Survivalist circularity: theorising fragility and displacement within necessity-driven circular economies

1 Introduction

The circular economy has been identified as a key paradigm for sustainable production and consumption. Its main goal is to substitute linear extraction-use-disposal systems with systems that retain the value of products, components and materials through maintenance, reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, repurposing, and recycling (Kirchherr et al., 2017; Geissdoerfer et al., 2017; Reike et al., 2018). This ambition has generated significant literatures on business models, product design, regulation, infrastructure, value-retention options and measurement.

Much of this literature is about transitions: how firms, governments and consumers can actively design more circular systems. This view is understandable as influential CE frameworks were developed in high throughput industrial economies where replacement is often easier than repair and where closing or slowing down loops often requires deliberate intervention (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017; Corvellec et al., 2022). It is less useful in cases where value-retention practices exist for reasons other than environmental intention.

In many materially constrained urban contexts, including but not limited to the Global South, repair, reuse, second-hand exchange and informal recovery are routine components of everyday economies. Research into the informal sector has long documented considerable material recovery and livelihood generation (Wilson et al., 2006; Scheinberg et al., 2010; Velis, 2017). More recent CE scholarship explicitly recognises forms of circularity embedded in low-income and informal markets (Korsunova et al., 2022; Dewick et al., 2022). Household repair research also indicates that affordability, access to spare parts, and value recovery can be central to repair decisions (Habib and Dewulf, 2025).

These practices do not always show up in formal CE strategies, institutional readiness assessments, or administrative data. This is as much an observation problem as it is an implementation one: a context may have weak formal CE institutions, but still sustain consequential value-retention through households, artisans, secondary markets and informal recovery networks (Saidani et al., 2019; Dewick et al., 2022). The formal institutionalisation and the material practice should therefore be measured as related but distinct phenomena.

The central theoretical question is therefore not whether economic necessity can produce circular behaviour. That point has already been established most directly from low-income urban communities in Brazil, India and Tanzania, where the necessity-driven circular economy was introduced (Korsunova et al., 2022). Later work has widened the institutional and ecosystem implications of necessity-driven contexts (Derks et al., 2024). The question posed here is dynamic: when circular practice is contingent upon a binding constraint, what happens as that constraint relaxes, and under what conditions can its material outcomes persist without the deprivation that created them?

This paper develops survivalist circularity to answer that narrower question. The construct is embedded in, rather than superseding, necessity-driven CE: it isolates the subset where a binding material or livelihood constraint is causally central, and persistence is therefore counterfactually dependent on that constraint. A new construct is justified only if this more stringent criterion leads to predictions that the broader antecedent does not. The proposed added value is fourfold: to specify a household- and livelihood-level causal mechanism; to theorise fragility, displacement and institutional substitution as constraint changes; to separate institutionalisation measures from material-practice measures; and to translate the mechanism into falsifiable propositions and policy sequencing. The label denotes a causal regime and not a place, income group, occupation or identity (Korsunova et al., 2022).

1.1 Scope and approach to the conceptual synthesis

This is a conceptual synthesis that produces theory rather than a systematic review. To render the synthesis transparent, the literature is organised around six bodies of work selected because each informs a specific element of the construct: (i) CE definitions and resource value-retention options; (ii) necessity-driven and informal CE; (iii) empirical research on repair, reuse and informal recovery; (iv) sustainable-livelihoods and resource-constraint frameworks; (v) frugal innovation, informality, legitimacy and alternative motivations; and (vi) CE measurement, formalisation and just-transition scholarship. The anchor is the established need-driven CE concept; adjacent constructs are included if they offer a rival explanation, a boundary condition, or an operational measure. In this sense, case evidence is used in an illustrative manner to establish plausibility and derive testable propositions, not for prevalence estimation or validation of the propositions (Korsunova et al., 2022; Reike et al., 2018; Dewick et al., 2022).

Section 2 revisits CE theory’s transition and institutional emphases, acknowledging existing necessity-driven CE scholarship. Section 3 delineates material practice from formal institutionalisation and intersperses grounded illustrations. Section 4 defines survivalist circularity, including its livelihood basis, mechanism, value-retention logic and boundaries. Section 5 presents five falsifiable propositions and their causal tests. Section 6 describes the two-axis model and its trajectories. Section 7 discusses the theoretical, measurement and policy implications and an empirical research agenda.

The manuscript is organised so that each component of scholarly rigour can be independently evaluated rather than assumed on the basis of the paper’s conceptual nature. The research question and hypotheses are clearly stated (Section 1) and formalised as five falsifiable propositions with associated tests and refutation conditions (Section 5). “The synthesis approach is described explicitly: the literature domains considered, the logic for including adjacent constructs, and the boundary conditions of the construct are set out above and in Sections 4.4 and 6.3.” The argument is built on six identified bodies of scholarship–circular economy and value-retention theory, necessity-driven and informal CE, empirical repair/recovery research, sustainable-livelihoods frameworks, frugal-innovation and legitimacy scholarship, and CE measurement and just-transition literature–rather than a single strand. Presentation uses conventional structural signposting (numbered sections, an explicit roadmap, tables and a figure) to make a dense theoretical argument legible. Authorship, funding, data-availability and conflict-of-interest disclosures are included in the final sections in accordance with the journal’s editorial and ethical policies.

2 The transition and institutional bias in circular economy theory

2.1 The intentionality assumption

Kirchherr et al. (2017) found substantial variation in scope and emphasis when analysing 114 CE definitions. Their review also reflects the highly normative and programmatic character of CE discourse: definitions usually describe what economic systems should do to reduce, reuse, recycle, restore or retain value. Similarly, Geissdoerfer et al. (2017) describe CE as a sustainability paradigm concerned with intentional system transformation. This does not imply that an unintended act of repair or reuse is materially non-circular. It means that the dominant theoretical language is better developed for intentional transition than for explaining why materially similar practices emerge under constraint.

