Forging the Future: Reconfiguring Value Chains Through Circular Economy Meta-Organizing

Transforming linear value chains toward circularity is rife with challenges, like valorizing materials and building supply relationships. Meta-organizations, organizations with organizations as members, may help alleviate these challenges. They can facilitate sustainability transitions by mobilizing collective action, but less is known about their potential for reconfiguring value chains toward circularity. We explore this by conducting a qualitative case study of two meta-organizations for textile circularity. Our findings reveal five key collective activities for reconfiguring value chains toward circularity through meta-organizing: setting material agendas, balancing membership openness and closedness, brokering new relationships among organizations, facilitating material-based platforms, and opening new material opportunities. The first three activities worked in parallel toward two outcomes that enabled material-based platforms and new material opportunities: circular co-experimentation and localized circular supply chain development. Our findings strengthen our understandings of how meta-organizations can build new links across industries and sectors, enabling value chain reconfiguration and broader systemic transitions.