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Circular Economy (CE) is seen as a key strategy in achieving sustainable development and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To seize the potential of CE, public and private organisations need to evaluate and communicate their progress moving away from the non-sustainable paradigm of “take–make–dispose” towards circularity. The literature and practitioners demonstrate a growing interest in CE assessment as a driver for this transition. Nevertheless, the majority of CE assessments are implemented in private companies and implementation in public sector organisations is low. This article presents the challenges that currently prevent public sector organisations from implementing CE assessment and derives strategies to overcome them. A total of 21 CE and assessment experts from the Portuguese public sector were interviewed, and the results were triangulated with an extensive policy document review. The findings show that cultural barriers, particularly a lack of public and political pressure as well as a resistance towards change, are considered the main challenges for CE assessment implementation. Cultural challenges drive structural ones such as a lack of leadership commitment, the voluntary nature, and a missing clear governance for CE assessment. Technical and financial challenges, contrary to previous findings of the literature, are not prioritised and are seen as a result of the cultural and structural challenges. Overall, the research suggests that CE assessment is often a discussion among academics and highly specialised practitioners. In order to drive its implementation, the debate has to involve stakeholders beyond expert circles to trigger awareness for its necessity and to facilitate usage for a broader audience.

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.