The paper examines two recent, high-profile contributions led by Julian Kirchherr, one of the most cited scholars in the field: an essay asking whether the circular economy is a failing sustainability paradigm, and a broader systematic defence of the concept against its critics. Both texts concede a remarkable amount. They admit that the circular economy is embedded in existing economic systems, that mainstream policy uptake favours marginal tinkering and easily measured victories, and that the appeal of the concept lies partly in its win-win optimism. Yet Marjanović’s central claim is that these concessions are folded back into a defence of feasibility, patience and incrementalism, so that the paradigm’s structural limitations are acknowledged but never allowed to destabilise it.

The first and deepest problem, the critique argues, is that the defences reproduce an eco-modernist vision of sustainability in which the goal is to sustain economic growth while reducing environmental harm through better design, efficiency and circular business models. In this framing, firms and markets sit at the centre of the transition: companies are asked to cooperate across industries, adapt their business models and build circular infrastructure, while governments mainly enable these processes and consumers supply market signals through their purchases. Questions of redistribution, labour, ownership, sufficiency and democratic control are pushed to the margins. When critics point out that the circular economy aligns with corporate interests, the defenders respond that the field is now increasingly dominated by academics. Marjanović counters that this conflates the production of knowledge with the distribution of power, especially since academia itself is entangled with industry through funding, advisory roles and pressure to produce commercially useful research.

A second, politically charged issue is what the critique calls depoliticisation. Rather than refuting specific criticisms, the defences recast critical scholarship itself as a potential hazard, warning that overly critical perspectives can undermine legitimacy, deter investment and ultimately entrench the linear economy. Critique is tolerated only insofar as it remains grounded and proportionate. Marjanović argues this gets the relationship between criticism and progress exactly backwards: because the circular economy is a contested political discourse that shapes which actors are empowered and which trade-offs are obscured, systematic scrutiny is not a threat to momentum but one of its essential preconditions. Recent work on so-called agonistic circularity, which shows that contestation can produce more plural and robust forms of governance, suggests that disagreement is not external to circular transition but constitutive of it.

The treatment of systemic change illustrates the pattern. When critics argue that the circular economy ignores deep structural transformation, the defenders reply that systemic concepts underpin the field and that circularity has long been conceived as a whole-of-economy model. But, Marjanović notes, a concept can be systemic in scope without being transformative in substance: addressing the whole economy is not the same as challenging the property regimes, growth imperatives and unequal power structures through which that economy is organised. Similarly, the argument that the circular economy is wholly predicated on incrementalism effectively redefines the terms of judgment, so that modest, institutionally convenient and highly measurable shifts count as success while more radical demands are pushed outside the frame of what the concept is supposed to deliver. The bar is lowered, and then the paradigm is declared successful on its own reduced terms.

The critique also takes aim at the evidential basis of the defences. One paper is explicitly framed as a perspective piece with no original research data, while the other claims to offer a systematic synthesis of critiques, yet both make expansive claims about the field’s maturity, coherence and progress on the basis of selective literature synthesis, definitional reviews and chosen case examples. The handling of degrowth is a case in point: the mere existence of degrowth-related discussion is presented as proof that the circular economy is no longer fundamentally growth-oriented, even though by the defenders’ own figures, degrowth and economic sufficiency appeared in only around eleven to sixteen per cent of circular economy definitions in 2023. The presence of a minority post-growth strand, Marjanović argues, does not show that the field has overcome its growth attachment; if anything, the minority status of degrowth reinforces the critique that radical interpretations remain peripheral to the dominant, business-centred logic.

The response to criticism of the circle metaphor follows a similar pattern. The defenders argue that the metaphor is not misleading because serious scholars do not aim for perfect circularity and influential conceptualisations already acknowledge leakage and trade-offs. But this shifts the discussion from the effects of the metaphor to the intentions of scholars. The original criticism concerns what the circle does in public and policy imaginaries: it can naturalise the image of closure, encourage the fantasy of neat loops and obscure the social and spatial displacements involved in material flows. The defenders themselves briefly concede that the seductive simplicity of the closed loop can obscure questions of justice and power, yet they do not engage that concern directly. A metaphor can be politically powerful, the critique insists, even when its users do not take it literally.

