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Description
The CIRCLE project aims to develop an interdisciplinary perspective on the circular economy in the Baltic-Nordic region by integrating insights from sociology, economics, philosophy, political science, and environmental science, and examining its all three - social, economic, and environmental - sustainability dimensions. The emphasis is placed on the use of byproducts (bio-resources) generated as part of primary production in agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture within their sub-sectors and across the sectoral boundaries to explore the underlying models of socially- and commercially-driven collaborations between the involved parties and the factors facilitating and hindering the development and wider use of circular practices and collaborative arrangements thereof. The project attends to both supply and demand side of this type of inter- and cross-sectoral circularity of bio-resources and their secondary application in production by investigating producers’ considerations, consumers’ views, and policy implications. This is to be achieved with the application of complementary methods such as literature review, media analysis, qualitative individual and group interviews, national stakeholder and scenario workshops, and cost-benefit analysis. The project will contribute to the growing academic, public, and policy debate at both national and European level on sustainable resource use, and will offer evidence-based knowledge on existing and potential solutions within and across the three sectors under investigation to highlight the role and models of cooperation between different market, civic, and public actors in ensuring effective implementation of circularity. The project’s consortium brings together five academic partners from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Norway allowing to build new partnerships, advance interdisciplinary collaboration, and contribute to inter-organisational learning and researchers’ training.