Legitimacy of life cycle assessment for sustainable
communities

Lou Grimal, Inès Di Loreto, Nadège Troussier

► To cite this version:

Lou Grimal, Inès Di Loreto, Nadège Troussier. Legitimacy of life cycle assessment for sustainable communities. Cleaner Production Letters, 2026, 10, pp.100131. 10.1016/j.clpl.2026.100131. hal-05459210

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# Legitimacy of life cycle assessment for sustainable communities

Lou Grimal<sup>a,b,*</sup>, Inès di Loreto<sup>c</sup>, Nadège Troussier<sup>d,e</sup>

## ARTICLE INFO

### Keywords:

LCA

Sustainable community

Legitimacy

Practice

Interpretative study

## ABSTRACT

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been developed within companies with high environmental impacts, and is widely used in industrial contexts. More recently, LCA has gained importance in sustainable communities. Thus, in this paper we aim to answer the question: *how legitimate is the LCA method for sustainable communities, regarding their values, practices and goal?* For this purpose, we conducted an experiment rooted in a sustainable community. We observed the work of a focus group composed of seven residents of a sustainable community, who conducted an LCA with the support of an LCA expert (the researcher conducting the study). Each focus group session was recorded and analysed using a qualitative method (thematic coding). Focusing on moral and cognitive legitimacy, our study highlighted three main themes: the tracking of material flows within a community, the notion of complexity, and the dissemination of results. We identified certain tensions between LCA practices and the residents' beliefs. Nonetheless, the output of LCA could still be valuable for residents, especially in terms of communicating their alternative way of life. It is also worth noting that the barriers to LCA adoption are similar in both industrial contexts and sustainable communities. We conclude on the need to better understand the role of LCA as a strategy for sustainable communities to upscale their way of life, while also acknowledging the persistent (and necessary) tensions in terms of values and organization.

## 1. Introduction

### 1.1. *From industrial origins to alternative contexts: the evolution of LCA use*

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) emerged in the 1960s–70s as an environmental analysis method, based on scientific models and designed to evaluate the impacts of products or services (Hunt et al., 1996). Initially co-developed by industrial actors (e.g., Coca-Cola, Mobil Chemical Company) within a capitalist framework, LCA has since become a standardized method widely adopted by companies to identify environmental impacts (Hunkeler and Vanakari, 2000), comply with regulations (Sala et al., 2021; Sonnemann et al., 2018), support eco-labelling (Molina-Murillo and Smith, 2009; Vizzoto et al., 2021), and gain market differentiation (Iraldo et al., 2014). While LCA is a methodological framework for environmental impact assessment, its practical application is facilitated by dedicated software (e.g., openLCA, SimaPro), which supports data modeling, calculations, and visualization. This distinction

is important, as the method itself is independent of its technical implementation. While LCA use has expanded beyond industry—including into public sector institutions (Hunt et al., 1996)—its adoption remains challenging for small organizations due to barriers such as cost, expertise, and time (Testa et al., 2016).

Yet, LCA's potential extends beyond its industrial origins. Theories of ecological transformation (Geels, 2019) emphasize the role of niche experiments—such as sustainable communities—in challenging dominant socio-technical regimes. These communities, which include ecosystems, transition towns, and intentional cohabitations, represent alternative models of low-impact living (Flint, 2013). Characterized by local mobilization, rejection of consumerism, and long-term ecological perspectives, they prioritize human-nature connections and collective values that often conflict with mainstream liberal economic models. Their cultural and technological choices reflect this opposition: for example (Hansen, 2020), documented how a sustainable community designed a digital communication system that preserved face-to-face interactions, privacy, and non-individualized contributions, avoiding

<footnote><sup>a</sup> Univ. Bordeaux, CNRS, Bordeaux INP, I2M, UMR 5295, Talence, F-33400, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>b</sup> Arts et Metiers Institute of Technology, CNRS, Bordeaux INP, I2M, UMR 5295, Le Bourget-du-Lac, F-73375, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>c</sup> LIST3N, Tech-CICO, Troyes University of Technology, 12 rue Marie Curie, 42060, Troyes, CS, 10004, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>d</sup> Arts et Metiers Institute of Technology, Paris, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>e</sup> INSYTE, Troyes University of Technology, 12 rue Marie Curie, 42060, Troyes, CS, 10004, France</footnote>

<footnote>* Corresponding author. Univ. Bordeaux, CNRS, Bordeaux INP, I2M, UMR 5295, Talence, F-33400, France.</footnote>

<footnote>E-mail addresses: lou.grimal@ensam.eu (L. Grimal), ines.di.loreto@utt.fr (I. di Loreto), nadege.troussier@ensam.eu (N. Troussier).</footnote>
data extraction from personal profiles. Such cases illustrate the caution required when introducing new methods or tools into these contexts, and highlight the need of alignment between users and technical systems.

While LCA's environmental profiling of communities has been explored (Boyer, 2015; Seyfang, 2010; Sherry, 2019), little is known about how residents experience the LCA process itself—or whether the method aligns with their practices, values, and goals. This gap is striking given that LCA, like other sustainability norms (Haack and Rasche, 2021; Thomas and Lamm, 2012), has gained legitimacy in industrial and institutional settings but remains largely unstudied in grassroots contexts that explicitly reject neoclassical paradigms.

