Why Circular Cities Keep Stalling: New Review Maps the Barriers Blocking Collaborative Policy

The circular economy has become the defining ambition of twenty-first-century urban policy: cities that reuse, repair, refurbish, and recycle their materials in closed loops rather than following the familiar take-make-dispose pattern of the linear economy. Yet a new systematic review published in Environmental and Sustainability Indicators suggests that the greatest obstacle to circular cities is not technology or even money, but the messy, interconnected machinery of collaborative governance itself. Rezky Kinanda, Ridwan Sutriadi, and Nurrohman Wijaya synthesized 93 peer-reviewed studies published between 2016 and 2026 to answer a deceptively simple question: what actually stops governments, businesses, academia, and communities from co-creating the policies a circular transition demands?

The scale of the underlying problem is easy to underestimate. Urban circular economy initiatives promise simultaneous reductions in raw material consumption, waste generation, and emissions, alongside new jobs, circular start-ups, and more engaged communities. Community gardens, co-working spaces, and local production systems have all been shown to support resource optimization and closed-loop systems. Public-private partnerships are frequently promoted as strategic vehicles for advancing circularity. But the review’s authors found that these collaborative policies repeatedly fail, undermined by inconsistent strategies, fragmented regulations, cultural resistance, and decision-making complexity that no single actor can resolve alone.

Methodologically, the study is notable for its rigor. The authors searched the Scopus database using a carefully constructed Boolean string combining circular economy, urban terms, governance and collaboration terms, and barrier or challenge terms, restricted to publications from 2016 to 2026. The search returned 1,106 records, which were screened under PRISMA guidelines down to 93 eligible studies. Each study then underwent a structured quality appraisal scored on three criteria, with 44 studies achieving the maximum score of 3.0 and 47 scoring 2.5, indicating an evidence base the authors describe as generally adequate though methodologically heterogeneous. Barrier statements were extracted, coded, consolidated, and mapped onto stages of collaborative policy development, with independent verification by the co-authors producing complete agreement on classification.

The analytical heart of the paper is a stage-based framework that traces collaborative policy development from regulatory initiation and problem identification, through stakeholder engagement and collective decision-making, into implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and finally feedback and adaptation. Mapping barriers onto this cycle revealed a striking pattern: different obstacles dominate different phases, but they do not stay in their lanes. Regulatory inconsistency, the most frequently cited barrier at the initiation stage with 12 supporting references, resurfaces later as bureaucratic complexity during implementation. Knowledge deficits identified early cascade forward, weakening engagement, decision quality, and monitoring alike.

At the problem-identification stage, the review found a foundational readiness problem. Beyond regulatory inconsistency, the lack of government standards, knowledge, information, frameworks, and awareness about the circular economy appeared in 11 studies, while political interference appeared in seven. The authors emphasize that problem definition is not a neutral technical exercise: political interests shape which circular economy issues receive attention and how they are framed. Limited data and ambiguous problem definitions compound the difficulty, preventing policy systems from constructing a shared, evidence-informed understanding of what a circular problem even is.

Stakeholder engagement, the second stage, is dominated by human and organizational friction. Cultural and behavioral resistance was the most frequently identified barrier of the entire review, supported by 12 references, reflecting the reality that circularity demands a departure from entrenched linear production and consumption habits. This resistance is reinforced by knowledge gaps, divergent goals among stakeholders, weak participation, and insufficient financial incentives, each cited in four to six studies. Businesses face additional hurdles: the absence of circularity in corporate culture and regulatory complexity for private actors both discourage the strategic contribution that collaboration requires. The authors describe this as a participatory alignment problem in which knowledge deficits, resistance, and misaligned interests reinforce one another.

Decision-making and implementation reveal their own conversion and translation gaps. At the decision stage, unstructured participatory processes, political interference, and scarce expertise can distort outcomes even when participation mechanisms formally exist, creating tension between deliberative legitimacy and external political influence. During implementation, the lack of skilled personnel emerged as the dominant barrier with eight references, alongside non-harmonious bureaucratic regulations and high investment costs paired with limited recognition of indirect benefits. Circular initiatives often require substantial upfront spending while their benefits accrue across sectors and over long time horizons, producing a mismatch between who pays and who gains.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns the final stages of the policy cycle. Monitoring and evaluation are hampered not only by technological limitations but by the absence of shared stakeholder frameworks and government monitoring regulation, meaning that data technologies become meaningful only when institutions know what to measure and how to act on the results. In the feedback and adaptation stage, highly contested solutions, delayed benefits, fragmented coordination, and the exclusion of stakeholders from policy revision expose whether collaboration was ever genuinely institutionalized. Monitoring information, the authors stress, does not automatically produce policy learning.

Two cross-cutting barriers tie the whole framework together. Limited governmental policies, incentives, and support, cited in seven studies, act as a systemic condition affecting every stage simultaneously, providing not just money but regulatory certainty, legitimacy, and continuity. And the interdependency of barriers, explicitly identified in four studies, supplies the review’s central interpretive claim: barriers form self-reinforcing feedback loops in which insufficient knowledge breeds resistance, resistance unstructures decision-making, weak decisions complicate implementation, poor implementation undermines monitoring, and inadequate monitoring makes adaptation contested. The authors argue that isolated, stage-specific, sectoral, or technology-centric interventions cannot break these loops; durable transitions require integrated governance that aligns institutions, regulations, stakeholders, and capacity across the entire cycle.

The study distills its synthesis into three interrelated dimensions: institutional and governance barriers at the system level, knowledge and capacity barriers at the stakeholder level, and socio-economic and behavioral barriers at the interaction level. Crucially, these dimensions reinforce each other systemically, so the success of a circular transition depends on simultaneously repairing structural failures, building stakeholder capacity, and aligning interests. The authors acknowledge limitations, including reliance on a single database and academic literature that may overlook industry reports, and they call for empirical validation of the framework in real urban contexts. But for city planners wrestling with why well-intentioned circular strategies stall, the message is clear: the barriers are not a checklist to be ticked off one by one, but a system to be governed as a whole.

Subject of Research: Barriers to collaborative urban policy development for the circular economy

Article Title: Unpacking the barriers to collaborative urban policy development for circular economy: A systematic literature synthesis

Article References: Kinanda, R., Sutriadi, R., & Wijaya, N. (2026). Unpacking the barriers to collaborative urban policy development for circular economy: A systematic literature synthesis. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101523. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101523

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101523

Keywords: circular economy, urban policy, collaborative governance, systematic literature review, stakeholder engagement, regulatory barriers, policy implementation, sustainability transitions, waste management, urban planning, PRISMA, institutional capacity