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Steffen Böhm, Chia-Hao Ho, Helen Holmes,
Constantine Manolchev, Malte Rödl, Wouter Spekkink
14 Circular society activism: prefigurative
communities in everyday Circular
Economy action
Abstract: Circular Economy (CE) is predominately approached through a technical
and engineering paradigm, which aims to radically reduce waste by redesigning re-
source flows. This often ignores the CE’s social dimension. While the entrepreneur-
ship and business model literatures do recognise the importance of people in CE
transitions, this chapter goes a step further by understanding CE through an activ-
ism lens. Our argument builds on social movement perspectives of societal transi-
tions, showing that change is often enacted by grassroots communities in everyday
settings. We provide three examples of what we term circular society activism, illus-
trating our argument. We contribute to the CE literature by conceptualising circular
society as a form of prefigurative action that can be enacted by communities in the
here and now.
Keywords: activism, communities, circular society, social movements, prefiguration
Introduction
The Circular Economy (CE) discourse has been growing exponentially in recent
years. Policymakers, such as the European Commission (2021), have been promot-
ing the CE as a vital framework for achieving ‘clean growth,’‘biodiversity loss re-
duction’and ‘carbon neutrality.’As part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s (EMF)
CE100 network, many large, multinational companies now have CE action plans in
place, which have resulted in circular products and services being launched. While
this commitment to the CE by these influential actors is laudable, there are two key
limitations, which provide starting points for our chapter. First, these ‘top-down’
CE discourses tend to emphasise technical and engineering solutions, highlighting
the material aspects of the CE transition (Geng et al., 2019). This is largely due to
the fact that significant parts of the CE discourse are driven by a concern for the
availability of so-called ‘critical materials,’such as rare-earths and other materials,
which are essential for a transition to low-carbon economies (Foxon, 2011). While
environmental pollution and sustainability in general are clearly key concerns,
dominant CE discourses often focus on waste and resource efficiency, driven by a
concern for resource scarcity (Gregson et al., 2015).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110723373-017
Second, the social dimension of the CE is often ignored or under-emphasised
(Padilla-Riveraet al., 2020). While there is an increasing focus on ‘mid-range’di-
mensions of the CE, including skills and jobs (Schroeder et al., 2019), entrepreneur-
ship (Cullen & De Angelis 2021; Millette et al., 2020; Vecchio et al., 2020), circular
business model innovation and experimentation (Aminoff & Pihlajamaa 2020; Ko-
nietzko et al., 2020) as well as city and regional transformations (Lekan & Rogers
2020; Petit-Boix & Leipold 2018; Palm & Bocken 2021), the role of grassroots com-
munities is not sufficiently understood. That is, what is missing is a ‘bottom-up’
perspective of the CE.
This chapter highlights the role of community groups in the CE transition, un-
derstanding their everyday activities through a social movement activism lens. This
bottom-up perspective appreciates the prefigurative action taken by organised com-
munity groups, enacting the CE in the here and now. In this chapter, we provide
three illustrative examples, showing how communities engage in reuse, repair and
provisioning activities on a self-organised, daily basis.
Building on the recent conception of ‘circular society’(Jaeger-Erben et al.,
2021), we contribute to the CE literature by arguing that social movement activism
plays a crucial role in bringing about CE transitions at a wider societal scale. The CE
movement should not be understood, however, as a unified people that speak with
one voice. Instead, CE is enacted and diffused by people who have different inter-
ests and agendas (Corvellec et al., 2020), who, nevertheless, engage in a form of
prefigurative ‘sustainable materialism’(Schlosberg, 2019), bringing about change
in the here and now.
CE’s social dimension
The CE is often referred to as a ‘triple win.’EU Environment Commissioner Sinkevi-
cius, for example, identified CE to provide wins “for people, for the planet and for
prosperity”(European Commission, 2021). In its most recent educational introduc-
tion, the EMF, which works largely with large, multinational companies, claims
that the CE “gives us the tools to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss to-
gether, while addressing important social needs.”It continues: “Itgivesusthe
power to grow prosperity, jobs, and resilience while cutting greenhouse gas emis-
sions, waste, and pollution”(EMF, n.d.). For another major actor, the Chinese state,
CE is a tool to improve resource efficiency and drive green technology innovations,
while reducing carbon emissions and water usage (Chipman Koty, 2021). A key
focus for China is the establishment of eco-industrial parks and elaborate recycling
systems to achieving these goals (Zhao et al., 2017).
