This article explores the capacity of industrial ecology to generate sustainable development in Latin America’s agro-industrial clusters. An evolutionary analytical approach is outlined, which is used to study Veracruz’s (Mexico) sugarcane cluster through a qualitative methodology. Our goal is to show that social innovation is key to promoting the sustainable development of clusters characterized by fragmented social, power, and innovation networks. Accordingly, innovations in the realm of industrial ecology often have a dual impact. On the one hand, in the dominant network, industrial ecology is reduced to its technological dimensions within a political-economic framework constrained by its external insertion and the maintenance of power dynamics. On the other hand, industrial ecology is a vehicle for a kind of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship driven by the core values of trust, transparency, acknowledgement of other people’s capabilities, and non-discrimination. This new transformative network promotes true socio-technical change by enhancing local resources and involving other intermediate actors. It also creates a localized agro-food system that promotes the development of cluster-based dynamics in the territory through radical innovations in industrial ecology. The article presents a new way of inserting industrial ecology into the dynamics of cluster-based organizations.

In the last few lustrums, the literature has searched for more precise methods to assess the socio-economic importance of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE). On that basis, this article offers a new way of assessing the SSE impact, enhancing the understanding of the SSE potential for socio-economic transformation. An evolutionary micro–meso–macro and territorial theoretical framework is developed, utilizing, along with the assistance of a qualitative methodology, studies on the transformation promoted by the SSE on the sugar cane cluster of Veracruz (Mexico). The main results of the article are that the SSE boost beneficiaries, while the protagonists of the transformation cannot be defined a priori, but are rather conformed by transformation vectors promoted by the SSE: their values shared by a wide spectrum of actors, the SSE socio-economic and organizational specificities, and their rooting in the productive system. The fundamental conclusion of the article is the need for a “territorial-driven approach” of the SSE’s impact, compared to the dominant “stakeholder-driven approach”. The main limitations (and suggestions for future studies) are the empirical investigation of a single case, and the need to develop a qualitative and quantitative system of indicators of the transformative drive of SSE.