The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy

Circular Economy (CE) is now a key governance framework that aims to reconfigure how value is extracted from resources. Despite its widespread uptake, CE commentary to date tends towards descriptive and/or celebratory. In response, in this paper I outline some ways that environmental politics researchers have much to contribute to CE research, arguing that current examples of CE policies and practices potentially accelerate resource use into this century. A key weakness is how proponents frame us all as particular forms of ‘user-consumers’. Such framings fail to account for what is at stake for all of us as part of the CE project: and I conclude this paper by posing several key research questions, to encourage more critical environmental politics research on and around issues of CE.