Mapping Circular Economy and the Role of Design in Portugal

After a long period of maturation, the European Commission approved an action plan for Circular Economy in 2015 (EC, 2015). The plan was received and approved by the EU countries, who followed up with national plans. Once the policies have been set, it is also important to recognize the concrete changes they are triggering in the socio-economic context, and, from the perspective of a designer, to understand the possible role of design in such change. This sug-gests two research questions that can be analyzed in relation to CE initiatives in Portugal. The Portuguese action plan sets the actions for CE at the macro, meso, and micro levels, thus including actions that concern broad strategic and cultural changes (at the macro level), and identify key sectors (at the meso level) and local actions (at the micro level). The authors of this paper analyzed the circular econ-omy initiatives in Portugal, that have been recorded in a database issued by the Circular Economy Club. The shift from a linear to a circular economy culture and practice can be read through a classification of different initiatives (Alaerts et al., 2019), which helps in recognizing and qualifying the dimension of change. The analytical framework proposed in this paper also considers a Multi-Level Perspec-tive (Geels and Schot, 2007), which allows the inclusion of some initiatives that could not be framed in Alaerts’ classification. The change generated by the new policy extends designers’ role to new functions: while the potential for circularity in product design has been largely assimilated into designers’ activity, the new rules and the panorama of the ongoing initiatives suggest a possible critical role
for designers to infrastructuring change. The inclusion of design in policy actions and their role in translating policy actions into concrete initiatives at the local level is something relatively new, that opens new perspectives and new challenges.