Who Benefits from the Circular Economy? A Systematic Scoping Review of Social Economy Actors, Livelihoods, and Policy in the Global South

Abstract

The circular economy (CE) has gained substantial policy traction, yet its social dimensions — particularly the roles, contributions, and vulnerabilities of social economy actors in the Global South—remain insufficiently mapped. This systematic scoping review examines how waste-pickers, cooperatives, social enterprises, and informal sector workers are positioned within CE transitions, adopting a multi-level analytical framework spanning micro-level livelihood outcomes, meso-level institutional and governance mechanisms, and macro-level CE system performance. Searches across OpenAlex and Crossref yielded 39,978 records; after deduplication (28,432 unique records), followed by automated pre-screening and dual-author manual title-and-abstract screening of all retained records against the eligibility criteria, 1,056 English-language articles, reviews, and book chapters were included for computational thematic analysis, with coding reliability assessed against independent manual coding of a random validation sample. The literature has grown exponentially since 2020, with inclusion and justice themes increasing by over 1,500%. Waste-pickers are the most documented actor (237 records, 22.4%), while women’s groups (0.3%) and youth (0.9%) remain almost invisible. A pronounced policy–livelihood disconnect emerges: 63.4% of studies address governance, but only 21.9% simultaneously examine livelihood outcomes. Macro-level CE performance metrics — resource efficiency, cleaner production, and material recovery rates — are rarely connected to the social economy actors who generate them. The review identifies five critical gaps and proposes a multi-level research agenda integrating social justice, institutional analysis, and system-level sustainability to guide an inclusive, socially restorative circular economy.