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Transitioning Responsibly Toward a Circular Bioeconomy: Using Stakeholder Workshops to Reveal Market Dependencies
Summary
This paper reflects on stakeholder engagement processes for transitioning to circular bioeconomy models, finding that workshops can reveal important market dependencies but struggle to simultaneously achieve normative and co-design goals. Circular economy approaches are key to reducing plastic waste and microplastic generation.
Abstract This article reflects on the contribution that stakeholder involvement could give to circular bioeconomy transformation (CBE). By comparing argument for stakeholder involvement in literature as well as on our own experiences in six stakeholder involvement workshops, we argue that it is probably unrealistic to fully achieve both normative and co-design goals in a single workshop. Furthermore, stakeholder involvement can help to acquire insight into dependencies in the market and offer an opportunity to connect people to deal with them. Therefore we propose for future stakeholder involvement initiatives for CBE to focus on (1) identify relationships of dependency which make it hard for players in the market to change, (2) develop strategies to change while mitigating the detrimental effects on already existing relationships and (3) gradually breaking down relationships and building new ones that support CBE.
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