Circular economy and power relations in global value chains: Tensions and trade-offs for lower income countries

The concept of the circular economy has gained significant traction among businesses, policymakers and researchers in recent years. The transformation of the current linear economic system to a circular one offers many opportunities to advance sustainable natural resource use, create closed-loop supply chains and implement sustainable recycling management. Circular economy strategies could help lower-income countries ‘leapfrog’ to a more sustainable development pathway that avoids locking in resource-intensive economic practices of the domi- nant linear consumption and production system. As lower-income countries’ economies are in many ways still more ‘circular’ in terms of resource management and production and consumption practices than their developed economy counterparts, the question is how to turn this into a development opportunity (Preston and Lehne, 2017). In this Perspective piece, we would like to highlight some concerns and make suggestions about current theoretical and practical ap- proaches to circular economy business models and global value chains (GVCs). We believe these need to be addressed to make the circular economy a success not only for large multinationals at the forefront of innovation, product design and circular business models, but also for small and medium sized suppliers, recycling businesses and other stakeholders in lower income countries. We use the case of digital technologies and issues around electronics value chains and waste management and recycling to illustrate our concerns and highlight tensions and trade-offs associated with GVCs and the circular economy.