Trading Radical for Incremental Change: The Politics of a Circular Economy Transition in the German Packaging Sector

Abstract

Understanding environmental politics is crucial for sustainability transitions. We study the transition politics of the shift to a circular economy in the German packaging sector, particularly the curious case of the 2019 German Packaging Act. While the policy was born out of the unanimous wish for radical regulatory change, all stakeholders evaluate the outcome as incremental. Applying the Discursive Agency Approach and drawing upon stakeholder interviews and documents, we show that stakeholders’ perceived fear of radical changes are critical for transition politics. This fear created a lock-in of two narratives proposing conflicting organizational designs of packaging waste management. While the narrative lock-in could be resolved by trading radical for incremental change, it left many conflicts and challenges unresolved. Our findings suggest that stakeholders’ fears not only prevent radical regulatory change but also create incremental change that may intensify unresolved conflicts and, thus, further weaken the stakeholders’ capacity for future transition politics.

Transforming ecological modernization ‘from within’ or perpetuating it? The circular economy as EU environmental policy narrative

“…This failure to prioritize environmental goals has also been detected in national waste policies (e.g. Nylén andSalminen 2019, Simoens andLeipold 2020). These recent analyses suggest that the policies succeeding the 2015 Action Plan perpetuate the CE narrative detected in this study.…”

Power struggles in policy feedback processes: incremental steps towards a circular economy within Dutch wastewater policy

“…Specifically, it illustrates that the innovators' struggles to introduce a circular economy faced resistance from established actors. Thus, these actors supported the established technology, rules and discourses with incremental changes, resulting in a largely stable policy instead of a fundamental shift towards circularity (further confirmed by Fitch-Roy et al (2019) and Simoens and Leipold (2021), among others). Hence, we presented a different way of understanding the potential beginnings of a circular economy (Zwiers et al, 2020), which may be used by practitioners in learning processes on a circular economy.…”

Lessons, narratives, and research directions for a sustainable circular economy

“…Competing but complementary approaches need to be critically assessed and integrated, as some focus on single products, materials and business models, whereas others assess the entire economy and its relation to (global) environmental goals and strategies 21,34 . It also calls for the identi cation of societal and political strategies that ensure an adequate distribution of costs and bene ts in society as suggested by Hobson 42 and Simoens and Leipold 43 among others, taking geographical and cultural differences into account 44 . 4.…”