## 1.2. Legitimacy at the crossroads: LCA in sustainable communities

This paper addresses the issue of LCA legitimacy in sustainable communities. In his work (Scott, 2008), emphasises that legitimacy is not a static resource, but rather a socially constructed condition that emerges from the alignment between an entity (e.g., a technology, organisation, practice) and the norms, values, and expectations of the entity's environment. Haack and Schilke's perspective further underscore its socially constructed nature: legitimacy is a "judgment of appropriateness that is audience-dependent" (Haack and Rasche, 2021). Similarly (Suchman, 1995), frames it as a "generalized perception that an entity's actions are desirable, proper, or appropriate within a system of shared norms and values." For sustainable communities, this raises key questions about the suitability of the standardized, data-driven approach of LCA and their lifestyle, which is steeped in values of simplicity, as well as their often-sceptical view of technology.

Through an analysis of LCA's legitimacy within sustainable communities, we identified barriers to its adoption, explored tensions and alignments between its industrial heritage and the communities' alternative ethos, and assessed its perceived added value for grassroots sustainability practices.

To do so, we conducted an immersive case study within a sustainable community, documenting a focus group of seven residents as they engaged in an LCA process with researcher support. Through qualitative analysis (thematic coding) of recorded sessions, we examined residents' expectations, experiences, and critiques—not to compare LCA results with mainstream lifestyles, but to assess how the method is received, practiced, and adapted in this context.

The structure of the paper is as follows: section 2 details the theoretical framework on legitimacy and the current legitimacy of LCA in different contexts (barriers to LCA adoption). Section 3 details the case study methodology, while section 4 discusses the thematic findings, particularly the gaps between residents' expectations and LCA's realities. In conclusion, we reflect on how legitimate LCA is for sustainable communities. While LCA could support efforts to scale up sustainable lifestyles, we also recognize the ongoing tensions between its technical requirements and the cultural and organizational priorities of these communities.

# 2. State of the art

## 2.1. Theoretical framework of legitimacy

The concept of legitimacy has evolved from its original focus on compliance with laws and regulations to include non-state actors, such as companies, or NGOs (Scott, 2008). While early scholarship emphasized regulatory legitimacy, contemporary approaches highlight normative and cognitive dimensions—particularly relevant for understanding how sustainability practices gain acceptance in diverse contexts.

The literature proposes multiple typologies of legitimacy (Scott, 2008). distinguishes between regulatory, normative, and cognitive legitimacy, while (Suchman, 1995) offers a complementary framework,

categorizing legitimacy as pragmatic, moral, and cognitive. In this study, we focus on moral and cognitive legitimacy, excluding regulatory aspects (e.g., legal compliance). Moral legitimacy, as defined by (Haack and Rasche, 2021), reflects societal judgments about what constitutes "the right thing to do" based on shared norms. Cognitive legitimacy, meanwhile, concerns the comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness of an object or practice (Haack and Rasche, 2021). Our aim is to assess how LCA stimulates—or fails to stimulate—these forms of legitimacy through its process. One definition that is particularly interesting is the concept of technology legitimacy, as developed by (Markard et al., 2016). Technology legitimacy defines the perceived alignment (or misalignment) of a technology with its institutional context. As summarized in Table 1, this framework links legitimacy typologies to specific elements of technology. In this manuscript, we understand technology as an ensemble of technical, cultural, and organizational characteristics—not merely its technical components as reminded by (Ghoshal et al., 2020a; Pacey, 2014). Thus, LCA is framed as a technology, with software (e.g., openLCA, SimaPro) representing its technical dimension, ISO 14040/44 standards its cultural dimension, and LCA experts its organizational dimension (non-exhaustive list). By calling LCA a "technology", we do not reduce it to its technical aspects (e.g., databases or software) but rather emphasize its multidimensional nature. The typology of technology legitimacy of Markard will be used in the discussion to evaluate different dimensions of LCA (technical, cultural, organisational) regarding its legitimacy.

One previous study has applied legitimacy frameworks to evaluate LCA's fit within specific industrial sectors. For example (Lazarevic, 2018), used (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2021) six dimensions of worth to analyze LCA in waste management—a context marked by high disagreement among stakeholders. While this approach differs from our own, it underscores the importance of contextual alignment in legitimacy assessments. To further explore this dynamic, we preferred to draw on input-output legitimacy (Schmidt, 2013). Applied to the context of our study, input legitimacy refers to the quality of the process leading to environmental results (e.g., transparency, participation), and output legitimacy concerns the credibility and usefulness of those results.

While the typologies of Scott, Suchman, and Markard help us analyze how LCA is perceived (e.g., its moral and cognitive alignment with community values), Schmidt's (2013) input-output framework allows us to assess how legitimacy is constructed through the LCA process itself—specifically, whether its methodological quality (input legitimacy) and result credibility (output legitimacy) reinforce or undermine its moral and cognitive acceptance. This combination enables a dual perspective: evaluating both the substance of LCA's legitimacy (via typologies) and its process (via input-output dynamics). Having established these theoretical foundations, we now examine how LCA has been applied—and perceived—in sustainable communities.

## 2.2. LCA in sustainable communities

Despite its widespread use in industrial and policy contexts, few studies have explored LCA's role in sustainable communities. Existing research primarily focuses on assessing environmental impacts rather than examining how residents experience or adopt the method.

For instance (Bocco et al., 2019), compared the environmental

<table><caption>**Table 1**

Characterization of technology elements by legitimacy typology (adapted from Markard et al., 2016).</caption><thead><tr><td>Legitimacy typology</td><td>Element of technology</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Cognitive</td><td>Purpose of the technology</td></tr><tr><td>Normative (moral legitimacy)</td><td>Informal design rules</td></tr><tr><td>Regulatory (not discussed in this paper)</td><td>Formal technology standards and the materialization of technology</td></tr></tbody></table>
footprint of the ecovillage Sieben Linden to the German national average and other ecovillages. While the community performed better than the national baseline, the study revealed a need to further reduce impacts to reach absolute sustainability thresholds (Bjørn and Hauschild, 2015). Such findings suggest that LCA could help communities monitor progress and empower residents to refine their practices (Carragher and Peters, 2018; Gahin et al., 2003). However, these studies do not address how residents engage with the LCA process itself—a gap our research aims to fill.

