Re-embedding the circular economy in Circles of Social Life: beyond the self-repairing (and still-rapacious) economy

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, the aspirational rhetoric of circular economics has intensified exponentially. At the same time, the boundaries of projected circular economy outcomes have been tightened around a reductive, often neoliberally framed, inter-relation between the domains of economics and ecology. In this process, questions of politics and culture, including issues of justice and social meaning, have largely been ignored. It is this Janus-faced outlook, with one face turned to aspirational intensification and the other face captured by mechanical techniques within the economics/ecology domains, that helps to explain how the circular economy can be the subject of so much hype and so much critique. This also means that, for all their urgency, the emerging lines of critique have not been able to more than hint at an adequate and holistic re-formulation of a circular economy for living sustainably. To give a sense of the nexus of aspirational intensification and economics-ecology domain tightening, this article begins with a dominant story that is told about development of the circular economy by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation. The article then responds to this ideological discourse by posing a series of considerations for developing an alternative approach. This alternative will need to bring back in politics and culture, but it will also need (á la Karl Polanyi) to re-embed economics and its technical tools in a broader conception of social life. Here we use the “Circles of Sustainability” approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Circular economy
• sustainability
• sustainable development
• justice
• cultural meaning
• deliberative democracy

Disclosure statement

With thanks to Shenjing He, Jamie Peck, and Sophie Webber.

Notes

1 “Natural biomass” is all plants, animals, bacteria, etc. calculated as dry weight. The weight of humans ourselves, domestic animals and agriculturally produced plants are included in “natural biomass”. Human-made biomass is calculated as only those things in use, and does not include all the objects – water, excavated earth, carbon emissions, etc. – that were processed in order to produce those objects. By comparison, in 1900 human-produced objects was 3% of natural biomass.

2 A 2021 search of the Science Direct archives for publications concerning the circular economy listed 11,361 academic studies, while prior to 2007 there were no articles with the concept “circular economy” in their titles. Of course, each of the authors of these articles will have normative positions, but they tend to be submerged beneath academic language and heavy citation lists.

3 The point that many writers have assumed either a single-source origin for the concept or have framed the discourse within the relatively narrow field of ecological economics is relevant to our larger argument that in forgetting the earlier broader works more recent works have tended to lose the breadth and radicalism of a prior era of writing where the work of economists, political scientists, and ecologists stretched comfortably beyond the immediate boundaries of their disciplines. Contemporary CE commentators tend not to read these works.