Just Transition, Pluralism and Local Governance Capacity: Democratic Challenges in Transition Governance Towards a Circular Economy

Circular transition policies and institutions are fragmented and the challenges complex and unruly (‘wicked’). Previous research highlights the need for more coherent policy and governance frameworks including a set of enabling measures, such as regulative frameworks, standards, economic incentives, infrastructures, logistics and informative measures to disrupt and create new institutions and markets. Hence, co-creation between multiple public and private actors, including citizens at large, have been suggested as necessary to produce collective, democratically legitimate, just and transformative circular solutions. However, the complex political economy of such collaborative endeavour is often deeply embedded in social and political structures, power imbalances and fragmented institutions. This paper suggests that limited research has been carried out on the social justice and justice pluralism involved in furthering collaborative governance towards circular changes. Focusing on the relationships between justice and efficiency, the paper explores diverse justice perspectives on social change. The analysis is mirrored in the actual involvement of different types of actors, including marginal groups, in five cases of circular transition in five cities (Asker, Cape Town, Oslo, Trondheim and Utrecht). We find that none of the project has exhausted the potentials of just involvement of civil society actors and citizens, while we suggest that the concept of justice pluralism is useful to capture the diversity of engagements across diverse social groups and agencies with different interests and perspectives on local agendas and opens an agenda for further research.