Similarly, Sherry (2019) conducted an LCA of a resident's lifestyle in a U.S. ecovillage, comparing impacts across four categories (climate change, eutrophication, ecotoxicity, energy demand) with those of average U.S. citizens. The results showed 47 %-80 % lower impacts for ecovillage residents. Yet, like (Bocco et al., 2019), this study was led by external researchers and did not explore residents' perceptions, barriers, or empowerment through LCA. This limitation motivated our action-research approach, which centers on residents' firsthand experiences with LCA—rather than its outcomes. Indeed, action-research approach can deepen the level of understanding of LCA's legitimacy among residents of sustainable communities.

## 2.3. Barriers to LCA adoption

Since we are examining the “appropriateness” (as defined by Haacke and Rasche (2021)) of LCA for sustainable communities, we focus on misalignments between the method and its context of use. Specifically, we explore the tensions and barriers related to LCA adoption. In this section, we first review existing scholarly work on LCA adoption and then assess whether these findings also apply to sustainable communities.

Barriers for adopting LCA are well documented in the literature, particularly in industrial and corporate settings. These barriers can be divided into two categories: technical and non-technical barriers. Technical barriers include the lack of data, poor data quality, and the difficulty of managing uncertainty in the LCA process, as noted by (Björklund, 2002). Non-technical barriers are more related to the difficulties to understand the results, or even the level of confidence in the end-results, or the fact that LCA is too time-consuming. Non-technical barriers are sometimes internal to the company (low acceptance, lack of resources) or external to the company (policies and legislation, lack of incentives) according to (Hjellvik and Kirkels, 2025).

Most of the time, in the literature where case studies are described, technical and non-technical barriers are both mentioned by companies (Berkhout and Howes, 1997; Gómez-Garza et al., 2024; Hjellvik and Kirkels, 2025; Testa et al., 2017, 2022). In (Almeida et al., 2019), 15 companies reported challenges related to LCA adoption. According to them, the four main difficulties were: lack of data (73 % of respondents), difficulty integrating LCA into company operations (53 %), challenges using or interpreting results for environmental improvement (46 %), and difficulty communicating the results (40 %). This is a good example to show how technical and non-technical barriers are mixed in companies.

These findings are consistent with those of (Seidel, 2016), who identify similar obstacles in the context of public policy. For example, decision-makers often "lack the background or technical literacy to interpret and incorporate LCA results" into their policies. Additionally, LCA is often perceived as too resource-intensive, and its results are not always viewed as neutral (can be interpreted as a form of lobbying from the study sponsor). We can see that policy-makers face similar issues as companies, as the difficulty to communicate and use the results is also mentioned by (Seidel, 2016). In our study, we would like to better understand if those barriers are also valid in the context of sustainable communities and impeach LCA to gain legitimacy in sustainable communities.

Thanks to this state of the art, we understood that LCA could be used for sustainable communities to prove that their way of living has a low

environmental impact. But also, we understood that sustainability communities are not the initial target group for LCA users. Thus, we want to understand if LCA could be integrated in the practice of sustainability communities. In other words: how legitimate is the LCA method for sustainable communities, regarding their values, practices and goal?

## 3. Method

To explore this research question, we collaborated with a sustainable community that already engages in scientific partnerships, providing an ideal context for our experimental case study.

### 3.1. Case study

Before presenting the method, it is important to describe the type of sustainable community involved in this study. Indeed, we asserted in the introduction that each sustainable community has its own specificities. The one we have studied established itself in 2016 and settled in western France in 2021. The community consists of 20 families (approximately 40 residents) united by the goal of “living and acting in an eco-responsible manner in our communities and on our planet.” From the outset, the residents created a scientific committee to advise them and to use the community as a space for experimentation.

The community is located in a rural area on the site of an old farmhouse, which includes several buildings, such as former lime kilns. When the residents moved in, in August 2021, there was no heating system, and much of the infrastructure required renovation. The site remains in constant development (renovation of the different buildings).

The residents regularly host visitors for immersive stays or workshops. Importantly, they maintain strong connections with local stakeholders—including political decision-makers, industrial actors, neighbouring villages, and institutions—and are committed to transparency in their way of life. As a result, significant effort is dedicated to communication, with regular events organized to welcome and engage the stakeholders in the community's activities.

The LCA process was conducted collaboratively with the residents, focusing on a tiny house selected by the focus group members. The initiative to perform an environmental analysis originated from the residents themselves. After discussing their objectives and priorities, the group collectively decided to undertake a LCA as a way to understand the environmental impacts of the tiny house and learn the LCA methodology.

The functional unit was collectively defined as “living in a tiny house. The home must be comfortable, last 100 years and be designed to travel only within France.” (Figure A.1, Appendix A). The reference flow was thus a tiny house of 16 m², with a wooden frame structure and insulation made of cotton, hemp, and linen panels. Regarding the scope, the integration of the trailer was highly discussed. It was finally excluded from the analysis, and a dedicated LCA on it will be done apart. Also, the interior design was excluded (bed, kitchen utensils, etc) as those elements will differ from one tiny house to another. In the initial results, the process “window frame production, wood-metal” was the main contributor, for all the impact categories chosen (Climate Change, Fossil depletion, Land Use, Human toxicity), except for Water use (the main contributor for this category was “cotton production”). The method ReCiPe H midpoint was used to launch the calculations.