This is an important distinction because similar practices may have different determinants. Repair can be a reflection of environmental values, expected cost savings, product attachment, habit, thrift, regulatory incentives, entrepreneurial opportunity, lack of replacement income or combinations of these motives (Habib and Dewulf, 2025; Shepherd et al., 2020). A practice-based taxonomy can identify the act without identifying the causal regime. The argument here thus treats motivation and constraint as empirical variables, rather than inferring them from a circular outcome.

This leaves a theoretical gap, which is less wide than a strong critique of intentionality would imply. In general CE theory does not preclude unintentional circular behaviour, necessity-driven CE already demonstrates that economic necessity can support value retention (Korsunova et al., 2022). The remaining gap is the relative weakness of theory for distinguishing practices by the conditions that generate and sustain them, and especially for predicting what happens when those conditions change.

2.2 The firm and the state as the locus of action

A related concern is the locus of intervention. Many CE approaches are aimed at companies and public bodies through circular business models, product-service systems, design for disassembly, remanufacturing, reverse logistics, regulation, procurement and extended producer responsibility (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017; Kirchherr et al., 2017). These are legitimate and necessary areas of action, but institution-centred transition narratives may portray formally organised actors as the main producers of circularity.

Households and informal workers are not missing from CE research. Recent scholarship on necessity-driven and informal circular economies makes their role increasingly visible (Korsunova et al., 2022; Van Opstal et al., 2025). The remaining analytical problem is to distinguish between practices driven by environmental or entrepreneurial intention and those sustained because actors face a constrained choice set.

2.3 The infrastructure assumption

Circularity is also measured through heterogeneous families of indicators. Some indicators directly monitor material flows or value retention, while others assess institutional readiness, policy instruments, organisational practices or implementation capacity (Saidani et al., 2019). The problem is therefore not that CE measurement is infrastructure-based across the board. It is that institution-centred and administrative measures may not capture value-retention activity occurring outside formal systems.

This distinction is important where informal collection, repair, resale or remanufacturing has a large material footprint. In such cases, it cannot be assumed that low institutionalisation and low material circularity co-occur, and the indicator family to be used needs to be made explicit (Saidani et al., 2019). A measurement framework should therefore distinguish between indicators of enabling institutions and indicators of actual value-retention behaviour or material flow.

2.4 The provenance of the assumptions

The transition orientation of the main-stream CE theory is clearly traceable. Much influential CE literature, and policy architecture, has been developed in high-income industrial economies where dominant incentives often favour high throughput, short replacement cycles and formalised waste systems (Kirchherr et al., 2017; Geissdoerfer et al., 2017; Corvellec et al., 2022). In such settings, circularity often does need to be intentionally constructed in opposition to prevailing economic incentives. The problem is when that narrative of transition is taken as a universal empirical point of departure.

Critical CE scholarship has challenged this universalisation. Corvellec et al. (2022) synthesise critiques concerning CE’s conceptual ambiguity, techno-economic dominance and tendency to depoliticise questions of growth and distribution. Schröder et al. (2019) foreground the different social and material conditions of Global South economies. Dewick et al. (2022) explicitly frame the relationship between informal economies and CE as a theoretical puzzle, whereas Hadfield et al. (2025) demonstrate that top-down CE transitions can have ambiguous outcomes for marginalised communities and call for context-sensitive, socially just transition principles.

Most relevant to this paper is the work of Korsunova et al. (2022), who introduced the term “necessity-driven circular economy” to describe locally embedded formal and informal value-retention practices based on economic necessity and income-generation opportunities. Derks et al. (2024) later examined circular e-waste ecosystems in necessity-driven contexts and the role of formal institutional voids. These contributions preclude novelty claims based solely on recognising necessity as a driver of circular practice.

The theoretical space left open is dynamic and causal. Existing necessity-driven CE work establishes that constraint can generate circular practice. It does not fully specify the counterfactual dependence of particular practices on a binding constraint, the conditions under which those practices are displaced as constraints relax, or the timing problem created when institutional substitutes arrive after the necessity driver has weakened. Survivalist circularity is developed as a mechanism-level theory of that transition.

3 Circularity without design: the empirical puzzle in materially constrained contexts

3.1 The documented pattern

Three observations from the empirical literature support the plausibility of the theory: informal actors can contribute significantly to material recovery; repair and reuse can be economically motivated; and formalisation can change or displace the networks through which those practices occur (Wilson et al., 2009; Korsunova et al., 2022; Hadfield et al., 2025). These observations do not prove the propositions, they specify empirical regularities which a more specific causal theory should explain.

First, informal recovery systems may contribute large shares of recyclable material recovery in some cities. Wilson et al. (2009) report informal-sector recycling rates of 20–50% for the cases they studied. Similarly, the comparative city study by Scheinberg et al. (2010) for UN-Habitat reports cities where the contribution of informal recovery exceeds the formally recorded contribution. These figures should be read as evidence about specific municipal material streams and cases, rather than as evidence that whole economies in the Global South are uniformly “more circular” than high-income economies. Further Nigerian evidence supports the material-practice component of this argument, with Olukanni et al. (2018) documenting a waste-to-wealth system that involves the delineation and recuperation of food, plastics, metals and paper for reuse and recycling and Kehinde et al. (2020) providing an overview of plastic-waste recycling routes as approaches for reducing environmental risk and valorising resources.

