Toward SCircularOps: A Stakeholder-Integrated Lifecycle for Engineering Circular Economy Systems in the Twin Transition

Source abstract

Abstract While the twin transition increasingly dominates the public debate, managerial tools and methods to engineer sustainable and circular projects have been lacking. On one side, the authors dispose of abstract frameworks of sustainability goals such as the Planetary Boundaries that fail to provide concrete operationalization strategies. On the other, the authors have promising technological solutions and project ideas that remain difficult to link to the concrete expectations, needs, and motivations of the stakeholders involved in sustainability initiatives. This chapter introduces Stakeholder-Integrated Circular Operations (SCircularOps), a lifecycle paradigm designed to bridge this gap. SCircularOps provides a structured yet adaptive engineering logic that unites three complementary communities of practice: stakeholders, who embody the socioeconomic and ecological realities of a system; circular economy consultants and engineers, who structure sustainability objectives and model dependencies; and technology integrators, who deploy and maintain enabling digital infrastructures such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain. Through this collaboration, sustainability becomes a continuous and participatory process. At its methodological core, SCircularOps is aimed to embed Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) into the domain of circular economy systems engineering. It enables the formal modeling of stakeholder dependencies, circular flows, and value exchanges to create a system that can be simulated, evaluated, and improved over time. The paradigm is instantiated through two complementary frameworks (Circulise and Circulise4LCE) and applied in to a reforestation project in the Congo Basin called Fanyatu. The case illustrates how a cryptocurrency can be backed by a CO2-absorbing forest, aligning ecological regeneration, social empowerment, and digital transparency in a self-reinforcing socio-technical system.