This paper examines how new policy concepts are taken up in practice, focusing on the Circular Economy of Water (CEW) in the Netherlands. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with practitioners from different governance levels, regions, and sectors, we analyze how CEW is interpreted, reshaped, and mainstreamed into existing water-governance structures. We identify six lock-ins that constrain CEW's implementation and three mechanisms through which it is mainstreamed. Our findings show that lock-ins and mainstreaming mechanisms are closely interconnected: While CEW adapts to existing systems, it can also reinforce them, at times leading to rebound effects or supporting business-as-usual practices. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the dilemmas related to CEW governance, offering insights to enhance sustainable water management practices and transformative changes. We argue that design-oriented approaches can inform how CEW is imagined and implemented, helping to reconsider whether it addresses the causes of unsustainable practices or offers temporary fixes.
This paper provides anecdotes and examples on a wide range of topics related to sustainability, circular economy, local governance, and community development in Nepal, and illustrates the disconnect between global concepts like the circular economy and the ground realities of rural Nepal. It discusses the origins of the circular economy concept, its benefits, and the challenges likely to be faced while transitioning from a linear model of production and consumption to one that is cyclical. The role of local governments in adopting new practices like waste management and the potential pitfalls of introducing modern solutions without considering traditional practices and local contexts have been analyzed within the complexities surrounding the circular economy, especially in relation to practicality in implementation in rural areas. Being based on secondary literatures, and the author’s own observation-based reflection, the article also discusses how imported ideas and practices, if not aligned with local traditions and resources, can lead to unintended consequences and challenges. The critique of initiatives that prioritize superficial modernization over addressing core issues like sustainable waste management or preserving traditional farming practices has also been discussed.
U. Pyakurel· Aadim Journal of Multidiscip...· 0 citations
The study investigates how existing circular economy (CE) practices operate within Mumbai’s brownfield redevelopment projects. It examines the decentralized network of actors, spaces and processes that govern material recovery, reuse and redistribution across demolition cycles. It addresses the empirical CE research gap in the Indian context by examining practices and policies.
The research adopts an actor–network framework through a multi-site fieldwork design using a multi-method qualitative approach. Data were collected through supply chain tracing, field observations, semi-structured interviews and material flow mapping across demolition sites, secondary material markets, workshops and scrap markets in Mumbai between the period of May and November 2025. Thematic coding and diagramming were used to analyse actor roles, processes, spatial configurations, material and value circuits across building life cycles and the 12Rs framework.
The findings reveal that Mumbai’s redevelopment economy already sustains a functioning decentralized circular system through informal socio-spatial networks of material recovery, reuse, refurbishment and redistribution. However, these systems remain weakly recognized within formal CE scholarship and policy frameworks, which continue to emphasize debris management and centralized recycling approaches.
The study advances CE scholarship beyond techno-material framings by showing how circularity operates through socio-spatial relations across actor networks, material processes, spaces and value circuits within redevelopment cycles, thereby foregrounding necessity-driven systems in the Global South.
The study relies on snowball sampling across multiple sites in Mumbai and recognizes the need for further research on material recovery rates and spatial, economic and environmental implications of these practices at the city scale.
The findings suggest policy reforms that acknowledge and integrate decentralized reuse systems through spatial planning provisions, incentives, capacity-building and worker safety protections.
The study suggests that higher-order CE outcomes can be achieved by integrating decentralized informal CE networks, thereby reducing stigma, enhancing livelihoods and supporting resource-efficient redevelopment while advancing more inclusive CE pathways.