Second, repair, reuse and secondary markets can be organised around affordability and livelihood. Oteng-Ababio (2012) characterises e-waste scavenging in Accra as a livelihood strategy under limited formal employment opportunities. Korsunova et al. (2022) show that economic necessity and opportunities for income generation are core drivers of value-retaining practices across low-income communities in three countries. More recently, Habib and Dewulf (2025) report that economic constraints, affordability and value recovery strongly shape household electronics repair in Lahore.

Third, the social and market infrastructures that enable these practices are consequential. Informal recovery and repair depend on collectors, traders, technicians, spare-part channels, resale markets and social knowledge. These networks have been recorded in Nigerian studies in Lagos and Enugu (Afon, 2007; Nzeadibe and Iwuoha, 2008; Nzeadibe, 2009; Afon, 2012). Recent work further suggests that informality is reproduced by institutional and market conditions, not merely by the absence of formal policy (Derks et al., 2024; Labra Cataldo et al., 2025).

This evidence also reveals a normative tension. Informal recovery can conserve materials and generate income while remaining tied to unsafe work, stigma, insecurity and weak labour protection (Wilson et al., 2006; Ezeah et al., 2013; Velis, 2017; Labra Cataldo et al., 2025). A theory of necessity-driven value retention must therefore separate environmental consequences from social desirability.

Lagos is a useful illustrative setting, as older studies record both high levels of informal recovery and ongoing limitations in formal waste-service provision (Kofoworola, 2007; Olukanni and Nwafor, 2019). Those studies should not, however, be treated as current estimates of the city’s total waste system; their quantitative estimates are used only as historical evidence of the documented pattern.

3.1.1 Grounded illustrations and operationalisation

A single, solid instance comes from Johannesburg. Moyer et al. (2025) examine a scheme where individuals in extreme precarity exchanged collected plastic for food, highlighting how material recovery can be linked to food insecurity, moral valuation, gendered and migrant precarity, non-profit intermediation and urban restructuring. In a survivalist-circularity test, binding constraint could be operationalised as food insecurity, unstable income and limited livelihood alternatives; network and institutional support as access to collection points, program rules and downstream recycling; and displacement as within-person changes in recovery behaviour following a credible change in food or income security. The case also warns against assuming that socially desirable recovery is necessarily environmentally useful.

Another instance comes from Pakistan. Yousafzai et al. (2026) describe Recursive Resource-Recovery Cycles (3RCs) in informal recycling networks for e-waste, construction debris, textiles, agricultural waste, plastics and festival waste. Repeated sorting, bundling, manual repair and improvised upcycling or downcycling illustrate the recursive organization of value retention through networks of waste pickers, aggregators and stockpile agents. In the present theory, 3RCs are a complementary meso-level process account: they explain the organization of recovery cycles, whereas survivalist circularity asks whether continued participation of actors in those cycles is causally contingent on a binding livelihood or material constraint.

The examples are meant to be illustrative rather than geographic definitions. Johannesburg, Pakistan, Lagos and the Global South are not, by default, assumed to be survivalist circular. The construct only applies where the binding-constraint mechanism is demonstrated for the practice under study.

3.2 The gap as conventionally diagnosed

This is contrasted to the behavioural evidence, where formal CE assessments may report low institutional uptake, e.g., limited policy enactment, traceability, producer-responsibility coverage, circular procurement or design standards. These are important findings, but they refer to institutionalisation and implementation capacity rather than material practice per se (Saidani et al., 2019). They do not automatically produce low levels of repair, reuse, second-hand exchange or informal recovery.

At sector level, Ezema et al. (2023) report low adoption of circular design strategies in Lagos public housing delivery and call for more deliberate action at the design and implementation stages. That finding is compatible with high levels of some household or informal value-retention practices, because the two observations concern different actors, scales and drivers.

The implementation-gap narrative must therefore be disaggregated. One gap may be real: formal CE institutions and professional practices are underdeveloped. A second may be observational: informal or household circular practices are poorly represented in the indicators being used. A third possibility is transitional: practices driven by necessity may erode faster than formal substitutes can be built. Treating all three as a single capacity deficit obscures different causal problems and different policy responses.

3.3 Why the conventional diagnosis is incomplete

A capacity-only diagnosis is incomplete on three counts.

First, capacity-based diagnosis can confuse formal capacity with material behaviour. Low formal capacity does not logically imply low value retention, because repair, reuse, resale and informal recovery can be performed through non-state and non-corporate networks (Dewick et al., 2022; Wilson et al., 2006). The existence and scale of these practices needs to be measured rather than inferred from institutional indicators.

Second, it can mis-attribute motivation. Where economic constraint is the dominant driver, environmental awareness may not be necessary nor sufficient to explain existing behaviour, although mixed motives are likely (Korsunova et al., 2022; Habib and Dewulf, 2025). The empirical question is whether direct measures of material or livelihood constraint explain behaviour over and above environmental values, thrift, attachment, entrepreneurship and other plausible drivers.

Third, a capacity account has little to say about the dynamics of transition. Where a practice is partly sustained by a binding constraint, income growth, access to credit or improved livelihood opportunities may weaken the driver in question. The extent to which total circularity then decreases depends on substitution by environmental preferences, formal institutions, market incentives, product design or other drivers (Derks et al., 2024; Hadfield et al., 2025). Thus the testable claim is one of contingent displacement, not that development necessarily reduces circularity.

These distinctions motivate the construct developed below. Survivalist circularity is not another name for all informal or low-income circularity. It is a proposed causal regime within the broader family of necessity-driven circular economies.

