Hospicing the Linear Economy: Care-Ethical Exnovation in Circular Economy Transitions

Circular economy scholarship increasingly recognises circularity as a social, ethical, and place-based transformation alongside material-loop closure. This paper develops Hospice Work for the Linear Economy as a care-ethical framework for accompanying the decline of linear practices, infrastructures, identities, and dependencies within circular transitions. Bringing transition scholarship into dialogue with palliative care, care ethics, and relational thought, it frames phase-out as a practice of attentive accompaniment. The framework emerges from practice-informed conceptual inquiry across European and African scholarly contexts and from dialogue with hospice practitioners and circular economy scholars. A Dutch vignette explores applications to agriculture, packaging, and water management, where identity, memory, and place shape processes of change. The paper contributes to circular economy scholarship by extending care ethics to exnovation and by situating the ending of linear systems within place-based and relational transition thinking.