The Circular Transition Through the Network Governance

Scognamiglio, Fulvio (2024). The Circular Transition Through the Network Governance. PhD thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00098881

Abstract

United Nations has defined Sustainable Development Goals defined the most pressing challenges of our time. The aim of comprehensively deal with the social, economic, and environmental challenges that are affecting our society has attracted the interest of academics and practitioners worldwide. Several frameworks have been indeed developed to achieve sustainable development, each one with a different balance on specific goals. Among the variety of models proposed, the Circular Economy has gained a prominent place due to its promises of holistically deal with all the SDGs, with a delicate equilibrium between economic growth, environmental limits, and social inclusion and equity. The Circular Economy approach proposes a radical shift from the current linear economic model, in which production and consumption side of economic system are disconnected, to a circular one, in which material and energy loops are connected and designed together.
However, Circular Economy has to deal with several challenges to realise its full development and guarantee its broad diffusion as a framework for achieving sustainable development. Indeed, the extraordinary attention that Circular Economy got in the last 10 years has also generated a conceptual confusion about what this approach means, the general principles, and how should be implemented. Indeed, there is the danger for this umbrella concept to become a permanent issue or to collapse instead to become a coherent concept. In addition to that, the Circular Economy literature and practice have largely overlooked its governance dimension, with most of the attention primarily on the technological innovation on how shift the linear system to a circular one. This lack of focus on the governance dynamics risks to undermine the comprehensiveness of the approach, relegating Circular Economy to just a technical approach to implement within single organisations and limiting the holistic ambitions to transform the economic system.
Through this thesis, we try to give answers to these challenges and contribute to the future of Circular Economy as a helpful framework for sustainable development. In Chapter 2, we adopt an extensive bibliometric analysis approach to explore the umbrella nature of the Circular Economy and identify the future trajectory of the concept. The findings suggest a vibrant field that must pay attention to avoid the involution of the concept. In Chapter 3, we employ a Qualitative Comparative Analysis methodology to analyse the governance of 20 networks engaged in circular transition. We have been able to identify three different configurations of network determinants that have successfully led to the network effectiveness, providing empirical evidence of the suitability of network governance for Circular Economy. In Chapter 4, we attempt a holistic answer to our main question, gathering all the findings and providing an overview of the actual state of the Circular Economy. In addition, we suggest various future research paths to be explored and to enrich the Circular Economy and governance literature. Moreover, we also give some advices to practitioners, that could use some of the findings as a blueprint for their engagement with Circular Economy.