EU textile industry has been undergoing rapid circular transition driven by large-scale circular textile policy implementation. The circular transition is mobilized by scaling multi-stakeholder circular clothing ecosystems that engage diverse stakeholders such as nonprofit charities, profit-making retailers, public actors like municipalities, as well as recyclers and knowledge hubs. Archetypes of these ecosystems are determined by their contrasting logics, such as profit-making, knowledge- and social value- creation, and national competitiveness, thus making idiosyncratic combinations of resources, capabilities and relationships. This gives rise to tensions and conflicts when coordinating across ecosystems, as well as “within” them while continuously updating and coordinating across organizational borders, thus hindering further scaling. 

The purpose of OCulUs is to understand and explain how circular policies are influencing the development of circular clothing ecosystems, and how such ecosystems can be orchestrated and scaled more effectively. OCulUs combines the lenses of market based-, stakeholder- and orchestration theories in a multiple case study of 5 ecosystems with different logics that operate in Sweden, but also include partners from Europe and Global South. OCulUs creates understanding of how different circular clothing ecosystems are shaped by external policies, interact with each other, and can potentially scale by organizing their resources and capabilities. 

Societal benefits

OCulUs will contribute towards an ecosystemic understanding of the used clothing industry in circular economy context. This way it has the potential to reduce negative and unintended consequences of operations carried out by stakeholders in circular businesses and supply chains, and improve overall circular performance of the textile industry, in terms of improving share of collected and reusable clothes and quality/value of recycled clothes among others. By mobilizing circular ecosystems, the scaling impact can be maximised. On one hand, circular ecosystems have more potential to influence change in consumers’ mindset to embrace circularity by impacting deeply the socio-cultural roots, on the other hand well-functioning circular ecosystems can inform policy development both in EU and in its trading partners, to enable bottom-up changes, thus reducing practice-policy gap. Enabling ecosystem level stakeholder orchestration can reduce “value destruction”, i.e. inherent loss of value of one stakeholder due to actions of another. This incentivizes developing new ecosystem structures (working processes, governance mechanisms, offering) that enable just and scaled circular transition. 

Partners and collaborations

OCulUs is a collaboration among researchers from 3 Swedish universities: University of Borås (Swedish School of Textiles, THS), Linköping University (LIU) and University of Gävle (HIG). Embedded in these research environments, OCulUs combines their unique competences, that is THS’s participatory research on circular textile economy interactively with global textile industry actors, with solid theory-driven applied supply chain knowledge at LIU and HIG. OCulUs also breeds active partnership with Ellen Macarthur Foundation (EMF), a global change-maker in circular economy, and leading many circular textile policy forums. EMF provides unique strength to OCulUs by creating impact pathways for the research results or both practice and policy by coordinating Delphi seminar and focus groups. In addition, OCulUs will involve around 25 organizations from Sweden, Europe and their Global South partners as co-developers and study objects in case studies and workshops.