Dialogue

On May 13, 2024, SIRI and CIRCLE—Lund University hosted a research and policy dialogue on circularity and mission-oriented policies.

The morning session featured a roundtable led by Dr. Julien Kirchherr, partner at McKinsey & Company and Associate Professor at Roskilde University. Julien reflected on the evolution of the circular economy literature, noting an uptick in academic articles that superficially engage with the topic. He called for more empirically and theoretically robust research on circularity, advocating for studies that use large data sets, unpack mechanisms, and explore sector-specificities to genuinely advance the field.

The afternoon session shifted focus to a policy seminar on mission-oriented policies. Dr. Matts-Åke Belin, Lead for the Decade of Action for Road Safety at the World Health Organization, joined Julien to discuss how best to study, design, and implement transformative policies. Both speakers emphasised the need to question underlying assumptions and normative biases within missions.

Matts-Åke shared his experience with designing and implementing a transformative policy: Vision Zero. He unpacked how Sweden’s highly successful road safety initiative challenged conventional thinking by:

1. Redefining the problem: shifting from a focus on crashes to a focus on fatalities and serious injuries.

2. Reframing causes: shifting from blaming to accommodating human mistakes.

3. Reassigning responsibility: from road users to system designers.

4. Questioning goals: from accepting an optimum number of fatalities and severe injuries to aiming to eliminate such outcomes completely.

Key factors for policy success highlighted include a cultural shift among system designers towards upstream problem-solving and effective multi-sectoral collaboration facilitated by a lead agency.

We thank Julien Kirchherr and Matts-Åke Belin for their insightful contributions.

We look forward to continuing these conversations and bridging the gap between research and practice in future events.