The EU, China and EMF have been driving the CE approach from the top-down,
working with large industrial actors. While this has involved wider social goals, it is
242 Steffen Böhm et al.
fair to say that the CE is dominated by technical, engineering and materials-based
approaches. This is mirrored in the academic CE literature; a Web of Science search
on the topic ‘Circular Economy’reveals that more than 90% of academic articles on
the CE are published within the fields of environmental sciences, technology, engi-
neering and materials sciences.
Only a minor fraction of academic literature and professional reports on CE ac-
knowledge the social dimension (Kirchherr et al., 2017). In fact, its explicit inclusion
might be a rather recent development: Padilla-Rivera et al. (2020) identify social
concerns in only 60 academic CE publications (out of literally thousands). They
name four larger clusters of social issues, namely ‘Labor Practices and Decent
Work,’‘Human Rights,’‘Society’and ‘Product Responsibility.’In later work, they
develop these concerns into a set of indicators for a ‘social CE’(Padilla-Rivera et al.,
2021).
Entrepreneurship is another focus for CE scholars that involves the social dimen-
sion (Cullen & De Angelis 2021; Millette et al., 2020; Vecchio et al., 2020). Particularly,
social and ecological entrepreneurship often involves creative CE approaches by eco-
preneurs, social enterprises and community groups who want to make a difference
(Dentchev et al., 2016; Stratan, 2017). These entrepreneurial approaches are often
based on radically different business models, compared to those suggested or imple-
mented by top-down actors (Aminoff & Pihlajamaa 2020; Konietzko et al., 2020), pro-
viding opportunities for grassroots innovation (Charter & Keiller 2014; Ziegler, 2019)
as well as city and regional transformations (Lekan & Rogers 2020; Palm & Bocken
2021; Petit-Boix & Leipold 2018).
Such CE approaches could be termed ‘mid-range,’involving not only large com-
panies or policymakers (the top-down dimension identified previously), but also a
broad constituency of societal actors. This is in line with calls for a ‘circular society’
“to provide an alternative framing that is going beyond growth, technology and mar-
ket-based solutions”(Jaeger-Erben et al., 2021, 1), which would enable a renewed
focus on societal problems (Leipold et al., 2021) and highlight that all societal actors
need to be involved in a socio-ecological transformation towards circularity (Jaeger-
Erben et al., 2021). Along similar lines, scholars have called for a ‘sustainable circular
society’(Velenturf & Purnell 2021), and they have sought to integrate CE’s technologi-
cal-material focus with the concept of ‘circular human sphere,’originating in the so-
cial sciences and development studies (Schröder et al., 2020).
All these studies highlight the social dimensions of the CE, emphasising the fact
that it is people, and often community activists, that perform an essential role in prop-
agating, diffusing and implementing CE approaches. Such a bottom-up view of CE al-
lows us to move beyond largely top-down analyses that tend to focus on economic
(e.g. company or industry) and institutional analyses (e.g. governmental, regulation,
national level approaches). While mid-range perspectives on entrepreneurship, social
enterprises and urban transitions have more fully acknowledged the importance of
people, they are often rooted in ecological modernisation (Hobson & Lynch 2016) and
14 Circular society activism: prefigurative communities 243
unlimited growth narratives (Kovacic et al., 2019) more in line with traditional busi-
ness and innovation models.
We contend that the transition towards a CE is often ‘messy’and non-linear,
involving a range of multiple, grassroots stakeholders who will often have conflict-
ing aims and approaches. In fact, there is often a “lack of a clear pathway for ac-
tion, and no single entity in charge”(Kanter, 2015, 129). Hence, the CE field is a
multiplicity and a space for grassroots activism –to which we turn now.
Circular society as activism
For many decades, scholars have discussed the role of activists, which we under-
stand here as individuals or collectives that seek to influence organisational or gov-
ernmental conduct bottom-up to drive social and environmental change (Carter,
2018; Dono et al., 2010). Civil society activism (Diani, 2015), consumer activism
(Cherrier et al., 2011) and environmentalism (Mirvis, 1994) are examples of activism
that is done at an individual level, within community groups but also in social
movements and other larger actor networks (Battilana & Casciaro, 2012; Farla et al.,
2012). We suggest that the CE can be viewed as another domain that demands atten-
tion by activists. We now discuss different types of activism –namely, ‘activism
from without’and ‘activism from within’–through which actors enact the CE di-
rectly and indirectly from below. We conclude the section by combining these cate-
gories into a new conceptual dimension, that of ‘everyday, prefigurative activism,’
which reflects the messy, organic and emergent nature of activism from below.
