Navigating the shift from waste management to circular economy and bioeconomy, between confrontation, arrangement and territorialization

Since the turn of the 2010s, both the OECD and the European Commission have put the circular economy and the bioeconomy at the heart of the transition agenda. Yet, whereas the circular economy and the bioeconomy open up prospects for balancing economic and environmental constraints, economic and political actors have different, potentially conflicting visions and associated imaginaries. The aim of this special issueis to offer a multidisciplinary contribution to the analysis of what the ‘transition' agenda is doing to socio-economic models. We define a socio-economic model as a social configuration of the economy, resulting from transactional practices between players in a context of asymmetrical power relations. Beyond the storytelling of a transition towards the circular economy and the bioeconomy, our goal is to study the actual changes taking place, based on the hypothesis that this process is leading to a diversity of emerging interrelated models. By focusing not only on this diversity, but also on the confrontations and arrangements between stakeholders, our special issue proposal deals with two main research questions: 1- Do the different models of the bioeconomy and circular economy overlap or collide and, if so, how? 2- Do the development and institutionalization of the circular economy and the bioeconomy paradoxically contribute to the market extension of the linear economy into areas that were previously non-market? The central focus of this special issue will be a comparison of North American and European cases, with a view to furthering our understanding of what the ‘transition' agenda is doing to socio-economic models in different political and socio-economic contexts. Contributions may also focus on North-South configurations to examine long-standing and emerging economic, social and political asymmetries, as well as the divergent but interdependent trajectories of countries in the North and South, that this new waste economy reveals.