A “win-win formula:” environment and profit in circular economy narratives of value

Event Details:

Date and Time: Thursday, 23 June, 11:30am - 1:00pm

Location: online via zoom. Please RSVP to e.blight@westernsydney.edu.au and the zoom link will be sent on Thursday before the Seminar.

Presenter: Dr Tomás Ariztía

Chair: Professor Juan Salazar

Discussant: Professor Paul James

Abstract

How is value defined, mobilized, and assessed in green circular economy startups?

Dr Tomás Ariztía, Director of the School of Sociology at Universidad Diego Portales, discusses a recent paper, co-authored with Felipe Araneda, that seeks to unpack circular economy narratives of value.  Drawing on recent debates about value and valuation in economic life and empirical evidence collected from interviews with green entrepreneurs, the paper shows how value is organized around the “win-win formula”: a narrative plot in which economic and environmental gains reinforce each other.

Following the spirited debates on that marked ICS' 10 year anniversary, Dr Ariztía's presentation attends to one of the critical challenges raised by Thursday afternoon's panel: how to respond to capitalism's desire to subordinate even existential environmental crisis to prevailing logics of value extraction and business opportunity. As if echoing the exact terms of that discussion, Ariztía and Felipe suggest "a critical challenge when examining sustainable transition frameworks from a social science perspective is the need to foster more transformative forms of environmental action, going beyond the existing dominant market-oriented forms of framing environmental problems and solutions". Professors Juan Salazar and Paul James takes up chair and discussant duties to work through with Dr Ariztía and the ICS audience how this challenge might be met.