“Our Best Enemy”: Right to Repair and the Politics of Agonistic Circularity

Circular economy (CE) is both contesting the status quo and a contested idea, for which many competing understandings and implementations exist. And yet, analyses of the role of social conflicts and pluralism are rare in the CE literature, overly focused on convergence and cooperation. To address this research gap, we draw on Mouffe’s “agonistic pluralism” political theory. Empirically, the study focuses on the interplay between different groups of actors in shaping the right to repair (R2R) policy debate in the European Union (EU) context. Deploying a process method consisting of secondary data and semistructured interviews, our analysis shows that productive conflicts between the R2R campaign and manufacturers did foster mutual learning, unlikely convergences, and a more pluralist European repair ecosystem. We call this dynamic “agonistic circularity.” We highlight the limits of both “harmonious” and “antagonistic” circularity, outlining a pluralist integrative model of CE politics.