Activism from without
Traditionally, activists tend to challenge organisations from the outside (Briscoe &
Gupta 2016). Hence, such activists, who normally organise themselves within civil
society-based community groups and social movements, are usually seen as a
threat to companies, governments or any other institutions with conflicting inter-
ests. According to Diani (2015), the structure of civil society is made up through the
links of voluntary organisations (either informal, partial or formal), acting on col-
lective issues. These organisations may devote themselves to mobilising external re-
sources and creating inter-organisational networks (Diani, 2015; Korhonen et al.,
2018) towards social change such as new infrastructure or regulation. They could
also target companies, pushing them to address environmental and social issues
(Den Hond & De Bakker, 2007; Shrivastava & Scott, 1992).
The CE domain is no different in this regard. For example, the ‘right to repair’
movement has, for decades now, campaigned for the reparability of products,
244 Steffen Böhm et al.
which are often badly designed or intentionally made to last only for a limited time
(Bello & Aufderheide, 2021). Similarly, social movements have campaigned against
plastics and chemical pollution and other environmental impacts of the linear,
wasteful economy (Auyero et al., 2019; Sicotte & Brulle, 2017). Perhaps the biggest
market failure has been climate change, which has been the focus of social move-
ment activism for decades now (Askanius & Uldam, 2011; McAdam, 2017; North,
2011). Yet, activism does not only happen ‘on the streets,’so to say.
Activism from within
Activists also aim to bring about change within, often incumbent, organisations (Bris-
coe & Gupta, 2016). These so-called internal activists are individuals who act as crucial
change agents within organisations, pushing them to adopt better social and environ-
mental practices from the inside. Management and organisational scholars have, for
some time, studied how organisational change is brought about. Innovations and
pressure to change organisational routines and cultures can be incubated endoge-
nously (Friesl & Larty, 2013), a process that is influenced by organisational power and
politics, capabilities, as well as organisational inertia (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006;
Greenwood et al., 2015). Individuals who feel misaligned with predominant institu-
tional logics will mobilise internal resources against existing organisational strategies
and systems (Meyerson & Scully, 1995).
Scholars have studied internal activists at the CEO level (Chatterji & Toffel,
2019) as well as other managerial levels (Bocken & Geradts, 2020). They have also
analysed institutional entrepreneurs (Battilana et al., 2009), social intrapreneurs
(Davis & White, 2015), tempered radicals (Meyerson & Scully 1995) and employees’
environmental activism (Skoglund & Böhm, 2020). These internal activists often
have unique knowledge and expertise, as they are often embedded in wider com-
munities of action, epistemic communities and social movements (Skoglund &
Böhm, 2022). They use their unique position to bring about institutional change,
sometimes using resources and networks from outside the organisation (Den Hond
& De Bakker, 2007). However, as we suggest next, activism in the CE domain can be
much more fluid and transcend organisational and role boundaries. It can include
and be led as much by employees, managers or social movement activists. This
type of activism transcends existing conceptual duality and provides a canvass for
unbound activity, which allows for a plurality of stakeholders to push their organi-
sations towards adopting CE principles and processes, thus bringing about positive
social and environmental change.
14 Circular society activism: prefigurative communities 245
Everyday, prefigurative activism
Since organisational boundaries are often porous (Gulati et al., 2012), activism
should not be seen as a dichotomy but, indeed, recognised as part of a multi-level
process of change-making in, between and through organisations (DeJordy et al.,
2020). Change-making activism should be seen as a hybrid concept where individu-
als may take both internal and external organisational positions, which they use to
accelerate or control resource flows and change processes (DeJordy et al., 2020).
