ExPliCit Exploring Circular Futures: Stakeholder Workshops Report

A new and long awaited outcome of the ExpliCit project has been published! 

The ExPliCit - Exploring Plausible Circular Futures project seeks to explore alternative circular futures in order to subsequently understand how supply chains can be configured in such scenarios. As part of work package 1 (WP1), the project aims to construct circular futures and investigate their key determinants and dynamics. In this context, WP1 includes the development of three knowledge coproduction workshops in which previously designed scenarios have been explored by different stakeholders. Based on an extensive literature review and an iterative co-creation process, the project team has designed four circular economy (CE) scenarios based on the intersection of two dimensions: the governance model (bottom-up, decentralised or top-down, centralised) and the focus on prioritising economic growth (growth-based society or limits to-growth society based on ecological boundaries). 
To better understand these scenarios, the project utilises the Scenario Exploration System (SES), a tool combining multiple Techniques of Futuring (ToFs), including interactive scenarios and role playing. The project team adapted the SES tool developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre to the circular economy context. This new edition of the SES was used in two workshops (one in Brussels, Belgium and one in Pontevedra, Spain) to explore the previously designed scenarios with different stakeholders.
This report presents the results of the workshops.

• Section 2 presents the scenarios that emerged in the ExPliCit project and that are used in the Circular Economy version of the SES.
• Section 3 describes the Scenario Exploration System tool
• Section 4 details the organisation of the workshops
• Section 5 presents the findings from the two workshops in relation to each scenario
• Section 6 presents the findings in relation to each of the roles that the different stakeholders took on during the workshops
• Section 7 and section 8 present a joint analysis of the findings, first reflecting on the game and then leading to a number of policy implications

Please let us know any comments and questions as a result of reading the report!

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