Going around in circles? Conceptual recycling, patching and policy layering in the EU circular economy package

By Oscar Fitch-Roy, D. Benson, David Monciardini. Environmental Politics, 2019

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT The circular economy (CE) concept is informing the governance of resource use and waste management on a global scale, leading to widespread policy instrument innovation. However, the recent appearance of CE ‘policy portfolios’ raises questions about whether such policies are genuinely path-breaking or are merely adjustments to existing arrangements. Tracing the emergence of the European Union’s Circular Economy Package shows that, while some measures are genuinely novel, many others are ‘patched’ onto pre-existing instruments and that the overall portfolio exhibits a high degree of institutional ‘layering’. Given the evidence of relative ineffectiveness of past incremental environmental interventions, there is a mismatch between such approaches and the scale, pace, and scope of transformation implied by contemporary articulations of the circular economy concept. Creating the policy conditions for sustainable production and consumption may require more radical policy formulations than CE proponents acknowledge.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e3fb6c6d6510f7c5e8e51372344e2f1573d0e74

Citations in the corpus

• Critiques of the circular economy (2021, unknown): “Thisiswhythecirculareconomyhasbeenreferredtoasdifferentthings,forexample,asapatchadaptabletochangingcircumstances(Fitch-Roy et al., 2019), as a vague narrative (Niskanen et al., 2020), as a horizon (Lazarevic & Valve, 2017), and as a floating (Niskanen et al., 2020) or empty signifier (Valenzuela &…”