### 3.2. General methodology

To fulfil our goal, we adopted a qualitative research method to analyze, in a real-world situation, the use of a LCA tool by residents of a sustainable community. During the study, the researcher conducted extended fieldwork in the sustainable community, collecting observational notes, individual interviews (using the motivational interview method), reading of key community documents, and a focus group.
While these data were gathered, only the focus group outputs were included in the analysis for this manuscript, as most of the findings of this paper come from this specific data collection part.

Indeed, our work focused on the deployment of a LCA (method and tool) in a community, and the analysis of the reaction of residents to the LCA method. Thus, we conducted a focus group composed of seven residents to conduct a LCA method over five months. The residents participating (7 adults over 40 residents) were voluntary. We have chosen a focus group for our analysis, because we wanted to understand how residents could adopt LCA. We had to observe residents while conducting an LCA. According to (Kamberelis et al., 2018), focus groups "are collective conversations or group interviews" (Kamberelis et al., 2018, p. 545). It enables the researcher to enact "in the context of locally situated "study circle"". Indeed, the researcher engage "with people, in their lived realities, producing and transforming them" (Kamberelis et al., 2018, p. 549). This group work makes it possible to capture the elements shared within a group (expressions, opinions) and better apprehend the real use of LCA in a sustainable community.

This study employs an interpretive research method, centering on the discourses and perspectives of practitioners—specifically, the community residents involved in the LCA process. By prioritizing the voices of those operationally engaged in the assessment, we address the call of (Rex and Baumann, 2008) who argue that the limited understanding of LCA's organizational context stems from a lack of interpretive research on its practical application. While this paper does not analyze the digital tools developed for the research, we provide an overview of the experimental process in Fig. 1 for clarity. Fig. 1 illustrates how experts collaborated with residents using a non-expert-friendly digital tool. Residents contributed by inputting data related to the tiny house's product inventory, while the expert transferred this information into openLCA, shared screenshots of the results via the residents' tool, and occasionally explained key aspects of openLCA to the group. Collectively, the focus group agreed to conduct a "screening LCA"—a preliminary, rapid assessment aimed at identifying the environmental hotspots of the tiny house. Indeed, as stated by (Budig et al., 2021) "Screening LCA is mainly suited for pre-design or the concept phase of the project". We followed an attributional approach, "in which inputs and outputs are attributed to the functional unit of a product system by linking and/or partitioning the unit processes of the system according to a normative rule" (Ekvall et al., 2016).

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Schema of the experiment.</figcaption></figure>

Our research process was composed of three main steps: (1) we designed a digital tool on which LCA knowledge and process was drawn and accessible for non-experts<fnref n="1" /> (to facilitate the understanding of LCA, element on the middle of Fig. 1), (2) we recorded several sessions of a focus group of residents conducting a LCA, (3) we transcripted, anonymised and coded the sessions with a thematic coding. The transcriptions of six focus group sessions were coded with four categories and several subcategories (between two and four subcategories per category). We applied thematic analysis (Kiger and Varpio, 2020), progressing through familiarization, coding, theme development, refinement, and final definition of themes (and we stopped when no new theme were found, which corresponds to (Given, 2015)'s definition of theoretical saturation: "additional data do not lead to any new emergent themes"). The results of the thematic coding are presented in the next section.

## 4. Results

The results are presented as follows: first, we sought to identify individuals' expectations regarding LCA (Figure A.2, Table 2 and Fig. 2). Next, we analysed how sustainable community residents perceived the LCA method after conducting an initial assessment (Fig. 3). This approach allows us to determine whether there is a gap between expectations and the actual reception of the LCA method, thereby highlighting the barriers to its adoption.

At the beginning of the process, the focus group members provided responses to the question, "Why conduct an impact assessment? Please explain the reasons that prompted you to undertake this life cycle analysis." The answers are shown in Figure A.2 (Appendix A). In the sticky notes displayed on Figure A.2, we can identify three types of expectations with regard to LCA (and we see that the goals and the intended applications are overlapping). Those expectations are structured in Table 2.

Along the LCA process, the residents of the ecovillage also expressed some expectations. Most of their expressions were related to their willingness to demonstrate that their lifestyle has a low environmental impact. A non-exhaustive list of verbatim statements related to this objective are listed in Table A.1 (Appendix A). Also, the verbatims can be related to three themes:

* The need for LCA to document the ecovillage experiment (dissemination)

* The need for LCA for everyday decision-making (decision support)

<caption>Table 2</caption>

Grouping of the answers of residents to the question "why do you want to conduct a life cycle assessment?" (Figure A.2).

<table><thead><tr><td>Group</td><td>Quote</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Dissemination of the ecovillage way of life (science-based dissemination in different spheres of influence)</td><td><ul><li>Documenting our results to share/ inspire/inform</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Taking daily decisions (make decisions to improve the ecovillage)</td><td><ul><li>Communicate our impacts to clients, the ecovillage community, politicians, public institutions</li><li>Choosing which object to use</li><li>Improving our behaviour, production and consumption</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Knowing the environmental impact of the ecovillage (becoming aware of the hotspots)</td><td><ul><li>Help us in making decisions</li><li>Becoming aware of our environmental impact</li><li>Non-obvious correlation to understand a complex system</li><li>Validate (or not) our way of life</li></ul></td></tr></tbody></table>

<footnote n="1">¹ Template publicly accessible here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J1xHdz80=/?share_link_id=220661122300.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2.** Verbatim statements related to residents' expectations regarding LCA (non-exhaustive).</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 3.** Verbatim responses related to the reception of LCA by the residents (non-exhaustive).</figcaption></figure>

● The need for LCA for structuring projects (complexity)

Along the LCA process, residents also expressed doubts about the compatibility of their daily lives with the recurrent use of LCA (method and software). Comments were made in this regard and are presented in Fig. 3. The verbatim responses were categorized into keywords and then

themes. A non-exhaustive list of verbatim statements related to this objective are listed in Table A.2 (Appendix A). This section addresses output legitimacy, focusing on residents’ reactions to the quality of the LCA results and their potential applications within the sustainable community.