Beyond the circular economy itself, the paper turns a sharper lens on academic culture. The defenders criticise the field for metric-driven opportunism, repetitive reviews and low-quality scholarship, yet Marjanović observes that their own output leans heavily on opinion pieces, definitional reviews and meta-level commentary with little original data, complicating sweeping dismissals of other forms of academic production. They also promote a pracademic ideal, celebrating scholars who move between universities, consultancy and public debate, and praising applied reports by organisations such as the UN for their clarity. Marjanović does not deny the value of practitioner engagement, but argues that this model projects a narrow, elitist hierarchy of scholarly worth in which visibility, applicability and policy influence define value, while slower, less performative and more adversarial forms of critique are cast as excessive or marginal. Teaching, mentoring, methodological rigour and conceptual clarification, he notes, are also central academic contributions, and not all impact is publicly visible.

Perhaps the most pointed section concerns self-positioning. The two defences cite roughly twenty-six publications authored or co-authored by Kirchherr, mobilising his own prior work to define the field, establish its maturity, diagnose its problems and defend its significance. The recommendation that scholars publish in practitioner-oriented venues is illustrated with the Journal of Circular Economy, of which Kirchherr is Editor-in-Chief and co-author Kris Hartley an editorial board member. Marjanović is careful to note that this does not amount to a formal conflict of interest or prove bad faith, but he argues it reflects a deeper epistemic self-positioning: the authors are not merely reviewing the field but shaping the canon through which it is understood, so that the circular economy is defended partly through texts that define what counts as meaningful progress within it.

The critique ends on a conciliatory but firm note. The defenders are right that parts of the critical literature can be schematic and repetitive, that circular economy scholarship has grown more internally plural, and that institutional uptake matters politically. Yet internal plurality does not erase the dominance of growth-compatible interpretations, and the weaknesses of some critical work do not invalidate the need for critique as such. A genuinely convincing defence, Marjanović concludes, would need to show that the circular economy can engage seriously with power, labour, ownership, redistribution, wellbeing and sufficiency, rather than treating them as secondary matters of implementation and design. Until then, the debate over the circular economy is best understood not as a technical dispute about recycling rates, but as a struggle over who gets to define the concept, which critiques count as legitimate, and what kind of academic authority is permitted to shape its future.

Subject of Research: Critical analysis of normative bias, academic elitism and self-positioning in circular economy scholarship

Article Title: What defenders of the circular economy get right, and what they don’t: normative bias, academic elitism, and self-positioning in circular economy scholarship

Article References: Marjanović, M. (2026). What defenders of the circular economy get right, and what they don’t: normative bias, academic elitism, and self-positioning in circular economy scholarship. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 2089-2099. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00141-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00141-w

Keywords: circular economy, sustainability, ecological modernisation, academic critique, degrowth, green growth, scholarly debate, Journal of Industrial Ecology, positionality, environmental policy, self-citation, pracademics

The study, conducted by Tonderai Manezhu, S. Sruthy and Raji Pushpalatha of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s Amrita School for Sustainable Futures in Kerala, sits at the intersection of two methodological traditions. The first is Participatory Rural Appraisal, or PRA, a family of techniques developed in the 1980s that transfers the tools of analysis from the outside expert to the community itself, using exercises such as resource maps, seasonal calendars and transect walks. The second is non-native ethnography, in which a researcher works in a cultural and linguistic setting that is not their own. The study’s central contribution is to show how these two traditions, often treated separately, can be woven together to investigate water governance in complex rural environments.

The theoretical spine of the research is hydrosocial theory, a framework that rejects the idea of water as a purely physical substance moving through a natural cycle. Instead, hydrosocial analysis treats water and society as mutually constitutive: political decisions, economic inequalities and cultural norms shape how water is captured, distributed and valued, while the resulting water systems in turn reinforce those social arrangements. Viewed through this lens, a tap that runs dry in one neighbourhood while another overflows is not a technical malfunction. It is an expression of the social order, made visible in infrastructure.

Applying that lens in Mohlai, the researchers identified a cluster of systemic problems. The village suffers seasonal drinking water scarcity, with availability fluctuating across the year rather than remaining uniformly poor. Distribution and supply are marked by inequality, meaning that some households reliably obtain water while others are left with insecure access. Wastewater management is inefficient, allowing greywater to circulate in ways that pose hygiene concerns. And groundwater levels are declining, a slow-moving crisis familiar across much of rural India where aquifers are drawn down faster than they recharge.