Social enterprises (Mair & Marti, 2006) and community-based enterprises (Hertel
et al., 2019) are typical examples of business activism that is geared towards social
and environmental agendas. Here, employees and managers do not simply have a
narrow profit-oriented identity and purpose. Instead, they work across a multiplic-
ity of domains that incorporate social, environmental and economic dimensions. As
the CE approach makes cross-organisational collaboration inevitable and neces-
sary, precisely because wider system change is often targeted, CE-adopting busi-
nesses could be seen as activists. Eco-industrial development (de Abreu & Ceglia,
2018), circular supply chain (Herczeg et al., 2018) and corporate-entrepreneur col-
laborations (Veleva & Bodkin, 2018) are examples of such a linkage between busi-
ness-focused change to wider societal and environmental dimensions.
In her work, however, Hobson (2020, 99) suggests that people may commend
CE approaches but are sceptical of its “new, resource-efficient business models in
contexts of hyper-consumerism.”Instead, Hobson emphasises an ‘everyday CE’
which permeates into private practices of resource use and recycling, but which
must build on circular spaces and neighbourhoods that enable and make possible
circularity beyond small-scale citizen initiatives. This points towards a CE perspec-
tive that is much more community-based, embedded in the wider social and cul-
tural fabric of society.
While often small-scale, many community-based initiatives related to ‘making,
doing, and mending’can be seen as a form of everyday CE action. One frequently
mentioned example is Repair Cafés (Cole & Gnanapragasam, 2017; Charter & Keiller,
2014; Spekkink et al., 2022), which aim to promote and help with repairing broken
items in order to save them from becoming waste. Other examples that have been
interpreted as CE-related communities are hackerspaces (Charter & Keiller, 2014) or
makerspaces (Unterfrauner et al., 2019). We can understand these initiatives as lo-
cally replicable ideas connected through shared aims and skills, which have been
analysed as translocal networks (Loorbach et al., 2020) or as social movements
both on a local and global level (Pesch et al., 2019). Such bottom-up approaches to
CE have also been applied to community development in rural settings with the aim
to increase its resilience (Aguiñaga et al., 2018).
Here, communities engage in everyday CE activism, pro-actively changing so-
cial and material relations. This often involves ethical considerations of solidarity,
reciprocity, cooperation, autonomy and participation, enabling everyone to partake
246 Steffen Böhm et al.
in the CE, not only as a consumer, manager or business-person, but as a citizen
(Gutberlet et al., 2017). Community CE activists, hence, set up alternative organisa-
tions, prefiguring the economic relations and societies they themselves would like
to see (Monticelli, 2018). They engage in a material, pragmatic type of activism that
is prefigurative and performative; that is, it is taking place in everyday settings in
the here and now (Skoglund & Böhm, 2020).
Examples of everyday, prefigurative CE activism
In this section, we discuss everyday CE activism through three multilateral exam-
ples. In all of them, individuals work within communities to bring about the change
they want to see taking place. They hence engage in prefigurative action on a daily
basis, in order to bring about the CE transition in the here and now.
Cultivate Cornwall
UK community interest companies (CICs) are an example of organisations with ‘po-
rous’boundaries (Gulati et al., 2012), able to lead or participate in change-making
initiatives (DeJordy et al., 2020). In the UK, a CIC is usually set up in order to serve
wider social needs of a community. This does not necessarily require it to be a not-for
-profit organisation, but it does mean that its modus operandi should include the pro-
vision of some social good, in addition to a return to its investors. One such CIC,
based in the Duchy of Cornwall, South West England, is Cultivate. Originally founded
by John Lakey and Harry Deacon in 2016, and joined by Lin Chapman in 2017, Culti-
vate has dedicated itself to the sole purpose of alleviating economic destitution in the
Bodmin area of Cornwall. In this way, the company’s business model can be de-
scribed as an example of ‘place framing’(Martin, 2003), whereby a number of com-
munal problems are identified (‘framed’)andsolutionssought.
Initially, Cultivate was motivated to address material waste as an economic as-
pect of business operation in the immediate Bodmin area. To do so, it collected waste
from local companies and reused it, in order to produce hand-crafted utility items.
This includes collecting textile materials, such as unsold t-shirts from local event or-
ganisers, and turning them into novelty clothing items, designed and made in-house.
Cultivate expanded its product range and repurposed damaged boat sails, scaffolding
and netting. As well as becoming the hub for a ‘social movement scene’(Creasap,
2012), connecting like-minded individuals, business and community members, Culti-
vate have been able to create a growing range of sustainable products, such as the
lunch box made from a torn wet-suit, shown in Figure 14.1.
