ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Circular Economy
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsus.2025.1527052
This article is part of the Research TopicDecoupling Growth from Resource Use: Circular Economy in Post-Growth ScenariosView all articles
Degrowth or Barbarism? An Exploration of Four Circular Futures for 2050
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 2Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
- 3Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands, Netherlands
- 4Department of Economics, University of Messina, Messina, Italy
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There are many competing visions regarding what a circular economy transition entails and how it would transform our social, economic, environmental, technological, and political systems. This paper sheds light on these different circular discourses by asking the following research questions: what future would different circularity discourses envision for 2050? To answer this question, this paper uses scenario planning methods to explore how four circular discourses developed in a 2x2 typology of circularity thinking would imagine the future. Results examine how these four discourses would organise and operationalise circular transport, energy, agriculture, and industrial systems in 2050. Results also explore the political systems and governance processes they would establish and the type of society, culture, worldview and lifestyles they would create. Moreover, the paper analyses the socio-ecological desirability and ecological plausibility of the scenarios, as well as the level of societal change potentially needed to bring them about. The paper concludes that there is a real danger in following growth-based circular discourses and scenarios because their visions cannot be implemented within the biophysical boundaries of the Earth. Indeed, over 50 years of academic research has demonstrated that decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation fast enough to prevent climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse is impossible. Degrowth-oriented circular society approaches, on the other hand, might shed light on socially innovative transformations that can allow all humans to meet their needs within the ecological boundaries of the Earth.
Keywords: Circular economy, Circular society, Future studies, sustainability, Degrowth, Post-growth, Just Transition, Socio-ecological transition
Received: 12 Nov 2024; Accepted: 27 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Calisto Friant, Vermeulen and Salomone. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Martin Calisto Friant, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
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