The Scottish Government RESAS funded interdisciplinary project Circular Economy: People, Behaviours and Skills led by James Hutton Institute colleagues aims to develop the evidence base to support policymakers in promoting behaviour change, necessary to accelerate the green recovery through the development of a circular economy (CE) in Scotland. BioSS’ role in the project has focused on the development of a circular behaviour scale and a causality framework.

Development of a Circular Behaviour Scale

Graciela Martinez has contributed to the development of a statistically sound psychometric scale to assess which behaviours individuals exhibit that are most relevant to circular economy policy, and how we can measure them accurately. Through an iterative process of selection of scale items from the literature, general public opinion elicitation, factor analysis and validation via a second general public survey, a 34-item Circular Behaviours Scale was created that detected nine key types of behaviour for CE policy (summarised in Figure 1).

Figure 1.  Key types of behaviour for Circular Economy policy.

Causal inference within the Circular Economy behaviours context

Altea Lorenzo-Arribas has worked on a causality framework that aims to reflect a more comprehensive picture of the causal relationships in the patterns of CE behaviours. The framework combines statistical methods with Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), both informed by qualitative and quantitative data and making use of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to represent causality visually.  With an aim that, by assessing the impact of interventions more efficiently, policies that are likely to have a positive effect on the environment could be prioritised.

Figure 2. Preparing a ‘toy’ Agent Based Model. Photo credit: CE project group

Open science: The project’s protocols, preregistrations, and data can be found on OSF | Circular economy: People, behaviours and skills

Further reading: Colley, K., Hague, A., Chen, J., Lorenzo-Arribas, A., Wooldridge, T., Somervail, P., Martínez Sánchez, G., Assefa, S., Bender, F., & Craig, T. (2024). Putting people at the centre of the circle: An agenda for behavioural research on the circular economy. Frontiers in Sustainability, 5, 1423912. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2024.1423912