The transition towards a circular economy requires a new capacity to anticipate future resource systems and translate that knowledge and foresight into industrial development, investment decisions and regional competitiveness. Planning, understood not as a mechanism of central control but as the reduction of uncertainty and the coordination of future economic development, may be one of the main missing institutional capabilities of the current circular economy discourse. We argue that circular regional planning boards could be institutional forms solving exactly that.
Planning as an Economic Function
Planning has acquired an uneasy reputation in economic debates, as it is frequently associated with centralised command and control systems, state intervention and attempts to replace market dynamics and tacit knowledge with administrative and bureaucratic decision-making. Consequently, planning and markets are often portrayed as opposing ways of organising economic activity. This interpretation, however, overlooks the reality that every successful market economy already relies extensively on planning (see, for instance, companies’ investment decisions and the optimisation of supply chains).
When planning is not understood as centralised decision-making, it is then better framed as the process through which uncertainty is reduced sufficiently for long-term economic decisions to become possible. This broader understanding of planning resonates with recent work which argues that sustainability transitions increasingly require forms of ex-ante coordination capable of complementing traditional market allocation (Genovese et al., 2024). In this perspective, planning can be understood as a mechanism for reducing uncertainty where long-term investments, systemic transformations and multiple interdependent actors must be coordinated over extended time horizons.
The circular economy fundamentally changes the nature of this planning challenge. While the linear economy organises production primarily around the extraction and processing of primary resources, circular systems largely depend upon anticipating future secondary resource flows. This means understanding not only how much demand will exist in the future, but also when products will reach the end of their useful lives, where valuable materials will become available, what condition they will be in, and how they can most effectively be reintegrated into productive use. Ex-ante planning, therefore, represents a necessary and required mechanism for organising future resource systems.
Planning Secondary Resource Systems
For much of the post-war period, primary resource supply enjoyed a degree of predictability shaped by long-term mining contracts, stable trade routes, and relatively predictable demand growth. That era has certainly ended. Geopolitical fragmentation, export restrictions, and price volatility have made primary systems less certain than they once were. Yet, such uncertainty is of a precise nature: extraction rates can be accelerated or deferred in response to prices, and known reserves provide stocks to plan around.
Secondary resource systems, by contrast, face uncertainty about timing, location, quality, and aggregation. These variables that are not determined by market prices alone, but by complex product lifecycles, consumer behaviour, and collection infrastructures. Businesses considering investments in refurbishment, remanufacturing or advanced recycling frequently face questions that remain difficult to answer. Will sufficient quantities of resources become available, and when? Where will they appear and how easily can they be aggregated? What quality will they have? Will processes achieve a level of scale able to make it cost-effective?
These uncertainties represent one of the most significant barriers to scaling circular business models. If secondary resources are expected to substitute an increasing share of primary resource extraction, they must eventually provide a comparable degree of predictability. Investors, entrepreneurs and industrial actors require confidence that future resource flows will be sufficiently stable to justify investments in facilities, technologies, logistics networks and specialised capabilities.
By reducing uncertainty surrounding future material availability, planning would play a key role in lowering investment risks and creating the confidence necessary for entirely new circular markets to emerge. One could therefore argue that while the linear economy plans around primary resource systems, the circular economy must increasingly learn to plan around secondary resource systems.
The Challenges Around Planning May No Longer Be Technical
Until relatively recently, such planning would have been extraordinarily difficult. Estimating future resource flows and stocks at territorial scale would have required enormous quantities of information, along with analytical and computational capacity. The exercise would have been expensive, highly uncertain and practically impossible to update continuously.
Today, however, the situation may be changing susbstantially as the cost of acquiring relevant information and deploy them for planning is decreasing. A variety of institutional and technological developments are supporting in that. On one hand, we large volumes of relevant information already exist across both public and private sectors. Sales data indicate which products are entering the economy, statistics about product lifetimes can be confidently estimated, and the large-scale deployment of Digital Product Passports will decrese the costs of acquiring information about products’ relevant parameters (such as composition and condition).
On the other hand, technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, digital twins, predictive analytics and increasingly sophisticated modelling techniques make it possible to integrate diverse datasets and data points into robust scenarios describing future resource systems; such techniques are regularly used by large multinational corporations in order to plan their extremely complex supply chains with accuracy and precision. As data availability expands, the use of existing data improves and the computing capacity to interpret and deploy these data grows, we may possess the technical tools to enable planning at scale and to enable better strategic decisions.
Circular Planning is Inherently Territorial
Although many circular economy policies are formulated at national or European level, circular resource systems are fundamentally territorial.
