The Circular Economy (CE) is regarded as a solution to the environmental crisis. However, mainstream CE measures skirt around challenging the ethos of ever-increasing economic growth, overlooking social impacts and under-representing solutions such as reducing overall consumption. Circular Societies (CS) address these concerns by challenging this ethos. They emphasize ground-up social reorganization, address over-consumption through suficiency strategies, and highlight the need for considering the complex inter-dependencies between nature, society, and technology on local, regional and global levels. However, no blueprint exists for forming CSs. An initial objective of my thesis is exploring existing social-network ontologies and developing a broadly applicable model for CSs. Since ground-up social reorganization on local, regional, and global levels has compounding efects on network complexities, a technological framework digitizing these inter-dependencies is necessary. Finally, adhering to CS principles of transparency and democratization, a system of trust is necessary to achieve collaborative consensus of the network state.
The abundance of cheaply exploitable natural resources and human labor has fueled a global
system of production and consumption, which follows a uni-directional pattern of "take, make
and dispose"; beginning with material and resource extraction, followed by applying (often
non-renewably sourced) energy and human labor, in order to manufacture products that are
subsequently sold to consumers, who discard them when they are of no further use [
While in the LE, materials are extracted from nature and are used to manufacture products, only
to be eventually turned into waste; the model of a Circular Economy (CE) employs strategies
such as sharing, leasing, reusing, re-manufacturing and recycling to keep existing materials
and manufactured products in use for as long as possible. The CE aims to design a system of
production and consumption that eliminates the concept of "waste", by designing products that
are optimized for cycles of disassembly and reuse [
In pursuit of similar goals, several governing bodies have adopted this model in recent years.
For instance, the EU Commission has drafted a circular economy action plan as one of the main
building blocks of the European Green Deal [
While the CE is a necessary and important step towards transitioning away from the destructive LE, CE in practice has been cricised in recent research as being insuficient to achieve the transformational change necessary to address the current socio-ecological crisis.
The central cause of the current socio-ecological crisis lies in the unidirectional logic that
characterizes global systems of consumption and production today. This logic is fueled by
industrialization and the narrative of free-market capitalism, whose primary function is to
maximize economic value of natural and human resources that are converted into market
commodities [
Another criticism of current CE measures, is that they often also display a lack of consideration
towards social sustainability alongside economic and ecological sustainability [
While the CE is a necessary step towards addressing the current climate crisis, for a successful transition to a sustainable circular economy that is truly within planetary boundaries, there is also the need for an expansion of unidimensional value definitions to multidimensional and holistic constructs that highlight the importance of suficiency and reducing resource consumption. The concept of a Circular Society (CS) is such a holistic construct.
The CS is a holistic version of the CE, in which transition "requires a fundamental reorientation
and reorganization of practices and processes in all areas of life — from nutrition mobility and
energy use, to work models and housing concepts. This holistic vision, hearkens back to the
roots of the CE; "1. to adopt a system perspective that considers the complex ways in which
nature, society and technology are interdependently interacting on a local, regional and global
level; 2. to aim for closed loops and organize production and consumption practices in circular
lfows that imitates the "eco-logic" of ecological systems; 3. to create a resilient production and
consumption metabolism taking the need for regeneration of natural capital into account" [
Aiming to challenge and transform the aforementioned unidimensional value definitions, CS
focuses on the creation of multidimensional concepts of value creation "that define qualitative
and quantitative indicators for social and ecological value creation and which take into account
the many forms of work (care work, informal work, community work, DIY) that contribute to
societal well-being" [
The CS also "aims to establish a participatory, communitarian, solidary and circular
consumption and production system" [
Jaeger-Erben et. al [
The authors [
There is a limit to what an individual alone can accomplish to incorporate suficiency practices
in their life. For instance, as individual computer scientists that recognize the socio-ecological
damage associated with the lifecycle of smartphones, we can refuse to buy new smartphones,
and rather utilize our expertise by repurposing electronics that we already possess, and build
our own software alternatives to fit our daily needs. However, at least for me personally, the
expertise ends here; since I would be unable to repair or build custom hardware components
to sustain such a device forever. At a certain point, the lack of expertise of a single individual
would be a barrier preventing them from pushing this practice further. Thankfully, for this
specific scenario, the concept of a Hackerspace [
A similar analogy can be made on a slightly more macro scale: individual local CS might also have similar limitations that they can only overcome by networking with other CSs. Working inductively, there needs to be perpetual scaling-up/networking of CSs, to actualize the goal of a socially and environmentally sustainable global circular society.
Jaeger-Erben et. al. [
As mentioned in Section 2.3, general guiding principles for CSs exist. However, the idea of
CSs is still relatively new, and there are already several examples of the principles of the CS
being put into practice, e.g., the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement [
Also, the perpetual scaling-up/networking of new and existing societies towards the goal of
a global CS would require a generic framework that works on an individual, societal and
macrosocietal level, and that can streamline the formation and continuous operation of these CSs: the
so-called fertile ground. Since this networking will exponentially increase in complexity,
tracking the various interdependencies between individuals, society, nature and technology, in an
analog manner would be infeasible. Hence, this would require this network of interdependencies
to be digitized, calling for a technological framework (at least) consisting of:
1. An ontology (consisting of individuals, society, nature, technology, and their various
relations), that is broadly applicable to, and serves as a means of understanding of the
dynamics of collaborative practices within and between CSs, inspired and compatible with
existing concepts such as solidarity economics, eco-villages, collaborative development,
etc.
2. A common communication network that allows transparent and democratized inter- and
intra- networking of CSs by forming a decentralized knowledge graph [
These three building-blocks can satisfy the previously mentioned prerequisites identified by
Jaeger-Erben et. al [
The main goal of my thesis is to fill the gap in the existing research identified in Section 3. To this end, I define the main research question for my thesis as follows:
RQ: How to create a technological framework to facilitate the formation and networking of circular societies?
For a more focused exploration of the main research question, I have further sub-divided the main research question into the following: • RQ1: How to create an ontology that is broadly applicable to circular societies? • RQ2: How to network circular societies in a transparent, democratized, and decentralized knowledge graph? • RQ3: How to create a system of trust to achieve consensus in the decentralized knowledge graph?
These sub-questions are suitably phrased in order to collectively answer the main research question.
In order to answer each of these questions, a preliminary research direction of my thesis would be to do systematic literature review into various subjects, including but not limited to: existing ontologies of social networks and frameworks for their development such as OWL (the Web Ontology Language) [14], decentralized knowledge graphs, technologies supporting decentralized autonomous organizations [15] (including non-blockchain [16] related solutions), and decentralized consensus mechanisms [17].
Secondary research directions of my thesis will also include exploring methods of evaluating suficiency practices for their positive environmental impact using this technological framework.
I would like to thank my members of my family, friends and colleagues; whose feedback was invaluable in writing this paper. [14] OWL Working Group, Web Ontology Language (OWL), 2012. URL: https://www.w3.org/
OWL/, accessed: 2023-03-17. [15] S. Wang, W. Ding, J. Li, Y. Yuan, L. Ouyang, F.-Y. Wang, Decentralized autonomous organizations: Concept, model, and applications, Transactions on Computational Social Systems 6 (2019) 870–878. [16] J. Golosova, A. Romanovs, The advantages and disadvantages of the blockchain technology,
IEEE, 2018, pp. 1–6. [17] C. Zhang, C. Wu, X. Wang, Overview of Blockchain consensus mechanism, 2020, pp. 7–12.