Circular futures: What Will They Look Like?
By Thomas Bauwens, Marko P. Hekkert, Julian Kirchherr. Ecological Economics, 2020
223 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The circular economy is argued to hold great promise for achieving sustainability. Yet, there is a dearth of research about what a circular future may look like. To address this gap, this paper proposes different plausible scenarios for a circular future, using a 2 × 2 scenario matrix method developed through a thought experiment and a focus group. Key drivers of change in this matrix are the nature of technologies deployed – high-tech or low-tech innovations – and the configuration of the governance regime – centralized or decentralized. From this, our paper builds four scenario narratives for the future of a circular economy: “planned circularity”, “bottom-up sufficiency”, “circular modernism”, and “peer-to-peer circularity”. It delineates the core characteristics and the upsides and downsides of each scenario. It shows that a circular economy can be organized in very contrasting ways. By generating insights about alternative circular futures, these scenarios may provide a clearer directionality to policy-makers and businesses, helping them both anticipate and understand the consequences of a paradigm shift towards a circular economy and shape policies and strategies, especially in the context of so-called mission-oriented innovation policies. They may also provide a sound basis for quantitatively modelling the impacts of a circular economy.
Subfields: Business and International Management, Marketing, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79158341b763fb1b0d6eeb4de218c7edcbef6ffc
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Citations in the corpus
- Critiques of the circular economy (2021, unknown): “Vague and uncontroversial (Lazarevic & Valve, 2017), critiques see in the circular economy a reassuring discourse for policy makers (Hobson, 2016) about futures made of planned circularity, circular modernism, bottom-up sufficiency, and peer-to-peer circularity (Bauwens et al., 2020).”
- A critical analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on the global economy and ecosystems and opportunities for circular economy strategies (2020, background): “As the global economy recovers from COVID-19, it has become more apparent that there is a strong sense of interconnectedness between environmental, economic and social sustainability (Bauwens et al., 2020).”