In the last decade, the Circular Economy (CE) has emerged as an important framing for business and policy action in support of sustainable development. In that time, there has been an explosion of academic publications, policy developments, and business activities related to the CE. Given that CE has been widely praised and adopted by policy think tanks, policy makers, and business, as a way to frame sustainable development, we think it is about time scholars from a critical sustainability perspective interrogate the CE framework from all three domains of sustainable development: economic prosperity, ecological integrity, and social well-being, with a particular focus on who wins and who loses in the CE. This double special issue of Local Environment helps to fill this long-overdue oversight with 14 papers that engage the Circular Economy both conceptually and through case study analyses. The aim of this special issue is two-fold – to expose diverse perspectives on the CE to Local Environment readers and to raise the awareness of justice considerations in CE discourse for a broader audience. It addresses the large knowledge gap in the literature by bringing together the work of scholars in different fields who are examining the role of justice and equity in the circular economy.

This article offers an approach that helps geographers and others to carefully and critically reexamine prospects for diverse economies. We propose an interpretative institutionalist perspective is useful for elucidating overlooked opportunities for creating alternative economic visions and practices by revealing the process of ‘meaning making’ undertaken by actors in the process of developing policy responses to various dilemmas. We explore this notion in the context of de-growth or post-growth. De-growth is a way of thinking about the economy in ways that are not growth oriented, or fixated on GDP, but on the redistribution of wealth and living within the Earth’s ecosystems.

Taking inspiration from the forthcoming Rio+20 Conference in Brazil, this paper reflects upon the roles of power and knowledge in developing indicators for sustainable local development. Are indicators, the evidence they privilege, and the policies that follow from them consistent with the stated goals of sustainable development? Are they merely bureaucratic tick-boxes that enable the measurement of “progress”? Or, similarly, do they represent “knowledge modernization” whereby sustainable development can be measured objectively, like GDP? We will examine three points relating to these questions: (1) the increasing standardisation and mobility of sustainable development indicators; (2) the increasing prominence and types of “evidence” that inform sustainable development policy, and (3) the role of experts in determining the parameters of sustainable development. We argue that the development and use of indicators have become a technocratic practice that serves as a buffer between the “political” and the “rational” and thus de-politicises and restricts local sustainable development agendas, despite the inherently political nature of environmental problems and values.

In this paper I seek to make a preliminary link between the discursive representation of the ‘environment’ and the regulation of economic activity. The contemporary Montana gold mining industry belies accounts that economic regulation can be situated purely in concepts of structures and institutions. In the 1990s, the Montana gold mining industry was fundamentally transformed in the absence of concomitant changes in the economic structure of the industry or in the institutions of regulation. Indeed, the changes in the efficacy of the Montana gold mining economy can only be explicated by adding a discursive account of regulation. In particular, I link a regulationist account of reregulation with the post-structural sensibilities found in cultural economic geography. This analysis, which focuses on how nature is represented in the mine-permitting process, illustrates that how we perceive ‘environment’ in particular places and times can influence access to resources and their subsequent physical transformation.