The Call for a Systemic Shift Towards a Circular Society: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract Following the recent call for a systemic shift towards sustainability, we present a systemic literature review conducted via the StArt tool and informed by over 105 articles in order to understand the nature and extent of a multidisciplinary literature on the systemic organising of the circular economy (CE). The findings show a large academic community occasionally addressing this management issue. Primarily composed of engineers and managers, they have published their findings, often as co-authors, in a few multidisciplinary engineering journals. The systemic CE organising issue is mainly problematised as the tools required, changes in organisation of the value chain, and reliance on key actors. However, little has been written about the conceptualisation or systemic evaluation of the impacts. Contributions show a split between the major conventional trend that focuses on CE for sustainable growth by optimising tools, actors’ roles, and the organising system, and a minor but critical trend that explores reflections on conceptualisation and evaluation, opening up avenues for territorial, complex, and ecological thinking for a transformational circular society. A reminder of Boulding’s systemic, sustainable, and stationary CE reveals three important points: (1) the literature we reviewed is largely analytical rather than systemic; (2) it is mainly limited to an incompatible economic growth logic and lack of awareness of complexity issues; and (3) the need for cooperation, information sharing, and interdisciplinarity clearly appear as common issues to be addressed.