Insights inspired by the Lebanon Clusters 2025 convening on circularity, competitiveness, and systemic change.
There is a growing understanding across Lebanon’s economic and innovation landscape: the country’s most pressing challenges won’t be solved by surface-level fixes. Across energy, agriculture, and waste, short-term responses may have eased immediate pressures but have fallen short of addressing the deeper systemic challenges. Real progress demands going beyond systems to transform underlying systems that either enable or obstruct sustainable development.
That’s precisely what Lebanon Clusters 2025 set out to address. By bringing together over 150 stakeholders from the public and private sectors, academia and civil society, the convening didn’t just celebrate collaboration and circularity, it challenged everyone to critically examine how systems work today, and how they could work better, together.
At the center of that shift in thinking is the role of clusters: collaborative ecosystems built around shared value, circular thinking, and long-term competitiveness. A proven model worldwide, clusters are now taking on new relevance in shaping Lebanon’s path toward sustainable growth.
Clusters as a Response to Structural Problems
In his keynote address, Mr. Nehmat Frem, President and CEO of INDEVCO Group and Member of the Parliament of Lebanon, set the tone by calling for a deeper, more courageous kind of reform. He reminded the audience that Lebanon’s challenges, like the enduring waste crisis, are not short-term obstacles but long-standing structural issues that cannot be solved with temporary fixes. These problems, he argued, demand systemic responses rooted in shared responsibility and long-term thinking.
That same logic applies across sectors:
- Agrifood, where small producers remain disconnected from innovation, markets, and one another.
- Energy, where sustainable alternatives are still under-leveraged.
- Waste, where valorization is the exception, not the norm.
- Clusters offer a way forward, not as short term interventions, but as permanent structures for transformation.
Why Clusters? Why Now?
Lebanon Clusters 2025 made a timely case for scaling cluster development across sectors, by demonstrating what clusters can achieve when fully activated:
- They reinforce resilience through collaboration.
Clusters bring together industries, researchers, and service providers, fostering coordination and shared purpose that strengthen the wider economic landscape.
- They activate cross-sector circularity.
Clusters move beyond vertical silos. Waste becomes input, energy circulates more efficiently, and food systems plug directly into innovation. Circularity becomes practical, not conceptual.
- They formalize what often remains informal.
Clusters transform sporadic partnerships to intentional, governed ecosystems, the very backbone needed for systems to evolve.
From Vision to Infrastructure
What made Lebanon Clusters 2025 stand out was not simply the what of collaboration, but the how behind organizing and sustaining it.
During a fireside chat moderated by Mr. Nicolas Farhat, Deputy General Manager at Berytech, panelists explored both global and local perspectives. Mr. Alejandro Gallego Alcaide, Director of International Business at AMEC, shared international best practices, while Dr. Marc Bou Zeidan, Executive Director of QOOT, grounded the discussion in Lebanon’s agrifood context. The takeaway was clear: clusters succeed only when shaped by real sector needs, not imposed from above.
That same thread continued in the session on organizational models, where Ms. Lara Khoury, Director of Programs at Berytech, unpacked differences among chambers, syndicates, associations, and clusters. She emphasized that clusters should be positioned not as another network but as adaptable, forward-thinking engines of innovation and competitiveness.
In the policy and legal session, Ms. Jessica Hajjar, Programs Manager at Berytech, and Maître Julien Khoury, Intellectual Property Specialist, made a strong case for official cluster recognition. Their intervention reinforced a central truth: if clusters are to become genuine economic infrastructure, they require legal clarity, policy integration, and long-term commitment.
The event also showcased the tangible progress made by Lebanon’s emerging clusters, particularly in waste valorization and sustainable energy.
Ms. Ingrid Salloum, Manager of QEEMA, highlighted how the Waste Valorization Cluster is connecting key industry players to transform waste challenges into circular economy opportunities.
Mr. Youssef Yammine, Manager of the Sustainable Energy Cluster, emphasized energy’s pivotal role in enabling circularity across sectors and driving Lebanon’s green transition.
Not a Celebration, a Realignment
Building on these examples, Lebanon Clusters 2025 marked a decisive shift from isolated initiatives to a coordinated future, one where actors such as QEEMA, the Sustainable Energy Cluster, QOOT, and Euromed Clusters Forward work in sync to build new cycles of shared value.
The presence of Euromed Clusters Forward, which also brought perspectives from Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, added a valuable layer of regional exchange, showing how Lebanon’s emerging cluster ecosystem is part of a wider Mediterranean effort toward innovation-driven circularity.
Together, Lebanon’s three clusters form interconnected pillars of the country’s circular economy: QEEMA drives waste valorization and resource recovery, the Sustainable Energy Cluster advances renewable solutions and efficiency, and QOOT fosters innovation across the agrifood value chain. Their convergence demonstrates how cross-sector collaboration can unlock new business models and shared economic value.
A Quiet but Fundamental Shift
If Lebanon’s past is a story of brilliant individuals and initiatives, its future must be built on coherence, structure, and systems that can hold together through change.
Clusters don’t promise overnight transformation, but they do offer something far more powerful: a stable platform for long-term, circular progress, where innovation is not just invented, but embedded.
Because at the end of the day, progress begins not with new ideas, but with how we organize the ones we already have.
Next Steps & Acknowledgment
This event was held under the patronage of the Ministry of Economy and Trade, with the support of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the European Union.
To explore collaboration opportunities with any of the clusters, interested partners are invited to fill out the collaboration interest form:
Learn more at www.qeema.org , www.secluster.org, and www.qoot.org.
