The transformation to a circular economy: framing an evolutionary view
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The transformation to a circular economy: framing an evolutionary view Armaghan Chizaryfard 1,2
& Paolo
Trucco 1 & Cali Nuur 2
Accepted: 16 October 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The notion of the circular economy (CE) has recently been put forth as a strategy to mitigate climate change. It has gained attention in policy circles and in the engineering and natural science literature. In contrast to the linear model of production, use and disposal, the point of departure for the CE is the creation and sustention of a regenerative system with the goal of minimising resource inputs and emissions. However, although the emerging literature has discussed the ongoing transition process towards the CE, mainly from an ecological perspective, the underlying mechanisms of industrial change including structural tensions have not been discussed. Responding to this gap in the literature, the aim of this paper is to discuss CE as an evolutionary process and to propose a conceptual framework that builds on a development block approach. Keywords Circular economy . Industrial transformation . Evolutionary economics .
Structural tensions . Development block . Complementarities JEL classification Q57 . B15
1 Introduction In recent decades, there has been an acceptance that industrial and technological transformation processes have evolutionary aspects. Following the seminal work of
* Armaghan Chizaryfard [email protected] Paolo Trucco [email protected]
1
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milan, Italy
2
Department of Industrial Economics and Management, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Lindstedtsvägen 30, SE-114 28 Stockholm, Sweden
A. Chizaryfard et al.
Nelson and Winter (1973, 1982), with philosophical foundations dating back decades – e.g. Marshall (1920), Schumpeter (1943/2000), Penrose (1959), Williamson (1966, 1970), Preston (1975), Klein (1984) and Freeman (1974, 1994) – the view that industrial development is an evolutionary process has permeated into other research fields. For instance, in the field of ecological economics and industrial ecology, where sustainability is a key point of departure, there have been attempts to adopt the core tenets of evolutionary economics to analyse global environmental systems (e.g. Norgaard 1981; Boulding 1992; Ring 1997). Today, an evolutionary view of the mechanisms of industrial transformations is of the utmost importance in the context of climate change mitigation strategies. Indeed, there is a political, industrial and academic consensus that the prevailing linear economic model, which has long dominated industrial systems, has not paid enough attention to the natural environment and is therefore unsustainable (Gregson et al. 2015; Sauvé et al. 2016; Schot and Kanger 2018). In this context, the circular economy (CE) has become an important strategic framework to induce a transition towards sustainable production and consumption (Korhonen et al. 2018a).
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