Shriya Bhatia, Shravani Salvi, B. Rao et al.· Journal of Real Estate, Cons...· 0 citations
Circular economy (CE) principles offer a restorative alternative to the linear construction model that dominates Lagos, a megacity facing a housing deficit of 2–3 million units and generating over 2.5 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste annually. While policy momentum is building, the extent to which CE principles are being embedded in building design practice remains unclear. This integrative review synthesises the empirical evidence to map the current state of CE integration in Lagos’s building design sector, its benefits, barriers, and the institutional frameworks shaping the transition. Following Whittemore and Knafl’s integrative review framework, a systematic search of Scopus, Web of Science, and African Journals Online was conducted for peer-reviewed studies published between January 2010 and April 2026. After screening and eligibility assessment, 23 peer-reviewed studies were included and thematically synthesised. Four analytical themes emerged. First, awareness of circular design strategies among Lagos-based design firms is moderate, yet adoption skews heavily toward strategies that slow and narrow resource loops, while closing-resource-loop strategies remain negligible. Second, an entrenched informal material recovery network achieves high recycling rates for metals and timber but lacks quality assurance. Third, quantified benefits are documented, but economic and knowledge-related barriers, particularly short-term client mindsets and a volatile economy, dominate. Fourth, a nascent regulatory push, including LAWMA’s Circular Economy Department and the draft National Building Code revision, is advancing faster than practitioner capacity. A transition model from informal waste recovery to formal design-led circularity is proposed. This review provides the most comprehensive synthesis to date of CE integration in Lagos’s building design sector, revealing a critical implementation gap between awareness and practice. A multi-stakeholder framework is advanced to guide policy, practice, and future research in rapidly urbanising African contexts.
Olutope Adeniyi Adewole· International journal of res...· 0 citations
The study conceptualises governance tensions in GenAI adoption as inherent paradoxes arising from the same mechanisms that create value, and proposes the Assure-Account-Align routine as a candidate bridge between contextual conditions (TOE) and dynamic action (DC), offering a sensitising device for future research rather than a validated framework.
Ginevra Degregori, Davide Calandra, P. Biancone· Management Decision· 0 citations
In commons and institutional research, the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IADF) has proven itself as a useful tool to investigate the complexities of social-environmental systems. It is effective in guiding researchers through the process of understanding complex problem situations. The framework helps to conceptually unravel the institutional scaffoldings structuring human-nature interactions. Yet, a long-standing critique of the IADF and its derivatives is that they fall short of making different workings of ‘power’ explicit, especially those illuminating structural and intersectional aspects. We believe that the IADF holds potential to help operationalise a large variety of perspectives on power and visualise how they may play out in commons governance regimes – a potential that has been underused thus far.
In this paper, we draw on discussions about the necessity and advantages of integrating the study of institutions and power and engage with various conceptualisations of these terms. We reflect on existing proposals for such an integrated analysis, highlighting the contribution of our broad approach to understanding power. Further, we lay out the methodology we used for reviewing literature on power theory and identifying related empirical questions, mapping these questions to different IADF elements in a coding matrix, and creating the basis for the development of a diagnostic tool from this initial mapping. In a section dedicated to theoretical framing, we outline the main approaches to power that inform this paper and then continue to introduce the pathway toward our diagnostic tool through a few exemplary applications, including a discussion on limitations and potential next steps.
Iasc-Ecn Power Collective, Désirée Schwindenhammer, Lavanya Suresh et al.· International Journal of the...· 0 citations
Collaboration across the ‘siloes’ of government is key to unlocking a transformative paradigm shift in climate change adaptation (CCA), yet such ‘mainstreaming’ efforts have been unsuccessful to date. This paper argues that these shortcomings are rooted primarily in the mainstreaming literature’s neglect of people’s worldviews as an integral component of successful collaboration. For an individual’s internal dimensions to be recognized alongside disciplinary knowledge requires inclusiveness and expansiveness in both organizational spaces and in people. This paper presents a novel framework aiming to facilitate inclusiveness and expansiveness in both areas: the CCA Worldview Map. The CCA Worldview Map unpacks the idea of transformation into five dimensions, each with three levels of complexity, which represent distinct phases of the public planning process: When and What, relating to the input; Who, relating to the process; How, relating to the output; and Why, relating to the outcomes and impact. Using interview data from sixteen managers and practitioners at the local government level across Norway, I show how the CCA Worldview Map can be used to map understandings of CCA, unearthing a plurality of worldviews within Norwegian public administration. I discuss the framework’s utility along three lines: as a vocabulary for articulating differing interpretations of CCA and their relationships, thus identifying complementarity instead of conflict; as a tool that consolidates a breadth of ideas from the CCA literature into a single framework; and as an aid in uncovering cognitive dissonance and expanding personal transformative awareness.
