Cristina Di Stefano (p), Stefano Elia, Paola Garrone, Lucia Piscitello

Sébastien Bourdin

The circular economy (CE) concept is gaining momentum among scholars and practitioners given the necessity to maintain economic growth while reducing the pressure on the environment, the consumption of natural resources and the production of waste.
The literature considers CE as a system solution aimed at improving economic development, but a perspective that considers the actual structure of the economic system (i.e. the international dispersion of production activities) is missing in the debate. Even when the discussion on CE reaches a macro level (city, region, nation and beyond) (Kirchherr et al., 2017), it does not take into account that the world economy is structured around global value chains (GVCs) in which all the activities that go from the design of a product to end use are fragmented and spread across several different countries.
At the same time, the international business community has not yet participated at all in the dialogue on CE (Hofstetter et al., 2021).
The aim of this study is to fill this research gap and identify possible linkages between the two research fields. We believe that a real understanding of the disruptive potential of CE asks for a new outlook in which issues raised by the debate on this topic are tackled from the local development standpoint as well from an international business and GVCs perspective. Thus, our main objective is to investigate if and how the adoption of a circularity paradigm may influence GVCs configuration and development. In this paper, we address the issue from a conceptual point of view. To reach our research objective, we develop a framework in which GVCs and CE dimensions are crossed and analytically investigated. The present study is a first attempt to recognize possible interconnections between two separate fields of research (CE and GVCs) that, to the best our knowledge, had never met before.
Appling a CE perspective on the different dimensions of GVCs, this work contributes to the ongoing debate on the evolution of GVCs and adds a new point of view to the CE discussion.
The proposed framework may also provide relevant insights for the main actors involved in GVC and the CE transition. It may induce a rethinking of each company and country’s position in the GVC, and may serve as a guide for policymakers in developing effective political agenda on CE.

Joana Wensing (p), Roger Cremandes, Eveline Van Leeuwen (p)

Cristina Di Stefano

As cities form central nodes in the network of food-related resource flows, a crucial strategy to steer the transition towards a more circular food system will be through the engagement of cities. Specifically, cities are character-ized by a large number of economic activities, and by dense and multi-layered social network structures and high levels of political power. Still, the central role of cities in enabling sustainability transitions, generally, and in food system transitions, specifically, is largely neglected. We argue that greater consideration should be given to the spatial dimension of circular food systems, the agency of cities on it, and their complex local, national and global interlinkages. In this perspective, we propose how policy-makers can take advantage of these factors to trigger unprecedented mo-mentum to materialize transitions to circularity at multiple scales.

Sébastien Bourdin (p), André Torre (p), Marie France Vernier, Linh Chi VO, Nabila Arfaoui

Joana Wensing

The idea that geographical proximity is an important determinant in the production processes is quite common and well accepted in the linear economy, but has still to be tested seriously in the circular context. A few empirical studies emphasize the importance of co-location of firms to manage the adoption of Circular Economy (CE), to ensure the adoption of circular processes, and to facilitate the exchange of material and immaterial resource flows. But there is no identified work based on big data bases and econometric models which provides evidence on the fact that geographical proximity between firms is an explanatory factor for their level of engagement in the CE. Our paper contributes to this literature by investigating the extent to which engagement in firms in CE depends on geographical proximity to stakeholders, and whether the structure of the ecosystem (in terms of density of firms and actors with which a firm works) influences this engagement. Our study is based on the analysis of data from an original survey of 1 000 firms in the chemistry sector. We run a probit model to examine the impact of the geographical and collaboration variables in the probability of the firm to implement any kind of CE activity. In the paper we run a literature review on the collaborations and the role of proximities to develop CE approaches. Then, we expose our methodology and shed light on main results of our estimations. We finally discuss our results and the implications for policies and businesses.