Upon reviewing the verbatim responses from Tables 2, Figs. 2 and 3,
we can observe a tension between the expectations and the reception of LCA among the focus group members.

The inhabitants of the ecovillage must regularly make choices to maintain the community's low environmental impact. However, the technical complexity of the LCA method—including its expert-driven logic, time demands, and data requirements—limits its feasibility for regular use by residents. While training and access to commercial databases could partially address these challenges (e.g., by improving data availability or methodological understanding), significant barriers remain. Databases, though useful, often require advanced technical expertise to operate effectively and may lack contextually relevant data (e.g., in terms of spatial, temporal, or technological representativeness). Nevertheless, some tensions, such as the added value of the results or the social-environmental relationship, may persist due to the residents' positioning within a strong sustainability paradigm. This will be further analysed in the interpretation section.

# 5. Interpretation

This section highlights the results obtained following the thematic coding presented in the previous section. We decided to discuss the results by theme: (1) the dissemination of LCA results, (2) the use of LCA for the sustainable community as a decision-support tool, (3) the importance of *complexity* for residents and how LCA doesn't tackle this issue. Each theme will be related to legitimacy issues and discussed through the theoretical framework described earlier. This will enable us to better understand the barriers for LCA adoption in the context of ecovillages but also the adequation of LCA method for sustainable communities.

## 5.1. Dissemination

We have seen in the results (precisely in Table 2 “Grouping of the answers of residents to the question “why do you want to conduct a life cycle assessment?”), that dissemination is a key element for the sustainable community analysed in our study. This observation is in line with the message of (Boyer, 2015) who underlines the role of ecovillages as key players to disseminate sustainable way of life. Indeed, ecovillages are bottom-up social innovations that are created organically, i.e. without a specific methodology. Their aim is to give practical expression to the ecological transformation of our society. The important thing for these social innovations is to spread beyond their microcosm. If we take up Geels' theory of transformation (Geels, 2019), we can say that sustainable communities are niches that attempt to integrate the socio-technical regime in order to transform society (Seyfang, 2010; Sherry, 2019). This transformation strategy is achieved through several actions: replication of ecovillage experiences in different territories, scaling up grassroots practices beyond the original community, and the adoption of the grassroots practices by institutions (inclusion in the socio-technical regime) (Boyer, 2015). In this context, we can see that LCA is a science-based method which can serve this dissemination goal (the way sustainable communities can effectively communicate on those results is out of the scope of this study). In other words, we could say that the results of the LCA are credible enough for mainstream institutions to lend credibility to the sustainable community lifestyle as a serious alternative for transforming our society within the planetary boundaries. Although the focus group participants contributed to the community at varying levels and in different capacities (initiator of the community/newcomer, involved in different sections of the governance system, etc), they quickly reached a consensus on the topic of dissemination. This suggests that, for this specific issue, the small size of the focus group (n = 7) did not constrain the depth or representativeness of the discussion.

However, the moral and cognitive legitimacy of LCA in this role is not guaranteed. From a moral legitimacy perspective, while LCA's scientific rigor may enhance the credibility of ecovillage claims, it does not

automatically ensure alignment with the ethical values that underpin these communities. For instance, residents may prioritize holistic, qualitative assessments of sustainability (e.g., social well-being, equity, or spiritual connection to nature) that are not fully captured by LCA's quantitative, environmental focus. If the method is perceived as reducing sustainability to measurable metrics—while ignoring dimensions like justice or cultural integrity—it risks undermining its moral acceptance among communities that view sustainability as a multidimensional, values-driven endeavor (“because if we say that a material is better environmentally but socially it's catastrophic ...”). As Haack and Rasche (2021) note, moral legitimacy depends on whether a tool is seen as “the right thing to do” according to shared normative frameworks. If we refer to cognitive legitimacy, as defined by Markard et al. (2016) (i.e., the purpose of a technology), we observe that classic environmental LCA fails to align with the expectations of sustainable communities. This suggests that the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) framework, which integrates social and economic dimensions alongside environmental ones, might achieve greater cognitive legitimacy in such contexts (coupling environmental LCA with social LCA could also be interesting).

Similarly, cognitive legitimacy hinges on whether LCA is comprehensible and intuitive to non-experts. The method's technical complexity—evident in its reliance on specialized software, databases, and jargon—may create a barrier to adoption for communities that value accessibility and transparency. If residents cannot easily interpret or engage with LCA processes and results, the tool may fail to achieve the taken-for-granted status required for widespread use (Suchman, 1995). This tension is particularly acute in dissemination efforts, where simplicity and relatability are key to engaging diverse audiences. For LCA to effectively serve as a bridge between grassroots innovations and broader society, it must be adapted or complemented by approaches that demystify its outputs and integrate local knowledge. In other words, the input legitimacy (collaborative and transparent approach) as well as its output legitimacy (added-value of the results) must be improved.

