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

Narrating the Interplay Between Circular Economy (CE) and Ecological Transition: A Social and Cultural Perspective from CE Experiments in Kamouraska (Quebec) and La Rochelle (France)

“…Aspects such as the quality and quantity of jobs created by CE (Walker et al, 2021), fundamental changes in consumption, production, and management practices (Ghisellini et al, 2016), the importance of public education (Kirchherr & Piscicelli, 2019;Suárez-Eiroa et al, 2019), and the role of non-profit organizations (Ghisellini & Ulgiati, 2020) receive insufficient attention in the analysis of the connections between CE and the ecological transition. Moreover, broader objectives related to social justice (both within and between generations), the wellbeing of local and national populations, the needs of future generations, and the value attached by communities to their relationship with the natural environment are not given priority within CE (James, 2022;Martinez-Alier, 2022;Velenturf & Purnell, 2021). This lack of consideration for the social dimension of CE raises two significant issues for academic research.…”

Embedding circularity: Theorizing the social economy, its potential, and its challenges

“…This literature also highlights that addressing the "social" dimension should add not only a quantitative component, such as the number of jobs created (see Llorente-González and Vence, 2020), but also qualitative, in-depth research approaches to examine challenges such as inequality, poverty, gender issues, and working conditions (Schröder et al, 2020). Philosophical notions of human development and sustainability have been proposed to explore the evaluative and epistemological dimensions of such alternatives (Clube and Tennant, 2020;Schröder et al, 2020;James, 2022). Moreover, recent literature has made valuable contributions to exploring specific aspects of the embedding of the circular economy, such as case studies of regional social economy networks (Villalba et al, 2020;Villalba-Eguiluz et al, 2023) and urban circular economies (França et al, 2022).…”