Training and Skills Development for the Circular Economy in the Current Geopolitical Context: A Bottom-Up Design Focused on Community Need and Social Enterprise

Abstract

The rise of circular economic thinking in academic literature can be traced back to Boulding’s work on open and closed systems in the 1960s. Since then, the Circular Economy (CE) has been developed as a model to facilitate environmentally sustainable production and consumption, as well as economic and social prosperity. Recent geopolitical destabilising events such as Covid-19, and the war in Ukraine, have further increased the urgency of finding practical solutions to the climate crisis. In this paper we will explore industrial transformation, and how it can best adapt to a more circular and greener landscape from the perspective of economic activity and social prosperity. Training, or retraining of the workforce with the new skills they will need must be targeted and part of a unifying strategy, locally, nationally, and ultimately, globally. We present a conceptual paper on this theme and present initial work carried out to co-design and deliver training to disadvantaged individuals; working with local authorities, community charities and social enterprises and focusing on the grassroots of the drive to promote and establish the system wide changes needed to shift from linear to circular economic practice.