4 Defining survivalist circularity

4.1 Definition

Survivalist circularity is a subset of necessity-driven circular material practice (product-life extension, repair, reuse, repurposing, second-hand exchange, recovery or recirculation) sustained primarily by a binding material or livelihood constraint, such that relaxing that constraint is predicted to reduce the necessity-attributable component of the practice unless another driver substitutes. It is not a geographical label. It is not a synonym for informal work, poverty, low income, repair or recycling.

Four elements of this definition do the analytical work.

First, the construct relates to observable value-retention practice and not to stated sustainability commitment. A repaired appliance or recovered material creates a circular material outcome, regardless of the actor’s environmental intent. In CE scholarship, value-retention options and value-retention processes distinguish between the retention of product, component or material utility and embedded value across loops of varying length (Reike et al., 2018; Russell and Nasr, 2023).

Second, the relevant explanatory variable is not low income per se but a binding constraint. A constraint is a condition where replacement expenditure, access to new goods, livelihood opportunities or material availability materially narrows the feasible choice set. Sustainable-livelihoods frameworks also emphasise assets, vulnerability, strategies and institutions, rather than income alone (DFID, 1999; Frankenberger et al., 2000; Cooper et al., 2011). Thus income is an imperfect proxy and should not be used to automatically assign the construct.

Third, “primarily” does not mean “only.” Economic necessity can be interwoven with thrift, attachment, environmental concern, cultural norms, habit, entrepreneurship or creative resourcefulness. Frugal and jugaad research shows that resource scarcity can also induce purposeful problem solving and innovation (Radjou et al., 2012; Shepherd et al., 2020). It is not about motivational purity, but about marginal causal contribution of constraint.

Fourth, the counterfactual clause makes the construct testable. If a binding constraint is causally central, relaxing it should reduce the necessity-attributable component of the practice unless another motivation, institution, market condition or design feature substitutes for that driver.

4.2 The driver: binding material and livelihood constraint

On the demand side, a binding budget or access constraint increases the opportunity cost of replacement and increases the relative value of maintenance, repair, reuse and second-hand acquisition. From a livelihoods perspective, the absence of secure employment and income opportunities can make collection, sorting, repair, and trading or reprocessing a relatively attractive livelihood strategy (Korsunova et al., 2022; Nzeadibe, 2009; Afon, 2012; Oteng-Ababio, 2012).

The sustainable-livelihoods traditions developed by DFID, CARE and Oxfam sharpen the phrase “binding livelihood constraint.” DFID’s framework views livelihood outcomes as a function of access to human, social, physical, financial and natural assets, vulnerability to shocks and stresses, livelihood strategies and the policies, institutions and processes that structure opportunity (DFID, 1999). Similarly, the CARE Household Livelihood Security approach links capabilities, tangible and intangible assets, economic activities and enabling conditions (Frankenberger et al., 2000) and Oxfam’s use of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach highlights existing assets and strategies and the changes required to achieve more secure livelihoods (Cooper et al., 2011). These frameworks are not imported as CE theories. They offer a disciplined way to operationalise when livelihood alternatives are sufficiently constrained for a constraint to be plausibly binding.

The two channels can reinforce each other. Household demand for lower-cost repaired or second-hand goods supports repair and resale livelihoods, while recovery networks provide the parts and materials that make low-cost maintenance possible. This interdependence means that survivalist circularity should not be reduced to an individual attitude. It is behaviour embedded in local market and social infrastructures.

Sen’s (1999) distinction between observed functioning and substantive freedom is useful here. A materially circular outcome does not, on its own, reveal whether the actor exercised restraint from a broad opportunity set or adapted rationally to a narrow one. The theory therefore treats choice-set constraint as an empirical condition that must be measured, not inferred from poverty labels.

4.3 The mechanism: use-value maximisation under constraint

The mechanism is use value maximisation under a binding constraint. Here, ‘use-value’ is a service or livelihood utility that can still be extracted from a product, component or material, not a claim that actors calculate a single monetary optimum. It may be relatively more attractive to continue using existing goods or to extract exchange value from discarded materials where the cost of acquisition or replacement is high relative to resources available or where alternative livelihood opportunities are scarce. So the mechanism connects constrained choice and observed value-retention behaviour, rather than equating scarcity itself with circularity.

The proposed causal chain contains four links. First, a binding constraint raises the shadow cost of replacement, disposal or alternative income-generating activity. Second, networks for repair, or for resale or exchange or recovery offer a value retention option. Third, actors spend time, labour or expenditure to extend service life or to retrieve material/livelihood value. Fourth, if the constraint is relaxed the necessity-attributable incentive should wear off. The practice continues only as long as environmental values, habit, attachment, entrepreneurial returns, regulation, product design, market prices or institutions offer a substitute. It is this last link that makes the construct dynamically different from the more general observation that necessity can lead to circular practice.

Alternative explanations are therefore an inherent part of the theory and not merely noise. Environmental concern, norms of thrift, product attachment, repairability, relative prices, entrepreneurial opportunity, regulation and frugal problem solving may each explain the same behaviour individually or in combination (Habib and Dewulf, 2025; Shepherd et al., 2020). Empirical identification means showing that direct measures of constraint are explanatory, and ideally that practices change within units when an identifiable constraint changes, while plausible substitutes and confounders are observed. When those conditions are lacking, the appropriate claim is association rather than causal survivalist circularity.

This mechanism is proposed to give rise to four conditional properties, none of which is universal by definition.

It can be intensive. Where repairable goods, secondary markets and recovery opportunities exist, binding constraint can increase the frequency of value-retention practices. The theory does not predict high circularity where households lack durable goods, products are not repairable, or supporting networks are absent.

It can be environmentally incidental. Environmental benefit may be a by-product rather than the initiating objective. This is consistent with mixed motives; it does not require pro-environmental attitudes to be absent or negatively correlated with the behaviour.

