Re-embedding the circular economy in Circles of Social Life : beyond the self-repairing (and still-rapacious) economy

Over the last decade, the aspirational rhetoric of circular economics has intensified exponentially. At the same time, the boundaries of projected circular economy outcomes have been tightened around a reductive, often neoliberally framed, inter-relation between the domains of economics and ecology. In this process, questions of politics and culture, including issues of justice and social meaning, have largely been ignored. It is this Janus-faced outlook, with one face turned to aspirational intensification and the other face captured by mechanical techniques within the economics/ecology domains, that helps to explain how the circular economy can be the subject of so much hype and so much critique. This also means that, for all their urgency, the emerging lines of critique have not been able to more than hint at an adequate and holistic re-formulation of a circular economy for living sustainably. To give a sense of the nexus of aspirational intensification and economics-ecology domain tightening, this article begins with a dominant story that is told about development of the circular economy by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation. The article then responds to this ideological discourse by posing a series of considerations for developing an alternative approach. This alternative will need to bring back in politics and culture, but it will also need (á la Karl Polanyi) to re-embed economics and its technical tools in a broader conception of social life. Here we use the “Circles of Sustainability” approach.