Urban Regions Shifting to Circular Economy: Understanding Challenges for New Ways of Governance

Abstract

Urban areas account for around 50% of global solid waste generation. In the last decade, the European Union has supported numerous initiatives aiming at reducing waste generation by promoting shifts towards Circular Economy (CE) approaches. Governing this process has become imperative. This article focuses on the results of a governance analysis of six urban regions in Europe involved in the Horizon 2020 project REPAiR. By means of semi-structured interviews, document analysis and workshops with local stakeholders, for each urban area a list of governance challenges which hinder the necessary shift to circularity was drafted. In order to compare the six cases, the various challenges have been categorized using the PESTEL-O method. Results highlight a significant variation in policy contexts and the need for these to evolve by adapting stakeholders’ and policy-makers’ engagement and diffusing knowledge on CE. Common challenges among the six regions include a lack of an integrated guiding framework (both political and legal), limited awareness among citizens, and technological barriers. All these elements call for a multi-faceted governance approach able to embrace the complexity of the process and comprehensively address the various challenges to completing the shift towards circularity in cities.

Circular Economy and Economic Development in the European Union: A Review and Bibliometric Analysis

“…This is true across many dimensions of circular economy [86]. In these contexts, urban areas are those mainly responsible for solid waste generation [87], making solid municipal waste a real problem [88]. However, these are not the only sources [89] and the structure is diverse amongst different global regions [90], depending on their specific characteristics [91].…”

Circling the square: Governance of the circular economy transition in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area

“…Given the complex nature of governing a CE transition in urban regions (Obersteg et al, 2019) and cities, and the many barriers that need to be overcome to depart from the prevailing linear economy, it can be fruitful to apply a governance approach that aims to address the tension between "the open-ended and uncertain process of sustainability transitions and the ambition for governing such a process" (Frantzeskaki et al, 2012, p. 21). Examples include adaptive governance (Olsson et al, 2006), reflexive governance (Voß et al, 2006;Grin et al, 2010), or transition governance (Loorbach, 2007;Frantzeskaki et al, 2012).…”

“…Circle Economy, 2016). Cities across the world put CE on their policy agendas and develop strategies to shift away from the linear mode of production and consumption (Obersteg et al, 2019;Williams, 2019;Turcu and Gillie, 2020;Prendeville et al, 2018, Petit-boix andLeipold, 2018). The concept has also spawned a rapidly growing body of literature from across various disciplines, from environmental economics, industrial ecology to urban studies (for an overview of the emerging perspectives on CE in research, see Merli et al, 2018 andWinans et al, 2017).…”

“…Addressing this lacuna is urgent because "the concept of the CE in itself is over-hyped, scarcely investigated and therefore ill-defined, [...] so far dominated by a business-focused narrative for competitive advantage, raising questions about the placement of the CE within a broader urban sustainability agenda" (Prendeville et al, 2018, p. 172). The current applications of the CE paradigm in urban strategies and initiatives tend to neglect the questions of land use, geographical scale, and the complexity of urban systems (Williams, 2019) and local territorial conditions (ESPON, 2019), which all have a bearing on multi-actor cooperation across scales and sectors that CE requires (Obersteg et al, 2019).…”

“…Finally, while most studies on urban transitions towards CE focus on cities, there is insufficient attention paid to its regional dimension and the operationalisation of a CE at the scale of an urban region (Obersteg et al, 2019;OECD, 2019). Such a regional perspective is much needed in the wake of the growing role of urban regions as the scale at which urban (sustainability) policies are developed and implemented, albeit often without sufficient resources and capacity (Turcu and Gillie, 2020).…”