| Abstract |
The textile industry's resource use, waste, and emissions have led to severe scrutiny, worsened by fast fashion's rise, making clothing disposable. The circular economy (CE) offers a solution to address these issues but achieving circular fashion requires systemic and comprehensive stakeholder engagement across the value chain. Current research often overlooks wider stakeholders beyond internal company members, neglecting calls to incorporate a systems perspective in CE transitions. Moreover, the potential of stakeholder engagement for social learning, where stakeholders mutually share and acquire knowledge, remains largely untapped. To this end, this paper provides a systematic methodology of stakeholder engagement based on an empirical setting of transition towards CE in fashion textiles in London. It entails identifying contexts, aligning stakeholders' actions, negotiating interventions, and communicating insights effectively. Based on the learnings from an empirical stakeholder engagement process, findings suggest a lack of alignment in the understanding of the CE concept across actors, that is underpinned by a fragmented knowledge of the overall value chain, often leading to also fragmented siloed policy approaches. While this paper uses fashion textiles as an illustrative case study, the processled framework is largely applicable across different areas of the CE transition. |