The crucial interpretive move came in the analysis of why these problems persist. The study concludes that water access in Mohlai is driven by economic capacity, infrastructural position, institutional authority and social power relations rather than physical scarcity. In other words, even where water physically exists, the ability to obtain it is unevenly distributed along social lines. Households with money, connections to functioning infrastructure and standing within local institutions fare better than those without. This reframing matters enormously for policy: interventions that simply add supply, without addressing the social architecture of distribution, risk reproducing the very inequalities that produce scarcity in the first place.

Reaching that conclusion required a methodological journey that the paper documents with unusual candour. The fieldwork was ethnographic and conducted across multiple stakeholder groupings, engaged through household and session-level PRA exercises rather than a fixed enumerated sample. That design choice reflects the logic of ethnography itself: instead of extracting data from a statistically representative cross-section, the researcher builds an understanding of the village as a lived social system, following conversations, events and relationships as they unfold. PRA exercises then structured that immersion, giving villagers tools to record their own knowledge and making community members co-investigators rather than passive subjects.

Being a non-native researcher presented formidable barriers, and the study treats these not as noise to be filtered out but as central to the research process. Linguistic limitations complicated everyday communication, since an outsider cannot catch nuance, idiom or irony in a language learned late. Cultural barriers risked misreading social cues and local etiquette. Perhaps most intractable were power asymmetries in developmental deliberations: in village meetings about water and development, dominant voices can crowd out marginalised ones, and an outside researcher with institutional backing can inadvertently add yet another powerful presence to the room. The researchers’ positionality, meaning their social position relative to the community, shaped every interaction.

Their response to these barriers was a strategy of deliberate rapport-building and collaborative validation. Rapport, in the ethnographic tradition, is the trust that allows a researcher to move from visitor to participant, and the study identifies it as the key to effective engagement in fieldwork, alongside strategic engagement for gaining entry into the research field in the first place. Collaborative validation then worked on two fronts. Technocentric PRA tools, such as a seasonal calendar in which villagers charted water availability month by month, and resource mapping, in which the community depicted its own water infrastructure and sources, produced structured records that could be checked against interview and observational data. Cross-cultural immersion, sustained over the fieldwork period, allowed the researcher to test interpretations against lived experience and reduce translation error. The study describes this as supporting triangulation across evidence sources, the practice of confirming a finding through multiple independent routes.

The ethical scaffolding of the research was correspondingly careful. Ethical clearance was obtained from the Institutional Ethics Review Board of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, with procedures conducted in accordance with Indian Council of Medical Research guidelines and the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all participants, who were told the study’s purpose, the voluntary nature of participation, how confidentiality would be protected and how data would be used for academic publication. The board’s approval noted the study’s focus on waste and water management with little to no sensitive inquiry, and a contingency plan addressed potential risks of greywater contact during the intervention. The work was supported by the E4LIFE International Ph.D Fellowship Program at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, with field support from the Amrita Live-in-Labs programme, the village local authority and Mohlai villagers themselves.

The wider significance of the study lies in its methodological lesson for sustainability science. As funding bodies and governments push for participatory approaches to resource governance, a persistent critique has been that participation can become tokenistic, with communities consulted but power relations left untouched. By foregrounding the researcher’s own positionality, the Mohlai study models a form of reflexivity in which the outsider’s limits, and the strategies for working within them, become explicit parts of the method rather than hidden assumptions buried in a methods section. For the millions of rural households across India facing seasonal water scarcity and declining groundwater, the message is that durable solutions will not come from pipes alone. They will require understanding who controls the taps, who is heard in village deliberations, and how a community, working with an honest outsider, can chart its own path to equitable water governance.

Subject of Research: Participatory rural appraisal and hydrosocial analysis of community-based water governance in rural India

Article Title: Participatory rural appraisal for community-based water governance in rural India through a researcher’s positionality-informed approach

Article References: Manezhu, T., Sruthy, S., & Pushpalatha, R. (2026). Participatory rural appraisal for community-based water governance in rural India through a researcher’s positionality-informed approach. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04753-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04753-x

Keywords: water governance, participatory rural appraisal, hydrosocial theory, ethnography, rural India, groundwater, wastewater management, positionality, Chhattisgarh, water scarcity, PRA methods, sustainability