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The concept of the Circular Economy (CE) is an increasingly attractive approach to tackling current sustainability challenges and facilitating a shift away from the linear “take-make-use-dispose” model of production and consumption. The public sector is a major contributor to the CE transition not only as a policy-maker but also as a significant purchaser, consumer, and user of goods and services. The circularization of the public sector itself, however, has received very little attention in CE research. In order to explore the current state of knowledge on the implementation of CE practices and strategies within Public Sector Organizations (PSOs), this research aims to develop an overview of the existing literature. The literature review was designed combining a systematic search with a complementary purposive sampling. Using organizational sustainability as a theoretical perspective, the main results showed a scattered landscape, indicating that the limited research on CE practices and strategies in PSOs has focused so far on the areas of public procurement, internal operations and processes, and public service delivery. As a result of this literature review, an organizational CE framework of a PSO is proposed providing a holistic view of a PSO as a system with organizational dimensions that are relevant for the examination and analysis of the integration process of CE practices and strategies. This innovative framework aims to help further CE research and practice to move beyond current sustainability efforts, highlighting that public procurement, strategy and management, internal processes and operations, assessment and communication, public service delivery, human resources dimensions, collaboration with other organizations, and various external contexts are important public sector areas where the implementation of CE has the potential to bring sustainability benefits.

The smart specialisation approach is becoming a strategic instrument for identifying regions’ opportunities for growth and sustainable development. It is a place-based approach and plays an important role in benchmarking regional competitiveness. To have a smart specialisation strategy has been thought of as a key factor in making a choice for investment. Smart specialisation strategies represent a policy measure to overcome disorganised and weak parallel activities in developed EU countries and offer support to those areas that have research, technological and production capacity to carry out particular activities. Smart specialisation strategies, therefore, follow the socio-economic situation in countries and their integrated technological, institutional and business processes. The EU Member States and regions recognised that supporting a limited number of well-identified priorities for knowledge-based investments and/or clusters could advance, focusing on competitive assets and realistic growth capabilities reinforced by a critical mass of action and entrepreneurial resources. However, the role of culture and cultural heritage has not been significant in these processes. As the policy review revealed that circular economy should be considered as a broader sustainable development strategy, which should also “support Member States and regions to strengthen innovation for the circular economy through smart specialisations”, the purpose of this paper is to lay a basis for a new, stronger complementarity between culture, cultural heritage and adaptive reuse practices, and circular economy concepts through smart specialisation strategies.

The adoption of circularity indicators in the electrical and electronic sector is understood to play a critical role in organisational decision making during the transition from a linear to a circular economy. Yet, it is widely recognised that there is no standardised method of measuring circularity performance. Additionally, the extent of literature uncovers a range of shortcomings of existing cross-sector circularity indicators, including a predominant focus on end-of-life, limited coverage of social measurements, a lack of sector specificity and limited capture of product functionality, durability or sharing. Furthermore, the current electrical and electronic sector-specific circularity indicators focus greatly on repair and recycling, failing to acknowledge the significant impact on circularity of the design and manufacturing, distribution and use phases. Therefore, this research set out to answer how electrical and electronic manufacturers can measure the circular economy performance of their products by developing and testing multidimensional circularity indicators for all products’ life cycle stages. To achieve this, a two-fold qualitative approach was adopted. Firstly, a stakeholders’ workshop aiming to generate, categorise and rate novel circularity indicators was held. Secondly, a focus group piloted the resulting workshop’s circularity indicators. The findings highlight key factors that influence circularity indicators’ applicability to electrical and electronic products, including product function, service arrangement, and customer type. The research has implications for electrical and electronic organisations seeking pathways to the circular economy by understanding, assessing, and measuring the circularity of their products.