14 Circular society activism: prefigurative communities 247
Note that the lunchbox opens out, so that the corners can be washed, and the
item comes with sustainable cutlery (a wooden spoon is visible in the top pocket
holder). Once opened, the lunchbox serves as a mat, so that lunch can be eaten di-
rectly from any surface, including a person’s knees. Cultivate has also started produc-
ing its own range of backpacks, with a prototype, made from a damaged wetsuit,
shown in Figure 14.2. Each product is hand-made at the company’s Bodmin premises.
In this way, Cultivate operates within the fluid space of everyday activism,
overcoming the separation between external organisational environments and in-
ternal decision-making (Skoglund & Böhm, 2020). As an example of what Skoglund
& Böhm (2020) further refer to as ‘prefigurative’merging of individual goodwill and
professional knowhow, the reclaimed materials used in their own production are
also offered to community members at the repair café-type sewing workshops Culti-
vate run for free, both from their Bodmin offices and in local schools. Cultivate also
offers paid repair services, yet members of the public can bring their damaged
items and use the sewing machines free of charge. Since 2019, their textile repairs
offering has expanded and now also includes a music instrument library for young
people in Cornwall.
The unequal impact of the coronavirus pandemic has pushed Cultivate to widen
its social agenda (Hertel et al., 2019) and its communal ‘framing’(Martin, 2003) even
Figure 14.1: A lunchbox designed and made entirely from a repurposed wetsuit.
Source: Authors.
248 Steffen Böhm et al.
further. In 2020, the CIC established an ‘essential provisions in Cornwall’(EPIC) hub
and has been working with over 20 local charities in the area. Although part of differ-
ent domains, members of the EPIC hub are able to work together to deliver emergency
food supplies across the South West, a collaboration which transcends individual
boundaries in an effort to transform the local community.
Cultivate’s Bodmin premises are the very embodiment of everyday activism. They
are a ramshackle of space that acts as office, campaign HQ and warehouse at the
same time (see Figure 14.3). Not a single corner, desk area or free space remains unu-
tilised –every item, off-cut or pile serves a purpose and fulfils a business need, mak-
ing it an example par excellence of ‘sustainable materialism’(Schlosberg, 2019).
There is nothing ornamental and no unnecessary decoration taking up valuable
space. Not even a sign announces Cultivate’s presence in the building –the CIC
seems determined to serve the community and not dominate it. Instead, Harry, John
and Lin rely on word-of-mouth to advertise their services and use their CIC as a vehi-
cle to bring about positive social and environmental change for their local area.
Figure 14.2: Prototype of a backpack made from a damaged wetsuit.
Source: Authors.
14 Circular society activism: prefigurative communities 249
Repair Cafés
Repair Cafés are “free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (to-
gether)”(Repair Café, n.d.). Visitors of Repair Cafés bring broken items from home,
ranging for electronics and mechanical devices to clothing, and then volunteer re-
pairers help the visitors to fix these items (if still possible). This happens in public
spaces that are typically set up in a way that facilitates social interaction between
volunteers and visitors. Although Repair Cafés exist in multiple shapes and sizes,
most Repair Cafés take place once a month, involve between 7 and 20 volunteers
and have between 11 and 30 visitors in a typical session (Spekkink et al., 2020).
The first Repair Café was started by Martine Postma (who later became the
chair of the Repair Café International Foundation (RCIF)) in Amsterdam in 2009.
The initiative is a response to three developments:
1. people often throw away broken items too easily, even when they can still be
repaired,
2. repairing is no longer a common practice and repair knowledge and skills are
on the decline and
3. people that do have repair knowledge and skills are not sufficiently appreciated
and their experience is underutilised.
Figure 14.3: Cultivate’s main premises in Bodmin.
Source: Authors.
250 Steffen Böhm et al.
The concept of Repair Cafés was quickly replicated in different parts of the Nether-
lands, as well as in other countries across the world. At the time of writing, more
than 2,000 Repair Cafés exist across more than 35 countries. This quick diffusion is
facilitated by, among other things, the existence of the RCIF, which was established
in 2010, and which specifically focuses on international growth of the community
since 2016.
