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Ranked by formulaVerdict: NotableThe Role of the Private Sector in the Governance of Circular Cities Initiatives: Towards a Conceptual Framework
Despite growing policy and scholarly interest in circular cities, limited attention has been paid to how private‐sector actors shape the governance of circular urban transitions across different spatial…
Key numbers
- 50% of waste management in
VerdictWorth a reader's time today.
Abstract
ABSTRACT Despite growing policy and scholarly interest in circular cities, limited attention has been paid to how private‐sector actors shape the governance of circular urban transitions across different spatial contexts. Existing research has largely focused on circular business models, technological innovation, and municipal strategies, while overlooking questions of governance, environmental justice, and ecological valuation. While a substantial body of work examines public–private partnerships, multi‐actor governance, and urban sustainability transitions, these literatures have not been systematically integrated to examine how different types of private‐sector actors, ranging from multinational corporations to informal‐sector waste workers, exercise governance influence, encounter power asymmetries, and produce differentiated outcomes across spatial contexts. This paper addresses this gap through a PRISMA‐guided systematic literature review of 81 peer‐reviewed studies. Drawing on polycentric governance theory, institutional theory, and an environmental justice framework encompassing distributional, procedural, and recognitional dimensions, the study develops a conceptual framework for understanding private‐sector involvement in circular city governance. The review finds that private‐sector participation is shaped by structurally embedded power asymmetries that existing governance frameworks inadequately address. In advanced metropolitan regions, the reviewed studies indicate that large corporations and infrastructure providers tend to leverage their superior resources, technical expertise, and advocacy capacity to shape governance arrangements, steering circular transitions towards capital‐intensive technological solutions while marginalising community‐embedded alternatives. In developing and transitional urban contexts, small enterprises, social and solidarity economy organisations, and informal‐sector actors perform essential circular functions, handling over 50% of waste management in many cities, yet remain largely excluded from governance deliberations. The findings further highlight persistent spatial disparities in circular economy investment, limited integration of ecological valuation and natural capital accounting into governance systems, and inadequate attention to environmental justice outcomes. The paper proposes a conceptual framework comprising four interrelated dimensions: circular city context, a spatially differentiated actor ecosystem that disaggregates private‐sector actors by organisational mission and governance capacity, integrated governance mechanisms that explicitly incorporate power‐sensitive accountability structures, and multi‐scalar outcomes assessed through environmental justice criteria. Unlike existing generic governance typologies, the framework embeds power analysis and environmental justice as constitutive elements rather than peripheral concerns, thereby bridging polycentric governance, institutional theory, and critical urban political economy perspectives. To render the framework empirically applicable, the paper specifies six testable propositions describing causal relationships among its dimensions, proposes measurable indicators for each component, and illustrates how the framework can be applied in advanced, emerging, developing, and industrial‐legacy urban settings. The review is limited by its reliance on English‐language, peer‐reviewed studies drawn predominantly from European contexts, and the framework's Global South components should therefore be treated as propositions for testing rather than validated findings. The study contributes to research on urban sustainability transitions by providing a theoretically grounded foundation for comparative and longitudinal investigations of private‐sector governance and by identifying priorities for future scholarship, particularly in under‐represented Global South contexts.
The editor's rubric
- Leverage2 / 5
- Reusable within one subfield (a technique, dataset, or protocol a few groups will adopt).
- Magnitude3 / 5
- Large gain: roughly 2x, or a clear new state of the art on a hard, unsaturated problem.
- Evidence4 / 5
- Strong: large scale, preregistered, independently replicated, or a well-powered randomized trial.
- Novelty2 / 5
- A new combination of known ideas.
- Trajectory2 / 5
- Some room to improve with obvious engineering.
- Stakes2 / 5
- Benefits a professional community (practitioners, clinicians, engineers).
Editor’s rationale
Heuristic triage from title and abstract text only, not a reading of the paper. Cues found: gains (outperforms); novelty (alternative to status quo); design (multicenter); verification (error bars, experimental validation); scale (improves with scale); stakes (global scale).
How the score was computed
Desks place stronger verdicts first, then use this score to order work within the same verdict.
- Merit
- 5.2 / 10
- Adjusted merit
- 4.5 / 10
- Attention
- 0%
- Freshness
- 85%
- Citations0 (reference 15, via openalex, Oct 25, 2026, 07:29 UTC)