Institutional Readiness and Systemic Barriers to Circular Economy Transitions in Emerging Urban Economies: Evidence from a Rapidly Industrializing Gulf Metropolitan Area

Circular economy (CE) transitions are increasingly promoted as a pathway for sustainable urban development; however, their implementation in emerging urban economies remains constrained by institutional and governance-related challenges. This study examines institutional readiness for CE transitions at the metropolitan scale, using the Dammam Metropolitan Area (Saudi Arabia) as an empirical case of a rapidly industrializing urban region. Adopting an institutional and urban governance perspective, institutional readiness is conceptualized as the capacity of metropolitan institutions to coordinate, regulate, and operationalize circular strategies through coherent governance arrangements and effective service delivery. Drawing on an expert-based survey of 230 stakeholders from municipal authorities, industry, and academia, the study employs a sequential quantitative approach combining descriptive analysis, inferential tests, principal component analysis, and multiple regression modeling. The findings indicate that institutional readiness for CE adoption remains moderate and uneven, reflecting a persistent gap between policy ambition and implementation capacity. Governance fragmentation, regulatory gaps, and funding constraints emerge as interrelated systemic barriers; however, municipal waste management system effectiveness is identified as the strongest determinant of perceived readiness in the multivariate analysis. This result highlights operational capacity as a practical institutional mechanism through which broader governance conditions are experienced and assessed by stakeholders. Rather than advancing conceptual novelty, the study contributes to circular economy scholarship by providing a place-based, metropolitan-level empirical assessment of institutional readiness and by demonstrating how operational service performance shapes the feasibility of CE transitions in emerging urban economies. The findings offer policy-relevant insights for aligning governance reform and infrastructure investment to move CE strategies beyond strategic intent toward effective urban implementation.