Who Benefits from Circular Economy Transitions? The Question Most Programmes Are Not Asking
The circular economy has a measurement problem. Not the kind that gets talked about at conferences, the difficulty of tracking material flows, calculating circularity rates, or attributing emissions reductions to specific interventions. That kind of measurement challenge is real, and the sector is getting better at it.
The problem I am talking about is different. It is the question that most circular economy measurement frameworks were not designed to ask: who benefits from these transitions, and who gets left behind?
What we measure and what we miss
Circular economy programmes have become increasingly sophisticated at demonstrating environmental outcomes. Tonnes of material diverted from landfill, percentage of recycled content in a product line, reduction in virgin resource use across a supply chain. These are meaningful metrics and they matter.
But they tell you nothing about the distribution of benefit. A supply chain transition can show impressive circularity gains while the workers at the bottom of that chain, those in informal waste collection, in low-wage repair and remanufacturing roles, in communities living alongside processing facilities, experience no improvement in their conditions. In some cases, formalising informal circular economy activities actively harms the people who depend on them, by removing their access to materials or replacing informal livelihoods with formal employment that excludes the most marginalised.
The environmental headline number stays positive. The social story underneath it does not.
Why the gap exists
This is not a failure of intent. Most organisations working on circular transitions genuinely care about equity and inclusion. The gap is structural: the measurement frameworks being used were designed to answer environmental questions. They were not designed to ask social ones.
GEDSI (gender equity, disability, and social inclusion) tends to appear in circular economy programmes as a reporting requirement rather than an analytical commitment. There is a section in the final report. There are disaggregated participation figures. There is a commitment, somewhere in the theory of change, to ensuring that the transition is just and inclusive.
But when you look at the evidence being generated, it rarely tells you whether that commitment is being kept. It tells you who participated. It does not tell you whether their participation changed anything about their access to resources, their position in the value chain, or their ability to shape the transition that is being designed around them.
What asking the question actually requires
Genuinely asking who benefits from a circular transition requires building that question into how you measure from the start, not adding it as a layer afterward.
In practice this means your theory of change needs to be explicit about which groups stand to gain from the transition and which face risks of exclusion or harm. It means your indicators need to go beyond participation and track changes in access, power, and economic position. It means your data collection needs to include the perspectives of people at the bottom of circular value chains, not just the organisations managing them. And it means your learning processes need to include specific moments where the social evidence is examined alongside the environmental evidence, rather than reported separately in a GEDSI annex that nobody reads alongside the main findings.
None of this is technically difficult. What it requires is the decision, made early and kept consistently, that inclusion is an analytical commitment rather than a reporting one.
The transferable lesson
The organisations I see getting this right are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated MEL systems. They are the ones who started with a different question. Not "how do we demonstrate that our circular transition is inclusive?" but "what would we need to know to understand whether this transition is genuinely working for the people it is supposed to serve?"
That shift in question changes everything that follows.
If you are working on a circular economy programme and you are not sure whether your current measurement approach is set up to answer that question, the GEDSI Diagnostic at tullysconsult.com/resources is a useful starting point. It takes about 15 minutes and gives you a picture of where your system sits across four dimensions: design intent, evidence quality, analysis depth, and learning and use.
