Circular economy and power relations in global value chains: Tensions and trade-offs for lower income countries

The concept of the circular economy has gained significant traction among businesses, policymakers and researchers in recent years. The transformation of the current linear economic system to a circular one offers many opportunities to advance sustainable natural resource use, create closed-loop supply chains and implement sustainable recycling management. Circular economy strategies could help lower-income countries ‘leapfrog’to a more sustainable development pathway that avoids locking in resource-intensive economic practices of the dominant linear consumption and production system. As lower-income countries’ economies are in many ways still more ‘circular’in terms of resource management and production and consumption practices than their developed economy counterparts, the question is how to turn this into a development opportunity (Preston and Lehne, 2017).