Disruptive but normalizing?: What the formalization of informality can tell us about the circular economy in the Global South

Abstract

The Circular Economy (CE) framework provides a new perspective on waste and resource management, from which we are invited to rethink our current social and economic patterns of production and consumption by encouraging reuse and recycling as a means to reduce the impact of resource extraction. The most optimistic approach highlights its potential to build-up a development strategy decoupling the use of virgin resources from economic growth, thereby contributing to sustainable development. The promoters of a systemic and global CE perspective highlight that this proposal provides a coherent and feasible roadmap to operate a transition from business models based on a linear economy (extraction-production-discarding) to a circular one based on flows of materials and energy which are integrated again into the productive process as loops and cascades. Therefore, the CE could be framed as a powerful narrative of change which has seen a broad deployment in industrialised countries, but is also spreading through the Global South. As the concept travels into new territories, it starts to confront more heterogeneous contexts, driving new theoretical and empirical tensions.Our argument builds on the identification of two complementary tensions regarding the potential implementation of Circular Business Models (CBM) in the global South. The first tension unfolds when considering the potential role of the CE when it comes to fostering or inhibiting social inclusion in the context of a sharp growth of social inequalities since the 1970s all over the region. As we already mentioned, circular economy initiatives are considered as a way to develop green and lucrative business opportunities. However, it is still unclear how these new circular guidelines could create mechanisms that encompass the individual and social development of workers and their communities. Complementarily, the second tension focuses on the CE´s adequacy for the global South, as up until now many of the local initiatives follow the mainstream perspective on CE elaborated in correspondence with the global North realities. This could lead to fostering the involvement of corporate and business actors in the CE, while community-based organisations (CBOs) and Social Movements are kept out, even when they have developed a wide range of innovative techno-productive and ideological practices that could easily be framed within the CE principles. Hence, here the CE narrative shows an interesting ambiguity, as it provides a disrupting narrative in the North – i.e. contesting linear production and consumption patterns - but, at the same time, represents a normalising narrative in the South – promoting a unique global sustainability benchmark. In this sense, the "formalisation" of so-called “informal recycling”, provides a powerful tool to problematise this ambiguity within the Latin American context. In fact, it is possible to translate the disruption/normalisation dyad in terms of different models of organisation for the “informal” workers within local CE initiatives, which involve contrasting visions about the relation between waste, knowledge and labour.