How to engage stakeholders in circular economy ecosystems: The process

Abstract

Achieving a circular economy (CE) requires collaboration between diverse stakeholders, which often happens in socio-technical ecosystem settings, where complementary stakeholders can pursue the system-level goal of improving circularity. The stakeholders, as well as the ecosystem settings in which they collaborate, are diverse, which might impact the process of how stakeholders can be engaged in the CE goals. Thus, to achieve CE goals, different stakeholder engagement processes are needed in different ecosystem settings. Bringing together stakeholder engagement, the ecosystem approach, and CE research as our theoretical background, we address the considerable lack of empirical case research on stakeholder engagement processes by analysing six critical topical CE ecosystem cases in Finland: two at the regional level (a local environmental issue and an industrial collaboration), three at the national level (nutrient recycling, the construction sector, and beverage packaging recycling), and one at the global level (a sustainable fast-food business). Based on a detailed case analysis, we conceptualised four stakeholder engagement process archetypes to achieve CE goals. We propose a model that shows how stakeholders are engaged in different CE ecosystem settings depending on the ecosystem structure and the alignment of stakeholder interests with achieving the CE system-level goal. The model and archetypes contribute to the theory and can benefit organisations and managers engaging stakeholders in emerging or established CE ecosystems.