It is constraint-contingent and therefore potentially fragile. If the constraint makes a causal contribution to the practice, relaxing it removes part of the incentive. Whether the practice survives depends on the strength of substitute motivations and institutions. Proposition 3 develops this conditional prediction.

It is often weakly formalised but not institution-free. Repair economies, kinship exchange, informal credit, trader relationships and secondary markets are institutions in a social sense even where formal CE policy is absent. The relevant vulnerability is therefore formal under-recognition: planning, regulation or market restructuring can disrupt networks that currently retain material value. At the same time, those networks may reproduce hazardous and inequitable labour conditions, which makes protection of material outcomes different from preservation of existing employment conditions (Wilson et al., 2006; Ezeah et al., 2013; Velis, 2017; Labra Cataldo et al., 2025).

4.4 Differentiation from adjacent constructs

Since survivalist circularity is located in a pre-existing conceptual landscape, construct differentiation is a necessary condition to hold onto the new label. Table 1 therefore compares the construct with the closest antecedent and with alternative classifications that function at different levels of analysis.

Table 1. Survivalist circularity in relation to adjacent constructs.

The closest antecedent is necessity-driven circular economy (Korsunova et al., 2022), which includes a broad spectrum of locally embedded formal and informal practices of value retention, dictated by economic necessity and opportunities for income generation. Survivalist circularity is intentionally narrower in three ways: it requires evidence that a constraint is binding rather than merely associated with low income; it articulates a counterfactual test of persistence; and it predicts conditional displacement when the constraint is relaxed in the absence of substitute support. If empirical work does not discriminate these features, then the established necessity-driven CE concept is favoured by parsimony and the survivalist label should be abandoned.

Survivalist circularity is not the informal circular economy either. The causal driver for survivalist circularity is not identified by the institutional or regulatory status of informality. Webb et al. (2009) further illustrate why we should not collapse legality and legitimacy. Their formal, informal and renegade economies distinguish combinations of legal/illegal and socially legitimate/illegitimate means and ends. The present mechanism is orthogonal to these institutional categories. A formal low-income household may engage in survivalist repair, and a socially legitimate but partly informal recycler may participate in survivalist circularity or neither may. Illegal/illegitimate “renegade” activity is not considered survivalist circularity simply because the actors are constrained by resources.

Frugal innovation and jugaad are different in that they are focused on purposeful problem solving and value creation when resources are scarce. For example, they show how trial-and-error learning, recombination and improvised quick-fix solutions form part of jugaad in rural India (Shepherd et al., 2020). Survivalist circularity may overlap with such ingenuity, but innovation is not necessary: persistence can meet the definition when it is constraint-contingent, through continued use, ordinary repair, second-hand exchange or recovery. Sufficiency is also different because it is about intentional restraint, not constrained choice (Princen, 2005; Radjou et al., 2012; Shepherd et al., 2020).

The environmentalism of the poor (Martinez-Alier, 2002) concerns ecological distribution conflicts and the politically salient defence of livelihoods. Grassroots circularity similarly often entails collective mobilisation or shared sustainability purpose. Survivalist circularity can coexist with either but does not require collective identity or political mobilisation. The label should therefore be applied to practices and causal regimes rather than to populations as a whole.

4.5 Value retention and recursive resource-recovery cycles

The material outcome domain of the theory is value retention, not a shorthand for all forms of economic value creation. Reike et al. (2018) classify CE strategies as resource value-retention options. Russell and Nasr (2023) separate value-retention processes such as direct reuse, repair, refurbishment and remanufacturing from the environmental impacts avoided by those processes. These distinctions are important because the same “circular” label can hide different amounts and qualities of retained product, component or material value. Survivalist circularity, then, does not rework the technical hierarchy of circular strategies but asks why a value retention practice occurs and persists. Studies of construction materials further illustrate technical pathways for the return of reclaimed materials to productive use. Olofinnade et al. (2018) assess the use of waste glass in place of natural sand in eco-concrete whereas Bamigboye et al. (2021) synthesise the reuse of municipal and industrial waste streams in highway applications. These studies highlight material value-retention pathways but should not be interpreted as evidence of survivalist circularity unless a binding constraint and its counterfactual persistence effect are independently identified.

The logic of recycling, upcycling and downcycling is applied to material transformation. Recycling recovers material for further use; upcycling seeks higher-quality or higher-value outputs, while downcycling retains material in a lower-quality application (Ogwu and Kosoe, 2025). Any of the three can happen in necessity-driven circumstances, but none is survivalist by definition. The relevant test remains whether the actor’s involvement or the continuation of the practice materially depends on a binding constraint.

The 3RCs framework provides a useful process perspective. Yousafzai et al. (2026) demonstrate how informal intermediaries can generate repeated loops of sorting, bundling, repair and improvised transformation across multiple waste streams. Therefore, recursive recovery may be an enabling network architecture for Proposition 5. Conceptually, however, 3RCs and survivalist circularity answer different questions. 3RCs characterise how recovery recurs through networks; survivalist circularity specifies the constraint-contingent causal regime that may - or may not - motivate actors within those networks.

5 A testable framework: five propositions

Theoretical credibility is added to a construct by making falsifiable claims that can be distinguished from competing explanations. The five propositions below thus describe expected associations, and tests and refutation conditions. They should be assessed on environmental attitudes, thrift and attachment, product repairability, relative prices, regulation, entrepreneurial opportunity, frugal innovation, network access and other plausible substitutes. Survivalist circularity is only supported when the binding-constraint mechanism explains incremental variation or response to a credible change in constraint.