## 5.2. Decision support

The residents expected the LCA to assist them in making choices. In Table 1, we identified that residents make decisions daily (dishes, transportation) as well as for large-scale projects (such as building houses on stilts). During the process, the residents realized that the complexity of the LCA method did not help for daily decision-making. Verbatim that clearly show this realization are: “By the time the LCAs are done, we will have built the village”, or “But we ask ourselves this question 200 times a day. All the time. And we can’t say every time, ‘Oh, let’s get on the software and do an LCA’”. A need to clarify the consequences of purchasing actions was expressed several times, for example through the following verbatim responses: “I am currently looking in stores to buy some tiles. But what should I prioritize? I constantly ask myself this question. Based on the information I have and my knowledge, I will choose the most advantageous [environmentally].”, “I do it blindly because I don’t know. We bought 200 m² of chestnut flooring, more or less local, and I suppose it’s good, but I don’t know.” The focus group members realized, during the process, that using an LCA tool on small elements of the ecovillage could be particularly time-consuming, and thus not realistic. This was highlighted in the last two focus group sessions, where they reviewed and discussed the LCA results. This result is in-line with the state of the art done on barriers to LCA adoption (Berkhout and Howes, 1997; Gómez-Garza et al., 2024; Hjellvik and Kirkels, 2025; Testa et al., 2022). The focus group participants engaged in extensive discussions about the importance of different impact categories, without necessarily reaching consensus. However, the question of using LCA for everyday decision-making emerged as a shared belief within the group. This suggests that we can hypothesize that this perspective was likely held across the broader community as well.

Another mismatch emerged in the decision-support dimension,
specifically regarding the interconnection between environmental and social impacts. During the LCA process, residents repeatedly expressed the need to integrate both dimensions. For example, one resident asked: "So I was wondering, could we do a parallel life cycle analysis on materials and the same thing but on social aspects, with all these calculations but applied to other indicators? Because the [ecovillage] is not just about the environment, it's also about people.". This desire for a holistic assessment—balancing environmental and social outcomes—reflects tensions between weak and strong sustainability paradigms. Paradoxically, while residents prioritized social well-being, they were unwilling to reduce environmental impacts at the expense of social benefits. This stance contrasts with the strong sustainability principle, which positions environmental limits as non-negotiable constraints for social systems. Our observations reveal a subtle tension: despite their alternative lifestyles, residents of sustainable communities still struggle to fully embrace a strong sustainability perspective in practice, highlighting a gap between their values and their operational goals.

These challenges extend beyond pragmatism to moral and cognitive legitimacy. LCA's narrow environmental focus clashes with the residents' holistic values, as illustrated by their call for social impact assessments. This limits the moral legitimacy of LCA (if not coupled with other methods integrating social issues). Also, LCA's technical complexity renders it inaccessible for daily use, undermining trust – and then reduced cognitive legitimacy of LCA. Thus, while LCA offers scientific rigor, its misalignment with community priorities and lack of usability limit its effectiveness as a decision-support tool.

## 5.3. The importance of complexity

Regarding the verbatim "non-obvious correlation to understand a complex system", it addresses the issue of the complexity of industrial systems. This issue came up several times during the focus group sessions, for example with the verbatim "we have reached such a complex level of our impact that it is inextricable". However, obviously, the LCA method and tool do not clearly address "decomplexifying" production chains. This need of "de-blackboxing" the complex value chains is a recurrent theme in scientific studies on grassroots communities. Indeed, in their work (Ghoshal et al., 2020b), but also (Norton et al., 2019; Nathan, 2012) have shown that grassroots communities (similar to ecovillages) focused on sustainability tend to be repelled by complexity, perceived as unsustainable. This is in-line with the research of (Taintner and Taylor, 2014), which shows that complexity could increase vulnerability as coming back to a previous state is a challenge. Thus, our findings seem coherent with those previous ones, as decreasing the complexity of value chains seem to be a goal of some residents. This observation and analysis reflect a major mismatch between sustainable communities' expectations and what LCA can offer.

This mismatch between LCA's analytical framework and residents' aspirations raises critical questions about its moral and cognitive legitimacy. From a moral legitimacy perspective, residents may view LCA as misaligned with their ethical priorities—particularly as it doesn't reduce the opacity of industrial systems. From a cognitive legitimacy perspective, the method's technical intricacy clashes with their desire for transparency and simplicity, undermining its perceived comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness (Haack and Rasche, 2021). Thus, while LCA provides scientific rigor, it risks being perceived as incompatible with the intuitive, holistic understanding that sustainable communities often prioritize. This tension underscores the need for adapted tools that bridge the gap between technical precision and community values, or at least for complementary approaches that address the demand for simplicity and accessibility in sustainability assessments.

# 6. Conclusion

## 6.1. Main findings

In this paper, we aimed to answer the question: how legitimate is the LCA method for sustainable communities, regarding their values, practices and goal? Through our grassroots study, we were able to observe residents of a sustainable community as they conducted an LCA. We found that even when residents are very motivated to adopt LCA, some practical tensions remain and constitutes important barriers to its adoption but decrease its legitimacy. Indeed, we found that the use of LCA creates some tensions in the community, on three key elements.

The first one is the use of a digital tool on which residents have to integrate all flows of materials and describing their life. Indeed, residents are reluctant to track everything on digital elements, willing to prioritize action and real-life interactions. This tension is related to the values and practice of the sustainability community.

The second element is related to the concept of complexity. By design, sustainable communities are willing to de-complexify their way of life and the production systems related to them. It seems that the residents were expecting LCA to enable us to better understand the construction of supply chains, and indicates how to decrease their impacts through de-complexification. This mismatch is related to the goal of LCA (moral legitimacy).

While LCA offers potential added value for sustainable communities, we observed a tension between its benefits and the time investment required from residents to conduct the analysis. Sustainable communities, as marginalized experiments, often face a lack of credibility in the eyes of the broader public. At a time when reducing human pressure on the biosphere is urgent, these communities could leverage LCA to bolster the legitimacy of their lifestyles as viable alternatives for achieving environmental goals. Additionally, as LCA increasingly enters mainstream society, its use by ecovillages to communicate results about their practices could serve multiple purposes: enhancing transparency, building trust in sustainability initiatives, and raising awareness among wider audiences. In the long term, this could support the dissemination, replication, or scaling-up of sustainable practices beyond ecovillages. In this context, LCA could act as a legitimate mediation tool—grounded in its scientific rigor—to facilitate dialogue and heighten environmental awareness. However, despite recent advances in more accessible LCA tools, further research is needed to streamline the process and reduce the burden on practitioners.

