“Our Best Enemy”: Right to Repair and the Politics of Agonistic Circularity
研究欧盟维修权政策辩论中不同群体间的冲突如何促进相互学习和多元修复生态系统的形成，提出“竞争性循环”概念，挑战循环经济中过度关注合作与趋同的现有分析。
Circular economy (CE) is both contesting the status quo and a contested idea, for which many competing understandings and implementations exist. And yet, analyses of the role of social conflicts and pluralism are rare in the CE literature, overly focused on convergence and cooperation. To address this research gap, we draw on Mouffe’s “agonistic pluralism” political theory. Empirically, the study focuses on the interplay between different groups of actors in shaping the right to repair (R2R) policy debate in the European Union (EU) context. Deploying a process method consisting of secondary data and semistructured interviews, our analysis shows that productive conflicts between the R2R campaign and manufacturers did foster mutual learning, unlikely convergences, and a more pluralist European repair ecosystem. We call this dynamic “agonistic circularity.” We highlight the limits of both “harmonious” and “antagonistic” circularity, outlining a pluralist integrative model of CE politics.