5.1 Proposition 1 (Binding-constraint effect)

Conditional on ownership of relevant goods, product repairability, and access to repair, reuse or resale channels, stronger material or livelihood constraint is associated with a higher probability of choosing value-retention options over replacement or disposal.

5.1.1 Test

Measure constraint directly through indicators such as material-hardship indices, scarcity of discretionary income, ratios of replacement cost to disposable income, employment insecurity, deficits in or access restrictions to livelihood assets rather than only household income. Model repair, reuse, retention or second-hand acquisition as outcomes while controlling for product age, quality, ownership, repairability, household composition, environmental attitudes, prices and network access. Extreme deprivation may reduce both ownership and ability to pay for repair, therefore testing for non-linear effects is needed (DFID, 1999; Frankenberger et al., 2000).

5.1.2 Refutation

The proposition would be weakened if direct measures of binding constraint show no positive association with value-retention choices after relevant product and access conditions are controlled, or if the association is fully explained by another measured driver.

5.2 Proposition 2 (Incremental motivational effect)

Material or livelihood constraint explains variation in circular practice beyond pro-environmental attitudes, knowledge and identity; the theory does not require environmental motivation to be absent or negatively associated with the same behaviour.

5.2.1 Test

Measure environmental attitudes and identity alongside direct constraint indicators and observed or recalled circular behaviours. Compare nested models to test whether constraint adds explanatory power and whether its effect interacts with environmental attitudes. Qualitative follow-up can reveal mixed motives that survey scales may obscure.

5.2.2 Refutation

The proposition would be refuted if the apparent effect of constraint consistently disappears once environmental values and other plausible drivers are adequately measured, indicating that constraint does not make an independent contribution.

5.3 Proposition 3 (Conditional displacement)

Exogenous relaxation of a binding material or livelihood constraint reduces the necessity-attributable component of circular practice. Total circularity declines only when environmental, institutional, market, design or other drivers fail to substitute for the weakened necessity driver.

5.3.1 Test

Use longitudinal data or quasi-experiments around income shocks, transfers, resettlement, access to credit, infrastructure roll-outs or labour-market changes. Measure total circular practice together with the motivations and institutions supporting it before and after the change. Cross-sectional income gradients can provide preliminary evidence but cannot identify displacement causally.

5.3.2 Refutation

The theory would be challenged if circular practices remain stable after a well-documented relaxation of the binding constraint in the absence of any credible substitute driver, or if the necessity-attributable component cannot be empirically distinguished from more durable motivations.

5.4 Proposition 4 (Observation gap)

In contexts with substantial informal or household value-retention activity, institution-centred indicators and administrative data that exclude informal channels produce lower estimates of circular practice than direct behavioural or material-flow measures that include those channels.

5.4.1 Test

Measure the same population, material stream or locality using paired approaches: an institutional or administrative measure, and a direct behavioural or material-flow measure with explicit coverage of informal channels. The comparative city evidence in Scheinberg et al. (2010) illustrates why such paired observation can matter, while Saidani et al. (2019) shows that CE indicators differ substantially in purpose and scope.

5.4.2 Refutation

Systematic convergence between the two approaches in contexts where informal activity is independently known to be substantial would weaken the proposition. The proposition should not be generalised to material-flow indicators that already capture informal activity.

5.5 Proposition 5 (Network-dependence effect)

Conditional on material constraint, survivalist circular practice is more likely and more persistent where repair, spare-parts, resale, exchange and recovery networks are accessible, dense and affordable.

5.5.1 Test

Combine household- or worker-level practice measures with spatial or network measures of access to technicians, spare-parts markets, second-hand trade, collectors and recovery hubs. Multilevel models can test whether network availability moderates the relationship between constraint and circular practice. Settlement typology may be examined as a contextual moderator rather than assumed to be a defining cause.

5.5.2 Refutation

The proposition would be weakened if practice intensity is invariant to the availability or accessibility of these networks after constraint and product characteristics are controlled.

5.5.3 Policy corollary

Propositions 3 and 5 imply a transition risk rather than a blanket argument against formalisation. Formalisation can improve safety, recognition, service quality and labour conditions, but poorly designed interventions may also displace existing value-retention networks before functional substitutes are established. The policy problem is therefore sequencing and institutional substitution, not preservation of informality for its own sake (Wilson et al., 2006; Ezeah et al., 2013; Hadfield et al., 2025).

6 A conceptual model

6.1 Material constraint and institutional support

The propositions can be embedded in a deliberately parsimonious two-dimensional model based on the two variables that define the central transition problem: the degree to which material or livelihood constraint binds and the strength of institutional support for value retention. The model is not a complete causal model or universal development sequence but rather an analytical map.

The horizontal axis measures the degree of constraint on material or livelihood, from high or binding to low or relaxed. Candidate indicators include material deprivation, replacement affordability, access to goods or credit, employment insecurity and livelihood alternatives. The vertical axis represents the level of organised formal institutional support for value retention, ranging from weak/limited formal support to strong/formally embedded support. Potential indicators include affordable repair infrastructure, spare-parts access, secondary-market support, recognised collection systems, worker protection, take-back or producer-responsibility coverage and traceability. Informal social and market networks are treated separately as enabling conditions, rather than as the low end of the institutional-support axis. Environmental intention is not necessarily in opposition to necessity, as they can co-exist; rather it is seen as a moderator, together with product repairability, relative prices and network density (Figure 1).

The four quadrants are ideal-typical regimes, not stages that all economies must pass through. Informal social and market networks remain analytically important even where the formal institutional support is weak; they are understood as enabling conditions for practice and not as evidence that the formal-support axis is high. Similarly, the legality/legitimacy categories given by Webb et al. (2009) do not define a quadrant because institutional status and causal motivation are orthogonal dimensions.