Repair Cafés engage in a practical, material kind of activism. Rather than de-
manding from companies that they change their ways through adversarial action,
Repair Cafés prefigure a society in which repairing is part of everyday life, a mun-
dane activity through which anyone can make a tangible contribution to a circular
society. Their vision of a circular society is one in which people are knowledgeable,
skilled and active contributors to circularity, rather than the passive consumers
that appear in the top-down visions that dominate CE debates. However, rather
than trying to persuade people of this vision by talking about it, Repair Cafés are
focused on enacting it. As the notion of ‘Café’also suggests, bringing people from
local communities together is a crucial part of their modus operandi, because it is
through the social connections that Repair Cafés build that the repair knowledge
and skills vital to a circular society.
Repair Cafés thus have a strong local orientation. At the same time, they form a
translocal community with a common underlying vision (Loorbach et al., 2020),
which has the potential to bring about broader social change by engaging in local
activities in many different places at the same time. The direct environmental im-
pact of Repair Cafés is likely to be modest (e.g. the RCIF roughly estimates that Re-
pair Cafés prevented 400,000 kilos of waste in 2019), but they are ‘playing the long
game,’attempting to change how people see their possessions and the role of repair
in their everyday life, which may have a larger indirect environmental impact. For
Repair Cafés, it is not just important that their visitors take home a repaired item
that would otherwise have been wasted, but also that visitors develop a different
mindset.
Food groups
Long-term austerity has led to a rise in community-based food provisioning across
the whole of Europe, with food banking now seen as the archetypal community food
model. Grassroots food-based initiatives based on commoning, sharing and reci-
procity are not new (Holmes, 2018). Indeed, the work of Pahl (1984) and Gibson and
Graham (2008), amongst others, has illuminated the vast array of community and
neighbour-driven informal economies of reciprocity and sharing of food and other
items that have existed for centuries. Nonetheless, in 2021, in the UK alone there
were over 2,000 food banks (House of Commons, 2021). With the pandemic severely
affecting many people’s livelihoods, the need for community and charity-based food
14 Circular society activism: prefigurative communities 251
provisioning has grown rapidly. Recent statistics illustrate that those accessing com-
munity-based food provisioning increased by up to 88% in October 2020 compared to
the same period in 2019 (House of Commons, 2021). Yet, whilst the focus remains on
food banking as the main means of community food provision, this often overlooks
the numerous other endeavours that similarly bolster local communities whilst also
engaging in everyday CE activism and practices.
Emerging work on community gardening schemes (Cumbers et al., 2018; Valle,
2021), community fridges (Morrow, 2019), food swaps (Schor et al., 2016) and cook-
ing clubs (Marovelli, 2019) reveals a plethora of locally based, volunteer-led, grass-
roots initiatives using purpose-driven circular action to provide food for local
people whilst also operating sustainably through a focus on redistribution and
reuse.
Coffee Club is one such initiative. Based weekly in a community space on the
high street of a former mill town in North West England, Coffee Club is an alternative
community food provisioning model that exemplifies local everyday CE action. Like a
food bank, its aim is to provide food to those in need in the local area. However, it
attempts to avoid the stigma attached to such charity-based models by operating on
a membership basis (Caplan, 2016). Anyone can join the group and for a nominal
weekly fee receive approximately three bags worth of food. The food is sourced from
a variety of suppliers –including surplus directly donated by local supermarkets and
a weekly coordinated delivery from the food redistribution charity Fareshare. One cri-
tique levelled at many food banks is the removal of choice –in other words, recipi-
ents simply get a given set food parcels rather being able to choose the food they like
and would want. This, of course, adds to the stigma attached to attending a food
bank. At Coffee Club, members can choose the food they want, picking their own
fruits and vegetables or tinned goods from food laid out on tables –not unlike a mar-
ket stall.
What also sets it apart from most food banking models is its café and networking
focus. Members do not just attend the group to collect food, they also attend to social-
ise with others. This often involves swapping recipes or tips of how to cook the pro-
duce on offer. Sometimes members will bring in things they have baked or surplus
food they have grown to share with others. Thus, Coffee Club not only circulates and
redistributes food from the wider and corporate food supply chain, but it also redis-
tributes and encourages the circulation of food at much more micro and household
levels (Holmes, 2018). In this respect, Coffee Club works with local businesses to
achieve social and environmental action –providing low-cost food to those who need
it, whilst ensuring food is not wasted. Furthermore, Coffee Club encourages and facili-
tates social relationships through such everyday circular practices –bringing local
people together and connecting the community.
