Event Information
The next speaker in the EEU seminar series is Ellen Palm. Ellen is a PhD student in Environmental and Energy Systems Studies at Lund University. Ellen's research focuses on sustainability issues around production and consumption of plastic materials.
On Monday, 12.05-13.00 (Stockholm time), Ellen will present us a paper analyzing the European Commission's Plastics Strategy. You can find the abstract below.
We will organize the seminar in hybrid format, taking place in Malmstensvåningen (building A, 6th floor) and Zoom simultaneously. Hope to see many of you there in person or virtually!
To access the seminar by zoom, please email ville.inkinen@economics.gu.se to get the link and password
Abstract
The European Union (EU) aspires to be an important global agenda-setter on how to treat and regulate the growing plastics problem. We present an analysis of the plastic policy narratives shaping European plastics governance, in particular through the European Commission’s Plastics Strategy. Our aim is to first uncover the policy narratives at play, and then examine how actors make use of those narratives through strategic construction. Based on interviews with key stakeholders and document analysis, we identify four narratives: fossil feedstock dependency, resource inefficiency, pollution, and toxicity. We find that the resource inefficiency and pollution narratives figure most prominently in European plastics governance, and that the circular economy is being advanced as a policy solution that cuts across the different narratives. However, surface agreement on the need for ‘circularity’ hides deeper-lying ideological divisions over what exactly the circular economy means and the different directions this implies for plastics governance.