Abstract
Circular economy (CE) is a concept that is gaining attention as an approach to help accelerate the transition towards sustainability. Research has focused on the adoption of CE practices in the business sector while the adoption within public sector organisations has been relatively overlooked. Examining CE adoption in the public sector through the perceptive of employees is crucial because of their expertise in the organisation where they work. The main aim of this study is to identify what public employees perceive as suitable CE practices for their organisations and their critical role in implementation. As the adoption of CE practices is influenced by social and material configurations, this research has taken a case study approach, focused on the Portuguese Central Public Administration. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with public employees working on CE and sustainability issues, and a complementary analysis was undertaken of governmental reports and legislative documents. The results show that public employees view the existence and potential of CE practices mainly in the area of public procurement but also in resource efficiency and optimisation, dematerialisation and in practices related to the R-hierarchy including reduce and reuse. Both technical-oriented practices aimed to achieve traditional resource efficiency, and human-centred practices targeted at reducing consumption and sharing resources have been identified. This research provides insights into how a specific group of stakeholders envisions CE activities for their sector. Identification of practices for central public sector has the potential to assist decision-makers in the process of defining priorities for CE planning, implementation and monitoring. This study focusing on CE practices in central public sector organisations contributes to the calls for an inclusion of human/socially-based practices centred around consumption reduction, sharing and dematerialisation activities to enhance the transformative and innovative potential of CE.
Highlights
The circular economy (CE) is widely presented as a tool to address the challenges of our current unsustainable production and consumption model and as a way to accelerate progress towards sustainability [1, 2]
This range of CE practices highlights that the interviewees and the public administration seem to be aware of the transformative potential of introducing CE practices addressing consumption behaviours in day-to-day operations alongside the traditional technical resource efficiency–oriented practices which has been stressed by previous literature [22, 46]
The results show that several interviewees’ awareness and attention were on CE practices that are linked to Public Procurement (PP), with 12 practices related to the integration of circular criteria and specifications in PP processes
Summary
The majority of the studies researching on CE at the micro level of individual organisations have focused on private companies, whereas the public sector seems to have been considered mostly at the macro level of policies and regulations as a result of public policies implementation in China and Europe [5]. Research on the adoption of circularity within Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) has been overlooked [7, 8] This lack of spotlight on the public sector at organisational level is probably due to the idea that the public sector is mostly seen as a driver to accelerate and scale up the implementation of CE in other sectors via governmental actions [9, 10]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