Survivalist circularity occupies the high-constraint, low-formal-support quadrant. Circular practice is partly sustained by constraint and depends heavily on local repair, resale, exchange and recovery networks.

Supported necessity-driven circularity occupies the high-constraint, high-support quadrant. Existing value-retention practices remain partly necessity-driven, but public or organisational support protects their material function while improving safety, recognition and service quality. This is a transition state rather than an argument for maintaining deprivation.

The displacement gap occupies the low-constraint, low-support quadrant. Here the necessity driver has weakened, but designed institutions and other durable drivers remain insufficient to sustain previous levels of value retention. This is the risk state predicted by Proposition 3.

Designed circularity occupies the low-constraint, high-support quadrant. Circularity is sustained mainly by product design, regulation, business models, infrastructure, market incentives, environmental preferences or combinations of these, rather than by a binding material constraint.

6.2 Trajectories through the model

The main analytical value of the model is in trajectories and sequencing, not in static quadrant labels.

The model separates two transitions that are often conflated. Relaxing a material constraint is movement along the horizontal axis; building institutional support is movement along the vertical axis. One does not logically entail the other. The economic incentive to repair or reuse may diminish as income, credit and new goods become more available, without the parallel development of circular product design, convenient take-back, affordable repair or effective secondary-material systems.

The theory thus predicts a risk of displacement, rather than an inevitable path of development. Total circularity may be stable or increase when alternative motivations, markets or institutions substitute quickly; where substitution lags, value-retention practices may fall during the transition. Hence, the displacement gap is a time lag between declining needs and slower creation of substitutes, not a statement that higher incomes or formalisation are inherently anti-circular.

The policy goal, accordingly, is to preserve or improve material outcomes, while eliminating the deprivation and unsafe working conditions that made some practices necessary. Institutional substitution can involve standards for repairability, affordable repair services and spare parts, secondary markets, safe decentralised collection and sorting, recognition and occupational protection of workers, inclusive producer-responsibility or take-back systems, and traceability arrangements that build on, rather than abruptly displace, viable local networks. The principle of sequencing entails setting up such substitutes when the driver of necessity is weakening or has weakened (Wilson et al., 2006; Hadfield et al., 2025; Labra Cataldo et al., 2025).

6.3 Boundary conditions

The theory’s scope is bounded, and stating the bounds explicitly is part of the contribution.

6.3.1 Economic scope

The theory applies where material or livelihood constraint makes a demonstrable causal contribution to the relevant practice. It does not equate low income with survivalist circularity, and it allows for non-linear effects where extreme deprivation limits ownership, repair expenditure or market access.

6.3.2 Institutional scope

The model distinguishes formal institutional support from the social and market institutions already present in informal economies. Formalisation is not assumed to substitute automatically for existing practice; its effect is an empirical question.

6.3.3 Scale

The primary unit is household-, individual- or livelihood-level practice embedded in local networks. The theory may inform firm or city policy, but it is not a theory of firm-level circular business models.

6.3.4 Geography

Urban contexts in the Global South are a major empirical domain because material constraint and informality are widespread, but geography is not the causal variable. In principle the construct should also apply to materially constrained populations in high-income economies. Evidence that informal repair, reuse, sharing and refurbishing are consequential in an industrialised region supports the value of testing that extension (Van Opstal et al., 2025).

6.3.5 Normative boundary

The theory does not advocate the maintenance of deprivation, informality or hazardous recovery work. Its normative objective is the opposite: to retain useful material outcomes while expanding substantive choice, decent work, safety and institutional support.

7 Discussion and implications

7.1 Theoretical implications

The main theoretical contribution is a dynamic refinement of necessity-driven CE. Korsunova et al. (2022) show that value-retention practices can be driven by economic necessity and livelihood opportunity. Survivalist circularity adds only if three stricter conditions are met: a binding constraint that can be shown to be such; a counterfactual dependence of the practice on that constraint; and a prediction of displacement were the constraint to relax without substitution. This reiteration of distinction is important: the paper does not re-label necessity-driven CE, informal CE, or Global South circularity as survivalist circularity.

A second contribution is to distinguish material outcome, causal regime and institutional status. R-frameworks and value retention taxonomies classify the fate of products and materials (Reike et al., 2018; Russell and Nasr, 2023). Webb et al. (2009) classify activities by legality and social legitimacy. The present construct asks why a particular value-retention practice persists and how that persistence changes when constraint changes. Identical repair or recovery rates may thus lead to different transition trajectories.

A third contribution is distributional. Environmental value can be created through material circularity under constrained choice, but at a cost to the time, health, safety and dignity of actors with few alternatives. Critical CE scholarship has repeatedly cautioned against treating environmental performance as socially neutral (Kirchherr et al., 2017; Corvellec et al., 2022; Hadfield et al., 2025). The framework makes that tension an explicit part of causal diagnosis rather than a residual ethical concern.

7.2 Methodological and measurement implications

Proposition 4 makes a measurement distinction between institutionalisation and material practice. This does not mean that “standard CE indicators” disregard informal activity entirely. CE indicator systems are meant for different purposes and work at different scales (Saidani et al., 2019). A narrower problem arises when researchers infer circular behaviour from policy, certification, infrastructure or administrative indicators that do not directly observe household and informal channels. A setting may improve in formal readiness but decline in retention of material value, or show poor formal readiness while much repair and recovery is taking place.