Also, we found that residents face the same challenges as stakeholders in industrial contexts: lack of data, time-consuming processes, trust in the results, etc. Therefore, the barriers are quite like those identified in the literature for other contexts (industrial, public policy).

## 6.2. Limits

This study presents several methodological and contextual limitations that warrant discussion.

First, its scope is inherently limited by its design: the research was conducted in a single location with a single focus group, following an interpretive approach. While the focus group members represented diverse backgrounds, this design limits the generalizability of the findings. Additionally, since LCA was new to the residents, their expressions of understanding and engagement may have been constrained by their nascent familiarity with the method and its tools.

Second, as an action-research study, this work involved the researchers acting as both investigators and LCA experts. While this dual role - highlighted by (Trondsen and Sandaunet, 2009) - can provide deep insights into socio-cultural processes surrounding the adoption of new practices, it also introduces ethical considerations. As the authors note, the "prolonged relationship between researcher and participants [in this case, the residents] can create a felt obligation among participants to help the researcher 'succeed' with the program." This dynamic may have influenced
residents' responses or behaviors during the study.

The work of (Staples et al., 2021) suggests that the legitimacy of a method or a tool is linked to the credibility of the researcher who suggest the method/tool to a community. Staples and her colleagues conducted transdisciplinary research in sustainability science and revealed that a method's legitimacy is not solely determined by its technical adequacy but is also shaped by the researcher's perceived trustworthiness. Their work suggests that future studies on LCA legitimacy in sustainable communities should adopt ethnographic approaches to capture the nuances of researcher-community interactions and their impact on methodological acceptance.

While this study focuses on the qualitative and participatory dimensions of LCA adoption in sustainable communities, we acknowledge that quantitative LCA results would have strengthened our analysis by providing a complementary perspective on the method's feasibility and limitations. Additionally, the reviewer rightly pointed out a discrepancy between the functional unit (as defined collectively by participants) and the scope of the initial LCA assessment, particularly regarding the inclusion or exclusion of certain elements (e.g., furniture, utilities). The fact that focus group participants did not perceive this discrepancy may have obscured the implications of the functional unit for the scope of the LCA and, consequently, for the results (and impact input legitimacy i.e. the quality of the LCA process).

### 6.3. Further work

Thanks to our study we have addressed the following question: how legitimate is the LCA method for sustainable communities, regarding their values, practices and goal? Indeed, there are some tensions between LCA and sustainable communities which can be resolved by the evolution of the LCA method, and further studies could deepen our understanding of its added value for these communities. For instance (Steen, 2006), has shown that values influence choices in LCA, at 10 different stages (goal of the study, system boundary in LCA, allocation in LCI, characterisation methods, etc). Thus, it could be interesting in further studies to compare the observation of (Steen, 2006) with real-world experiment in several sustainable communities carrying

different visions of sustainability. Also, our experiment engaged non-experts in the LCA process, at all stages (except the modelling on the LCA software). Participation has been little discussed in the LCA community (Bouillass et al., 2021; Mathe, 2014), but could radically transform the LCA practice (to orient towards non-expert integration), and maybe increase its impact.

We hope this study opens new possibilities for researchers to expand LCA practices and better understand the role of LCA in the ecological transformation.

## CRediT authorship contribution statement

**Lou Grimal:** Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization.
**Inès di Loreto:** Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition.
**Nadège Troussier:** Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition.

## Data availability statement

The raw data supporting the findings of this study are not publicly available due to privacy concerns related to the focus group participants. However, anonymised data may be made available upon reasonable request and subject to approval by the members of the sustainability community where the study was conducted.

## Compliance with ethical standards

Anonymised.

## Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

# A APPENDIX.

Define the system in terms of performance (duration of use, performance achieved, number of uses, etc.).

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. A.1.** Expression of the functional unit by residents participating in the focus group.</figcaption></figure>
Why carry out an impact assessment? Give the reasons for carrying out this life cycle analysis

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

Explain the intended application of the life cycle analysis

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Fig. A.2. Answers of participants regarding the reasons why they conducted a LCA (data gathered thanks to the LCA prototype through the 1st focus group session).</figcaption></figure>

<caption>**Table A.1**</caption>

Verbatim statements related to residents' expectations regarding LCA (non-exhaustive)

