The resilience of planned and self-organised circular economy networks: a novel simulation approach

Circular economy networks (CENs) refer to sustainable ecosystems where autonomous companies collaborate with each other to pursue circularity goals. Firms’ behaviours produce complex loop-like archetypal structures through which end-of-life resources are effectively restored. Loop-like structures have to be preserved, especially from frequent and unpredictable disruptions occurring over time on CENs. This is achieved by designing resilient CENs. Despite the importance of this topic, the determinants for the resilience of CENs are still scarcely investigated. A few scholars have focused on the structural features of CENs, ignoring, however, that these can change over time, influenced by the collaborative behaviours of the involved stakeholders undertaken in a self-organised or planned way. We argue that stakeholders, while facing disruptions, reconfigure their local interactions to recover original or more favourable loop structures and hence preserve the continuity of circularity functions. This enhances the resilience of the entire CEN. The theoretical lens of complex adaptive systems is employed to develop a conceptual framework describing the complex and dynamic nature of CENs. The results of agent-based simulations show how planned and self-organised mechanisms perform across CENs characterised by different network patterns and facing different kinds of disruptions.