Europe is accelerating the shift towards cleaner, more circular and more resilient industry. Batteries, hydrogen systems, recycling plants, critical-raw-material projects, electricity grids and low-carbon production sites are expected to reduce emissions, strengthen competitiveness and limit strategic dependencies. The EU’s Clean Industrial Deal and Critical Raw Materials Act make this connection explicit: decarbonisation, circularity and security of supply now belong to the same industrial agenda.
Yet these ambitions materialise in specific places, affecting land, energy and water use, transport, employment, prices and local development. Industrial transformation therefore creates societal opportunities, costs and trade-offs that are experienced differently across communities and population groups. Technical feasibility and regulatory approval do not automatically translate into lasting public support. Industrial transformation also depends on societal legitimacy: not a formal permit, but continuing acceptance built through credible institutions, meaningful participation, procedural fairness and relationships of trust. This is where technological and societal innovation intersect: resilient industrial transformation depends not only on robust technologies and supply chains, but also on trusted institutions, inclusive participation and the capacity of people and places to adapt.
Social licence is more than acceptance
Local resistance is still too easily dismissed as ‘not in my backyard’ (NIMBY). In practice, the concerns often focus on environmental risks, transparency, benefit distribution, competing land uses and who has influence over decisions. Research on planned lithium extraction in Austria, for example, found that an otherwise promising project was weakened by limited public dialogue and insufficient involvement of residents and local politicians. More broadly, the quality of engagement, procedural fairness, confidence in governance and the distribution of benefits are central to social acceptance.
This changes the task for research and innovation projects. Engagement cannot begin only when a technology is ready to be explained or a site needs approval. It should start while alternatives are still open and evidence can still influence technical choices, deployment models and impact strategies. The objective is not to secure consent for a predetermined solution, but to create the conditions for informed participation and better decisions.
When resilience becomes a societal expectation
Geopolitical instability is also changing how industrial innovation is judged. [Europe’s economic-security agenda](https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2024-01/Communication on European economic security.pdf) highlights risks related to supply-chain resilience, critical infrastructure, strategic technologies and potentially compromised economic sovereignty. Industrial R&I is therefore increasingly expected to look beyond efficiency and emissions reduction and contribute to diversified sourcing, circular material flows, repairability, redundancy, cybersecurity, local production capacity and continuity during shocks.
We can already see these changing translated into concrete European projects: the RELiEF project developed routes to recover battery-grade lithium from secondary sources, reducing waste and dependence on imported raw materials, while the MOWSES project investigates how scrap-based green steel can remain safe and reliable in critical infrastructure. Both demonstrate that industrial resilience combines circularity and strategic autonomy with technical performance and safety.
But resilience is not merely a technical property of a product or supply chain. For citizens, workers, regions and public authorities, it also means affordable access to essential goods and energy, quality employment and skills, environmental safeguards, preparedness and the ability to absorb disruption without deepening inequalities. A technology may reduce an external dependency yet create new local burdens or exclude affected groups from decisions. In that case, it strengthens one dimension of resilience while weakening another. Resilience also depends on human capacity: workers, organisations and regions need the skills and learning opportunities to adapt to new technologies, changing occupations and industrial transformation.
Designing industrial R&I for trust and resilience
For industrial R&I consortia, societal resilience and legitimacy should be designed alongside technical performance. This means mapping affected stakeholders and potential conflicts early; using two-way and, where appropriate, participatory formats; testing pathways against geopolitical and social scenarios; examining local value creation and benefit-sharing; and monitoring societal readiness together with environmental, technical and market indicators. This complementary technological and societal perspective is already reflected in European collaborative R&I: the READJUST initiative develops tools to identify and address inequalities arising from the green and digital transitions, while RURACTIVE co-designs place-based solutions with rural communities through multi-actor innovation ecosystems. These approaches strengthen industrial R&I by anticipating societal concerns, clarifying potential trade-offs and integrating stakeholder and community perspectives into the development of innovation pathways.
Europe cannot build strategic autonomy by bypassing communities or overlooking the people and institutions that make transformation possible. Industrial transformation will be most resilient where technological performance, environmental integrity, economic value, skills and societal legitimacy are designed together.