14 Circular society activism: prefigurative communities in everyday Circular Economy action

Circular Economy (CE) is predominately approached through a technical and engineering paradigm, which aims to radically reduce waste by redesigning resource flows. This often ignores the CE’s social dimension. While the entrepreneurship and business model literatures do recognise the importance of people in CE transitions, this chapter goes a step further by understanding CE through an activism lens. Our argument builds on social movement perspectives of societal transitions, showing that change is often enacted by grassroots communities in everyday settings. We provide three examples of what we term circular society activism, illustrating our argument. We contribute to the CE literature by conceptualising circular society as a form of prefigurative action that can be enacted by communities in the here and now.