252 Steffen Böhm et al.
Discussion
The examples in the preceding section provide insight into how community groups
simply get on with the CE transition in their everyday settings. They do not wait for
companies to offer them circular products or services. They also do not wait for gov-
ernment to introduce CE legislation or regulation. They do what people have always
done: self-organise to address social and environmental issues in their local setting
(Heiskanen et al., 2010; Calvário et al., 2020). In this chapter, we have termed this
‘circular society activism,’in order to provide an alternative, grassroots perspective
of CE, whose discourse tends to be dominated by large, top-down actors, such as
multinational companies, policymakers and influential thinktanks. We have argued
that what is often forgotten or under-emphasised by most CE literatures is the vital
role of grassroots communities who engage in CE activities in self-organised, every-
day, place-based settings.
These bottom-up CE initiatives can be conceptualised as ‘everyday, prefigura-
tive activism,’which reflects the messy, organic and emergent nature of activism
from below. This builds on recent scholarship that emphasises that perhaps we
should talk less about the ‘CE’but, instead, talk more about the ‘circular society’
(Jaeger-Erben et al., 2021). In this chapter, we have highlighted the role of grass-
roots activists in CE transitions. When we say that this type of activism is ‘messy,
organic and emergent,’we imply that a circular society should not be understood
as a unified people. Instead, all social relations involve struggles, misunderstand-
ings, divergent interests and power relations. The political theorist Mouffe (2014)
calls this ‘agonism.’
What is striking, however, is that communities, while embedded in agonistic
spaces, nevertheless just get on with it. They engage in a form of prefigurative ‘sus-
tainable materialism’(Schlosberg, 2019), bringing about change in the here and
now. While prefigurative social action has existed for a long time, what is perhaps
distinct about CE prefigurative activism is its explicit engagement with materials
and resources. All three illustrative examples deal directly with things we can touch
and need on a daily basis: clothing, gadgets and food. What Schlosberg (2019) calls
‘sustainable materialism’is a vital extension of existing forms of environmental ac-
tivism that challenges dominant actors, often discursively, from without or within
organisations. In our cases, the prefigurative communities do not necessarily shout
too much about what they are doing; they simply get on with it, working with the
everyday materials of their activist focus, creating change in the here and now (Chat-
terton & Pickerill, 2010; Maeckelbergh, 2011; Skoglund & Böhm, 2020).
While we think that circular society activism from below plays a vital part in
bringing about social and environmental change, we do not claim that it can be seen
in isolation of other forms of activism we discussed in this chapter (without and
within), nor should we ignore the more mainstream top-down and mid-range CE dis-
courses and practices by governments, corporations, large NGOs, consultancies and
14 Circular society activism: prefigurative communities 253
entrepreneurs. Social movement theory has understood the differentiated relation-
ship between moderate and more radical actors through the lens of the concept of
‘radical flank,’arguing that more radical actors often have a direct or indirect role in
pushing mainstream actors in a particular direction of change (Fitzgerald & Rodgers,
2000; Rucht, 2004). While it goes beyond the purpose of this chapter to discuss this
in detail, perhaps the type of circular society activism discussed here provides insight
into the future direction of the whole CE transition movement.
We do claim, however, that place-based, everyday community activism is under-
emphasised in most CE scholarship as well as wider CE discourses and practices.
There is an urgent need, we argue, to make more visible the thousands of grassroots
initiatives that engage in concrete, material CE practices that are of ethical, cultural,
social and economic value to communities. Without these actions from below, the CE
runs the risk of being perceived as a top-down, elitist model of bringing about social
and environmental change. History has shown that this can easily involve autocratic
tendencies, while not creating sustained, inclusive change in the first place.
Conclusion
This chapter has conceptualised what we have called ‘circular society activism’to
provide an alternative, community-focused perspective of CE transitions. We have
provided three illustrative examples to show how CE is enacted by community
groups in an everyday, place-based setting, working with materials that are of rele-
vance to communities: clothing, technical gadgets and food. We have understood
these CE practices through the lens of prefiguration, which means that social and
environmental change is brought about through concrete, material activities in the
here and now. These grassroots practices from below are testament to the creative,
innovative potential of the CE that can be enacted by anyone and at any time. In this
way, the CE should not be seen as an economy to come in the distant future. Instead,
the CE is already here, as it is being prefiguratively enacted by a circular society that
does not want to wait for governments and large businesses to tell them what to do.
The circular society is already actively engaged to bring about a CE.
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