Circular Economy for Who? When Sustainability Leaves Communities Behind

Circular economy has become a reassuring phrase.

It signals progress, responsibility, and innovation. It promises a future where waste disappears, resources circulate, and growth becomes sustainable. But beneath the optimism sits a quieter question, one that is asked far less often: Circular for who?

When good ideas travel badly

Circular economy frameworks did not emerge in a vacuum. They were shaped in contexts with strong institutions, capital access, regulatory enforcement, and stable infrastructure. When these models travel, especially into African contexts, they often arrive as complete packages: technologies, metrics, funding conditions, and implementation timelines.

The intention is usually positive. The outcome is more mixed. Too often, circular projects are transplanted rather than translated.

Sustainability without ownership

Many circular economy initiatives focus on material flows while paying less attention to power flows.

Who owns the technology?
Who controls the data?
Who captures the value once waste is transformed into a product?

In practice, circular systems can still be extractive,  only cleaner. Waste is sourced locally. Value is processed elsewhere. Profits accrue upstream. Communities remain service providers, not stakeholders. The loop may be closed materially, but it remains open socially.

When metrics replace context

Policy frameworks rely on indicators: diversion rates, recovery percentages, emissions avoided. These metrics are useful. They are also incomplete.

They rarely ask:

• whether systems are locally governable

• whether skills and ownership remain in place after pilots end

• whether communities gain agency, not just compliance

A project can meet every sustainability target and still weaken local capacity. This is not failure by accident. It is failure by design omission.

Circularity is not neutral

Circular economy is often presented as technical, a matter of optimisation, efficiency, and innovation.

It is not.

It redistributes value. It reshapes labour. It determines who participates and who is displaced. These are political outcomes, whether acknowledged or not. When circular systems are imposed without local control, they risk reproducing the same dynamics they claim to replace, extraction, dependency, and asymmetry, only with greener language.

Africa is not a testing ground

African cities and communities are frequently framed as ideal sites for piloting circular solutions: high waste volumes, urgent need, flexible regulation. But urgency should not justify imbalance.

Innovation that relies on weak bargaining power is not innovation, it is opportunism. Circular economy projects that succeed because governance is weak should make us uneasy, not impressed.

What an honest circular economy requires

A circular economy that works in African contexts must be more demanding, not less.

It must ask:

• Who owns the system after donors leave?

• Can it be governed locally?

• Does it redistribute value or merely repackage it?

• Are communities participants, or inputs?

These questions slow projects down. That is precisely why they matter.

Closing loops, and opening choices

Circular economy remains a powerful idea. But ideas do not implement themselves, people do. If sustainability is to mean more than technical efficiency, it must engage with ownership, agency, and long-term governance. Otherwise, we risk building systems that are circular in material terms, but linear in power. And that is not the future we are trying to design.