From circularity to care : sufficiency as a relational practice for business transformation

In times of multiple environmental and social crises, a systemic sustainable transformation is crucial. The Circular Economy (CE) is a prominent transformative concept, aiming to design waste out by closing material loops through strategies such as reuse, repair, and recycling. Although promising, much CE research remains reformist, focusing on efficiency and technological optimization. Sufficiency, by contrast, advocates for absolute reductions in material and resource use and for redistributing wealth so that everyone can meet basic needs. Scholars propose strategies such as slowing production and consumption, strengthening local provisioning systems, and avoiding new production to stay within planetary boundaries. However, sufficiency is widely neglected in mainstream CE approaches, which often preserve economic growth paradigms and thus perpetuate unsustainable practices. A key reason for this neglect is the lack of clarity about what sufficiency means and how it can be operationalized in practice. To identify ways of integrating sufficiency into CE, this thesis explores the performance of sufficiency in business practices—investigating what sufficiency means for businesses, how it is enacted, and what elements support it. Using a praxeological and pragmatist approach and following the iterative methodology of Grounded Theory, the research reveals strong synergies between sufficiency and the ethics of care. The analysis identifies four interrelated meanings of sufficiency, each expressing care. Sufficiency reorients production and consumption toward needs and is inherently relational, as it depends on connections and mutual support. It also requires balancing levels of enoughness—both materially and in the distribution of influence within organizations. Finally, it is inherently paradoxical, as performing sufficiency often entails navigating tensions with capitalist and consumerist systems. The praxeological perspective also highlights specific practice elements that enable sufficiency: shared values, ongoing knowledge production and transfer, creative financial strategies that sustain sufficiency despite lower revenues, and alternative temporal perspectives embracing plurality and slower rhythms. These findings suggest that for CE to truly integrate sufficiency, it must move from circular strategies to caring practices. CE’s purposes and strategies should reorient toward needs, rely on social relationships and collaboration, revalue preservation and the common good, redistribute wealth and knowledge, and re-learn from care-based traditions such as Indigenous philosophies. In summary, this thesis reimagines the CE as a relational and caring system, oriented toward needs and guided by principles of enoughness that balance resource use between scarcity and excess.