Grown Up Overnight - What We Learn from Narratives about the Circular Bio-Economy

Understanding what narratives people share about the present and the future is critical for theorizing and creating social change. A prominent narrative on social change among the World Economic Forum, the G7 and individual countries is the circular economy. While scholars widely acknowledge that this narrative shapes policy development all over the world, its impact on individual policy processes hardly received attention.

This presentation presents select results from 5 years of research in the junior research group “Circulus”. We study (1) what characterizes a transnationally shared circular economy narrative, and (2) how it affects national policy processes aimed at a circular economy. Based on more than 120 stakeholder interviews from international organizations, the EU, different member states, and China, we demonstrate that a transnationally shared narrative emphasizes business opportunities, market creation, and scaling of solutions as levers for a circular economy. We demonstrate for two national policy processes, on food and packaging, how this narrative creates struggles over power, responsibilities or resource access and leads to policy outcomes that stakeholders evaluate as unambitious, hardly effective, or creating new problems.

We conclude by highlighting the need for a stronger engagement with the power and policy implications of the current circular economy narrative in global and national politics and its suitability to induce policy outcomes that people perceive as social change.