Some Milestones for an Evolutionary-Institutional Approach to the Circular Economy Transition

In the recent decades, circular economy (CE) has attracted increasing interest from public authorities, non-profit organizations, businesses and, more recently, scholars who have proposed a variety of approaches to the concept. This article aims to lay the foundations for an original framework for analyzing CE from the perspective of the evolutionary institutionalism pioneered by Thorstein Veblen. Evolutionary institutionalism is rooted in a systemic and multi-layered ontology. It employs the Darwinian triplet of variation, selection, and retention/replication (VSR) as a fruitful framework for analyzing evolving population systems. Building on this generalized Darwinism framework, the article argues that the transition from a linear economy to a (more) circular economy should be conceived primarily as a co-evolution between business firms and industry architectures. From this perspective, it suggests centering the analysis of the VSR processes of the CE transition on the notion of business model, defined as a system of organizational routines that structures interactions between the members of the firm and the social entities of its industrial environment.