Four measurement responses are shown below. First, institution-centred indicators should be complemented by behavioural or material-flow measures where informal circulation is expected to be large. Second, surveys should directly measure binding constraints and allow for mixed motives, rather than classifying behaviour as environmental or economic. Third, network accessibility should be measured because value-retention options are not possible simply because actors are facing hardship. Fourth, because fragility is a response to change rather than a cross-sectional level, it requires longitudinal or quasi-experimental designs as suggested in Proposition 3. Table 2 summarises candidate operational measures and their role in testing the propositions.

Table 2. Candidate operational measures for testing survivalist circularity.

7.3 Policy implications

Under SDG 12, the framework suggests that some contexts may need to protect or improve existing value-retention outcomes rather than simply increase circular behaviour from an assumed low baseline. The appropriate intervention depends on what is already happening, who bears the costs, and whether the existing practice is likely to persist as material constraints change.

Under SDG 8, environmentally useful activity cannot be counted as unqualified progress when it depends on insecure, hazardous or stigmatised work. Formal recognition, occupational safety, income security and worker voice may alter the way recovery is organised and could affect measured material flows. Such trade-offs should be evaluated explicitly rather than hidden within aggregate circularity indicators.

Four interlinked policy directions can make institutional substitution work.

Protect material function without protecting deprivation. Make repair, spare-parts availability, resale and recovery services affordable while improving incomes, safety and substantive choice. Measures may include right-to-repair provisions, repair vouchers and shared repair facilities that keep repair economically attractive as replacement becomes more affordable.

Institutional fit: formalise. Identify and contract existing collectors, repairers and traders as appropriate; extend occupational safety, social protection, training and worker voice; and design producer-responsibility or take-back systems so compliance does not automatically exclude functioning informal networks (Wilson et al., 2006; Ezeah et al., 2013; Derks et al., 2024).

Build infrastructure for safe recovery and secondary markets. Decentralised collection points, sorting and storage facilities, traceability support, quality assurance for reused goods, and safe handling pathways for e-waste and plastics can replace hazardous practices while maintaining material throughput.

Monitoring and substitution sequence. Institutions should be created in advance of, or in tandem with, large-scale shifts that undermine necessity-driven participation, and transition monitoring should track both worker outcomes and material flows. This avoids formalisation being seen as success when environmental value retention has only been shifted elsewhere (Hadfield et al., 2025; Moyer et al., 2025).

7.4 Research agenda

The proposals set out a phased research agenda. Household or worker surveys measuring direct constraint, livelihood assets, environmental attitudes, product characteristics, prices and network access can be used to test Propositions 1 and 2. Proposition 5 requires spatial or network data. Proposition 4 requires paired observation of the same material stream or population. Proposition 3 is the strongest causal test and it requires longitudinal, natural-experiment or quasi-experimental evidence around a change that plausibly relaxes a binding constraint. If such identification is not available, the cross-sectional evidence should be described as associational and used to refine, not validate, the mechanism.

Three broader questions follow. First, how much support is required for necessity-driven practice to become durable, freely chosen circularity without losing its material function? Second, which forms of formalisation improve worker conditions while preserving efficient recovery and repair networks? Third, does the same constraint-contingent mechanism explain informal circular practices in high-income economies, or do other motivations dominate there?

8 Limitations

This is a conceptual contribution and its propositions are hypotheses and not findings. The synthesis is theory-building and purposeful rather than systematic or exhaustive, and it reports no original empirical test. The evidentiary base should thus be seen as a triangulation for construct development and proposition derivation, not prevalence estimation or proof of the proposed causal mechanism.

Four limitations are particularly important. First, motivation and binding constraint are difficult to identify from self-report and may require behavioural or quasi-experimental evidence. Second, mixed motives are likely, so the “necessity-attributable” component is a latent causal quantity rather than a directly observed category. Third, the evidence base is stronger for informal waste recovery than for household repair, reuse and repurposing, although recent household research is beginning to redress that imbalance (Habib and Dewulf, 2025). Fourth, the conceptual boundary with necessity-driven CE is deliberately narrow; if empirical studies cannot discriminate survivalist circularity by its constraint-contingent mechanism and predicted displacement, parsimony favours retaining the established broader concept rather than multiplying labels.

9 Conclusion

There is no need for a new concept to demonstrate that economic necessity can result in repair, reuse, recovery and other value-retention practices; necessity-driven CE already offers that foundation (Korsunova et al., 2022). The narrower theoretical problem is a dynamic one: what happens when a particular practice is counterfactually dependent on a binding material or livelihood constraint, and that constraint later relaxes?

This paper proposes survivalist circularity as a narrow answer to that problem: the subset of necessity-driven circular practice whose persistence is materially contingent on a binding constraint. The construct is not meant to describe all Global South, informal, low-income, frugal or repair activity. The defining claim is conditional: removal of the constraint reduces the necessity-attributable component and complete circularity is reduced only if durable motivations, institutions, markets or design features do not compensate.

This paper makes four explicit contributions. It first develops a constraint-contingent mechanism -- use-value maximisation under constrained choice—and identifies rival explanations and causal tests. Second, it distinguishes this mechanism from necessity-driven CE, informality, frugal innovation, legality/legitimacy classifications and recursive resource-recovery cycles. Thirdly, it foregrounds a measurement principle: that formal CE institutionalisation and actual material value-retention practice must be observed separately and, where possible, jointly. Fourth, it turns the threat of displacement into institutional replacement: affordable repair and spare parts, secondary markets, safe recovery systems, inclusive producer responsibility and worker protection should be sequenced before or as necessity weakens. The two-axis model and the five falsifiable propositions provide an empirical program to test whether the narrower construct gains standing beyond its necessity-driven CE antecedent.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Footnotes

Edited by: Konstantinos P. Tsagarakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece

Reviewed by: Muhammad Tariq Yousafzai, University of Swat, Pakistan

Lucy Khofi, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa