Many resources are becoming depleted, and waste is a global issue. For accomplishing sustainable growth, the European Commission set the objective for achieving a circular economy in 2050. Rijkswaterstaat pushed this ambition even further, wanting to be circular in 2030. In the province Noord-Holland, the municipalities Bergen, Uitgeest, Castricum and Heiloo work together in the organization called ‘de BUCH’. They have the ambition to be the leading municipalities in circular economy. For their transition, they questioned the ‘Delft Design Lab Participatory City Making Lab’ at the University of Technology Delft: how to change the norm behaviour of their citizens towards circular norm behaviour at a local level? To answer this question, first the context was explored on the topics of waste, circular economy and behaviour change. After that the ambitious question of the BUCH is researched by researching how the citizens in the BUCH can be facilitated to the transition towards a circular economy. This is researched by 1) an intervention, 2) a competitor analysis on circular practices, 3) a survey on the behaviour of citizens in the BUCH, and 4) multiple semi-structured in-depth interviews. The key insight of the research is that a large proportion of the citizens in the BUCH is motivated to practice circular behaviour. However, the opportunity to do that is experienced as low. Various designs for those opportunities were made and evaluated. While operationalizing these designs, there was the critical insight: a circular initiative network is missing that brings together the ambitious and motivated citizens in the BUCH. This resulted in the final design: De BUCH rond maken: Samen doen we het. Consisting out of: •A Circular Initiative Network administrator: This person functions and acts as the network administrator of circular initiatives in the BUCH. The person enables to establish novel relationships between people and groups of people, which catalyses value to emerge between those people. •Initiative makers package: The package is a tool that citizens can request. It contains the essential steps to explain a circular initiative idea from multiple facets. The tool than helps to have conversations with other people, helping to operationalize the idea. •Do together: This is in essence a collaborating process. In order to catalyse this process, it is key to follow certain principles and have a certain mindset. Also, the role that the Circular initiative network administrator takes in such collaborative effort is key. The final design also contains a plan with key actions to follow, in order to facilitate the citizens in their transition towards a circular economy. A key action point is the communication towards the BUCH citizens, as having communication from multiple various sources will help in changing the norm. The design showed promising results in a creative session with initiative leaders and citizens from the BUCH municipalities. It is recommended that the final design is put further into a pilot for testing and development. This to, while doing that together, operationalize the transition of the BUCH citizens towards a circular economy.

Sustainable innovation and transitions are increasingly gaining traction within academia, industries, and policymakers. Despite the research efforts, sustaining innovation and operationalizing transitions still remains a barely explored field. The pragmatic step from understanding towards doing is often not made explicit in the literature. In fact, it results in an unclear and vague grip on how to operationalize these understandings, or differently put on how to make this understanding pragmatic. In the current article, we conducted an integrative literature review using human-centeredness lenses that informs the so-called ‘Human-Dimension’ framework. We argue that adding the Human-Dimension to the existing models for analysis, such as the Multi-Level Perspective framework, might clarify the different meanings that emerge within the network of actors in a transition, and knowing how to translate those individual meanings towards a collective construction of meaning might be enabled. To illustrate the framework’s contribution, we applied it to the context of a local sustainable development project. The results show how human-centeredness could serve as a domain to make the Human-Dimension of sustainable transitions actionable.

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