Eco-efficiency, -productivity and -effectiveness in a productive efficiency framework

Since its origin as an operational concept, the use of eco-efficiency for firm, government or multi-actor decision making faces many problems. These include the rebound effect, weighting multiple environmental indicators when indexing, respecting threshold levels and treating scale and social issues. We review drawbacks of the eco-efficiency concept and show how production frontier methods improve the operational eco-efficiency diagnosis, identification of improvement paths and search for induced innovations. The potential of environmentally adjusted production frontier models based on the materials balance condition, capacity constraints and the Baumgartner conditions is explored.
While eco-efficiency is basically interpreted as a ratio-indicator, frontier methods help to analyze the numerator and denominator separately. They allow to identify drivers of trade-offs between environmental and social outcomes, necessary conditions for respecting capacity constraints and opportunity costs for alternative input –output combinations. Reflections are made on the usefulness of eco-efficiency in multi-actor configurations that appear necessary in maintaining resilience of the overall system, social capital or cradle-to cradle links.