<table><caption>**Table A.2**</caption><thead><tr><td>Subcategory</td><td>Verbatims</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>LCA to document the ecovillage experiment<br><b>Dissemination</b></td><td>"Resident 1: But if the goal is to document so that it can be useful to others, then we need to extend it to everything we do."<br>"Resident 1: So we need to ask ourselves why we are doing this [= LCA]. For me, the important things are the two I mentioned earlier: raising awareness and building ourselves with consciousness."</td></tr><tr><td>LCA for everyday decision-making (short term projects but could be quite recurrent)<br><b>Decision-support</b></td><td>"Resident 1: Ah well, it's really important, well we're talking about Tiny House, but we're wondering about everything. We were going to buy a heating system, we're wondering about a hot water tank for each flat or a boiler with pipes, but if we change the system we have to buy new pipes."<br>Resident 4: Yeah.<br>Resident 1: All the time ... saucepans, cookers ... everything.<br>Resident 2: That's it."</td></tr><tr><td>LCA for structuring projects (for instance building renovations)<br><b>Complexity</b></td><td>"Resident 3: After that, there's nothing that has 0 impact, you have to see what's less important depending on the values ... That's why we set ourselves a limit on the list, to try and compare.<br>Resident 1: That's why I have to make decisions about what we buy ... I do it blindly because I don't know anything about it. We bought 200 m² of chestnut flooring, more or less local, and I suppose it's good, but I don't know anything about it."<br>"Resident: I don't have a clear idea, but [for instance] we're redoing the roof. The tiles—depending on where we buy them, whether they are local or not, how they are manufactured and transported—right now, I'm looking in stores to buy some tiles. But what should I prioritize? I keep asking myself this question. Based on the information I have and my knowledge, I will choose the most advantageous option. But I know it's a compromise."<br>"Resident 6: Yeah, there's also the issue of reuse, which isn't necessarily less impactful because sourcing takes a long time. We collect materials, but it takes time to find them, a few kilometers to go pick them up, and by the time we gather all these materials, in the end, it doesn't really cost less ..."</td></tr></tbody></table>

Verbatim responses related to the reception of LCA by the residents (non-exhaustive)

<table><thead><tr><td>Subcategory</td><td>Verbatims</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Time consuming<br><b>Decision-support</b></td><td>Resident 1: "It's for everything. I have to make decisions about what we buy ... I do it blindly because I don't know. We bought 200 m² of chestnut flooring, more or less local, and I suppose it's good, but I don't know. It's going too fast! By the time the LCAs are done, we will have built the village!"<br>Resident 1: "That means we can say it depends on who it's for. Because if we say it's to guide us in our construction, it's too late."<br>"Afterwards, in the long-term use, we need to get familiar with it ... to be immersed in the types of results because we can't keep going back to (continued on next page)</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><caption>Table A.2 (continued)</caption><thead><tr><th>Subcategory</th><th>Verbatims</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td></td><td>calculations all the time."</td></tr><tr><td>Limited added-value of the outcomes<br>Decision-support</td><td>Resident 1: "Well, how can we use this? For everything ... ideally, for every action we take, we should be able to fill out our little LCA table and see if I take this, I have this impact, if I take that, I have that impact, and if I take this, I have this impact. I'm obviously speaking ideally. And we either do it for a specific action like building a masonry heater; or for a global action, building a house with a masonry heater and rehabilitating the area with masonry heaters. Saying there will be billions of pieces of information everywhere, I don't know how we will manage to measure all that. So yes, the tool is ... it's relevant, whether it's useable there ... I don't know. And whether we can do it often ... I hope so."<br>Resident 1: "We don't need a super sophisticated software to know that machining will have an impact with the whole chain behind it, that if it comes from far away, it has an impact, that if we add screws, it has an impact, etc."<br>Resident 1: "Of course, we can't document it scientifically, but there's not a human on earth who doesn't realize this. It seems so obvious to me."<br>Resident 4: "But it's true, what do we do with the info [LCA results] afterwards?"<br>Resident 3: "I don't know, I think ... you get this, OK, but if you just give me numbers, I'll say 'okay.' And actually, what does it change compared to something else when you don't know and you don't have this general knowledge about, for example, a house of the same size but with almost similar materials and with I don't know what, or without a trailer, so what does it change? What's the point of making an [alternative house] compared to something else in the ..."<br>Resident 2: "Do we need, I wonder, the way we compile the data ... do we need everything to be necessarily filled out if we ask questions ..."<br>Resident 1: "Given what I see here, I'm trying to find a use for this tool."</td></tr><tr><td>Relation between social and environmental impacts<br>Decision-support</td><td>Resident 3: "So I had a question, the life cycle analysis is related to the materials we use. Can we also have a social life cycle analysis? Because if we use mineral extraction, there are also people's living and health conditions ... I was thinking about everything related to food, for example, cashew nuts and their impact on women's health. So, I was wondering, could we do a parallel life cycle analysis on materials and the same thing but on social aspects, with all these calculations but applied to other indicators? Because the [ecovillage] is not just about the environment, it's also about people."<br>Resident 3: "Because if we say that a material is better environmentally but socially it's catastrophic ... Well, is it really beneficial? We could choose something that has a bit more environmental impact but is better socially."<br>Resident 3: "I think it could be interesting because, well, we can talk about ecology, but it starts with people."<br>Resident 1: "What I find even more depressing is this, but also the fact that not everything is in the nomenclature [...]"<br>Resident 5: "But for us, it's craftsmanship ..."<br>Resident 1: "It's too elaborate with all this nomenclature, in English, it's very approximate. I agree with Resident 4 and what Resident 5 said, if there are categories of materials and we know that a certain type of material has a certain impact spectrum, well ... but doing it like this ..."<br>Expert: "And how do you see this in terms of organization within the oasis?" Resident 1: "I don't see it because I don't know how to use the [LCA software] (laughs)."<br>Resident 1: "It's too elaborate with all this nomenclature, in English, it's very approximate. I agree with Resident 4 and what Resident 5 said, if there are categories of materials and we know that a certain type of material has a certain impact spectrum, well ... but doing it like this ... I'm trying to find a topic that seems valid to use this. But we ask ourselves this question 200 times a day. All the time. And we can't say every time, 'Oh, let's get on the software and do an LCA.'"<br>Resident 1: "[...] and it's especially what we were saying again this morning before being with you, Resident 5, that we've reached such a complex level of our impact that it's inextricable. The ramifications of our impacts are inextricable in the end ... I find it mind-boggling! (laughs)"</td></tr><tr><td>Lack of data and LCA adapted to the<br>ecovillage context<br>Decision-support</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Complexity</td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

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