Materials become available in particular places. Industrial capabilities develop in specific places. Logistics infrastructure, labour markets, universities and business ecosystems are all geographically embedded. At the same time, transport costs, industrial specialisation and existing infrastructure strongly influence which circular opportunities become economically viable.
The regional scale therefore represents a particularly appropriate level for planning because it combines sufficient economic critical mass with detailed knowledge of local industrial ecosystems. Regional actors are often best positioned to understand existing capabilities, identify strategic gaps and recognise opportunities for industrial symbiosis, entrepreneurship and cluster development.
If a region knows that substantial quantities of photovoltaic panels, lithium batteries, composite materials or construction components will become available over the coming decade, this information becomes economically valuable long before those products reach the end of their useful lives. It creates an opportunity to ask a fundamentally different set of questions. Which industrial capabilities should be developed? Which firms could be attracted? Which processing technologies are likely to become economically viable? Which research competences should be strengthened? Which infrastructure investments should be prioritised?
Anticipating future material availability enables regions to move beyond reactive waste management towards proactive industrial strategy. Instead of asking how future waste streams should be managed, regional actors can begin asking how anticipated resource systems might strengthen existing industrial clusters, support entirely new industries, attract investment and improve long-term competitiveness.
Regional Planning Boards as Coordination Institutions
If planning for the circular economy is becoming both increasingly necessary and technically feasible, an institutional question naturally follows. Who should develop and update such scenarios and suggest, or even better take decisions based on this evidence? More importantly, how could businesses, researchers, public authorities, investors and sector associations be connected around a shared understanding of future resource systems?
One possible response would be the establishment of Circular Regional Planning Boards, similar to the established regional planning boards which oversee spatial planning.
Such boards would function as institutions for negotiated democratic coordination, bringing together businesses, public authorities, research organisations, financial actors and civil society around a shared understanding of future regional resource systems. Building on the broader concept of ex-ante coordination proposed by Genovese et al. (2024), these boards would act to reduce uncertainty and enable investments that individual actors would struggle to coordinate independently.
As a key task, they would map existing secondary resource flows against regional industrial capabilities, identifying opportunities for industrial symbiosis that individual firms rarely have the visibility to recognise. Using digital dashboards fed by real-time data on material availability, processing capacity, logistics networks, and upcoming decommissioning schedules, the boards would help match secondary resource suppliers with potential users, flag bottlenecks before they become binding, and track progress toward circularity targets.
This dashboard would serve not only as an intelligence tool for the boards themselves, but as a transparent, accessible platform for businesses, investors, and public authorities to coordinate their own decisions. In short, the boards would act as the industrial strategy arm of regional circular transitions, not supplanting markets, but catalysing them through foresight, matchmaking, and targeted public action where markets alone fall short.
Clearly, the boards would not allocate capital, set prices, or select technologies. However, they would not content themselves with producing forecasts and ‘hoping for the best’. For instance, where forward scenarios reveal critical infrastructure gaps (for instance, a regional shortage of battery disassembly capacity or plastics sorting facilities), and where private investment consistently fails to materialise due to coordination problems, long payback periods, or fragmented ownership, the boards would have both the authority and the responsibility to recommend public intervention.
That could take the form of direct public investment, public-private partnerships, procurement commitments, or regulatory. The boards would not manage these investments directly (that would remain with development banks, infrastructure agencies, or private operators) but they would provide the strategic rationale and the democratic legitimacy for public money to be deployed.
Through such institutions, regions can actively develop the conditions through which future circular markets can evolve.
Conclusion
The circular transition requires new institutional capabilities capable of anticipating future resource systems, reducing uncertainty and coordinating investments across multiple actors and territories.
Regional Circular Planning Boards represent one possible institutional response to this challenge. By themselves, Regional Circular Planning Boards are only an institutional container whose effectiveness ultimately depends on how it is designed: how decisions are made, how different interests are represented and balanced, how participation is organised, how legitimacy and accountability are ensured, and how it supports democratic and equitable regional development.
These governance questions deserve much deeper consideration than can be addressed here, but they will ultimately determine whether such institutions become effective mechanisms for coordination or simply another administrative layer.
Prof. Andrea Genovese
Andrea Genovese is a critical supply chain management scholar. His work explores the intersections of circular economy, ecological planning, post-growth transitions, and the political economy of supply chains. He currently works as a full professor at the University of Perugia (Italy) and is a visiting professor at the University of Salford (UK).
Emanuele Di Francesco
Emanuele Di Francesco is Senior Manager, Communications and Partnerships at the World Resources Forum.