Legal-institutional inertia in circular electrification: Evidence from Swedish heavy-duty and off-road machinery

Electrifying heavy-duty and off-road machinery can cut operational emissions, but cleaner-production gains depend on circular battery and component flows, interoperable charging and useable data. Transition research explains policy mixes and socio-technical lock-in but often treats law as an external context. We ask which legal domains enable or obstruct circular electrification, how they create system inertia, and which legal design principles can reduce it. The study combines 29 semi-structured expert interviews in Sweden with hybrid thematic analysis and targeted doctrinal analysis of relevant EU and Swedish law. Eight connected domains emerge, spanning regulatory direction, permitting producer responsibility and product–waste status, standards, data governance, finance, contracts and procurement, and regulatory experimentation. Across them, ambiguity, fragmented authority and legacy-rule misfit increase coordination and transaction costs, delay decisions, shift risk to early movers and favour incumbent-led reconfiguration over more disruptive circular models. The central contribution is to specify legal-institutional inertia as a cross-domain regime mechanism that selects both transition pathway and actors. Connecting the multi-level perspective with institutional environmental governance and product-chain management, the paper derives a coordinated policy mix based on stable long-term direction, modular implementation, interoperability, proportional responsibility and experiments linked to scaling. Cleaner production policy must therefore align legal interfaces across the product chain, not only remove isolated barriers.