Responsibility as a field: The circular economy of water, waste, and energy

Abstract

Responsibilities are a central matter of concern of environmental politics because they underpin regulatory frameworks of utility services. Yet, in scholarship concerned with sustainability transitions and governance, responsibility is reductively understood as a legal obligation or allotted task. Building on an institutionalist perspective, this paper conceptualized responsibility as a field of contention where actors negotiate, contest, and articulate what we define as subjectivist and collectivist responsibilities. Defining and using the concept of ‘fields of responsibility’, the paper analyzes how responsibilities (mis)match and contradict in controversial policymaking around the ‘circular economy’: a wide policy program for restructuring water, energy, and waste utility services and infrastructures in Amsterdam region. In so doing, it reveals the logic of contemporary environmental governance: in approaching climate targets, actors actively take on responsibilities while at the same time maintaining a conservative view of their role and responsibilities. We call these phenomena over-stretching and under-reaching.

Circularity on What Grounds? Advancing Learning for Circular Area Development at the Interface of Proximity and Precarity

“…Solutions are thus predominantly sought in persuasive communication and top-down participation strategies, technological fixes and smart economic instruments (Schulz et al, 2019). In such understanding, learning is geared toward behavioural change and the role of individual actors (Savini and Giezen, 2020), often with little consideration for otherwise complex and contradictory responses. Simultaneously, the politics of employing the CE-concept remain unquestioned.…”

“…Several authors point out that governments are struggling with the specifics of circularity, despite ambitions and advances in mainstreaming the concept, at least rhetorically (Bolger & Doyon, 2019;Corvellec et al, 2021;Ghinoi et al, 2020;Prendeville et al, 2018). Others emphasize that CE thinking is not preparing the grounds for radical sustainability (Gregson et al, 2015;Lynch, 2022) and often relying too strongly on the very materials and production methods that caused the environmental crisis in the first place, including a lack of commitment to capitalist consumerism as a fundamental cause behind global environmental degradation (Hobson & Lynch, 2016;Niskanen et al, 2020;Savini, 2019;Savini & Giezen, 2020;Zink & Geyer, 2017). In a similar vein, various plans are criticised for their excessive concern with the putative gap between policy and implementation, as well as the technical and economic aspects of circularity, while disregarding its social, institutional and spatial articulations (Blomsma & Brennan, 2017;Calisto Friant et al, 2022;Ghisellini et al, 2016;Hobson, 2020aHobson, , 2020bMoreau et al, 2017;Schulz et al, 2019).…”

THE STATE OF THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY: Waste Valorization in Hong Kong and Rotterdam

“…through incentives and concessions) (Massarutto, 2007). Waste valorization mutates the industrial composition of the waste sector: it pushes the marketization of waste (sub)streams and increases the legal responsibilities of waste producers and consumers, including urban households, in the recovery process (Pollans, 2019; Savini and Giezen, 2020).…”

Public Norms in Practices of Transitional Planning—The Case of Energy Transition in The Netherlands

“…', 'whose rights?' [80][81][82] are urgent and challenge the politico ordinance of supply driven utility markets. This tension reflects a frequent bias in post-war arrangements of utility markets that tend to focus on the production and exploitation relationships between the government and the utility producing agencies and on conditions of price-setting, but neglect the constituent roles of users and selfproducing 'pro-sumers' and cooperatives.…”