The accelerated development of cities involves important inflows and outflows of resources. The construction sector is one of the main consumers of raw materials and producers of waste. Due to its quantity and potential for recovery, waste from the construction sector constitutes significant deposits and requires major action by bringing together different stakeholders to achieve the objectives of a circular economy. Consequently, it is crucial to understand the current knowledge of urban metabolism, deposits, and recovery practices. This article aims to investigate the role of local authorities in the planning of strategies to facilitate a circular economy; in particular, this article aims to answer how local authorities facilitate circular economy initiatives in the building sector and what opportunities and obstacles they encounter in the process. The strategy used for the study was to conduct semistructured interviews with those responsible for circular economy projects within local authorities that were pioneering circular economy projects in metropolitan France. The results highlight the importance of community involvement in the implementation of circular economy principles in the building sector. Thus, it is essential to identify the different stakeholders and their respective challenges to build an operational framework.

With increasing urbanisation, new approaches such as the Circular Economy (CE) are needed to reduce resource consumption. In Switzerland, Construction & Demolition (C&D) waste accounts for the largest portion of waste (84%). Beyond limiting the depletion of primary resources, implementing recycling strategies for C&D waste (such as using recycled aggregates to produce recycled concrete (RC)), can also decrease the amount of landfilled C&D waste. The use of RC still faces adoption barriers. In this research, we examined the factors driving the adoption of recycled products for a CE in the C&D sector by focusing on RC for structural applications. We developed a behavioural framework to understand the determinants of architects’ decisions to recommend RC. We collected and analysed survey data from 727 respondents. The analyses focused on architects’ a priori beliefs about RC, behavioural factors affecting their recommendations of RC, and project-specific contextual factors that might play a role in the recommendation of RC. Our results show that the factors that mainly facilitate the recommendation of RC by architects are: a senior position, a high level of RC knowledge and of the Minergie label, beliefs about the reduced environmental impact of RC, as well as favourable prescriptive social norms expressed by clients and other architects. We emphasise the importance of a holistic theoretical framework in approaching decision-making processes related to the adoption of innovation, and the importance of the agency of each involved actor for a transition towards a circular construction sector.

Forests of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) have a rich diversity of valuable non-timber forest products (NTFP) that local communities extract for their sustenance and income. The region is home to over 60% of species recognized for novel bio-medicinal properties in the Indian Himalayas. There is significant national and international demand for these species, providing income and employment for more than 60% of the population of J&K. Despite this, NTFP are not adequately recognized for their contributions to rural livelihoods and the regional economy due to the lack of appropriate policy and governance mechanisms. In this study, we embrace a bioresource vision to examine challenges and opportunities for transition to a sustainable bioeconomy in J&K. Selected NTFP were considered for valuation to showcase their bioeconomy potential using two approaches. First, we used the ‘market price method’ to estimate the contribution of NTFP to the local economy. Second, the ‘maximum willingness to pay method’ was used to project the bioeconomy potential of NTFP in the region. The analysis reveals that local communities’ revenues could increase by as much as 18 times their current price with appropriate actions to include NTFP. However, to realize this potential, policies and governance frameworks based on increased access and benefit sharing with inclusive institutional models would support the transition of the local economy into a bioeconomy. Fostering public–community partnership by improving the local participation of producers and processors in NTFP value chains for overcoming the existing governance barriers is needed.

In recent years, cultural sustainability has attracted increasing attention within the discourse of sustainable development and sustainable cities. Notwithstanding some effort put on conceptualizing the relationship between culture and sustainability, research on the issue is still in a pre-paradigmatic stage and related empirical studies are scant. In particular, further knowledge is required to understand not only how cultural sustainability has been addressed strategically but also implemented in practice. In this direction, research has pointed out the role of social structures (e.g., partnerships, collaborations, etc.) for achieving cultural sustainability goals. However, focusing on smart cities, attention is limited to how collaborative arrangements can be leveraged within the development of new city services (e.g., smart open innovation) to sustain goals of environmental, economic and social sustainability, with cultural sustainability still playing a marginal role. This paper develops a new framework linking together the strategic level and the practice level in addressing cultural sustainability and conceptualizing the role of collaborative structures in the development of smart innovation. The framework is then used as a frame of reference for analyzing the case of MuseoTorino, a new city museum realized within the smart city strategy of Turin (Italy). The analysis provides evidence of some practices adopted to leverage collaboration and stakeholders’ engagement to strategically address cultural sustainability and to realize it in practice throughout the new service development process.