Abstract Body

Despite all efforts, the Netherlands still has a long way to go to realize a circular economy and the Dutch construction sector likewise. Many organizational barriers and institutional characteristics inhibit the sector’s transition to circular practices. The past ten years, Academic studies analysed these barriers and what policy makers and organizations could do to speed up the transition. Nevertheless, within this early phase of the transition, several building and construction projects were realized based on circular principles. Such projects are crucial because they pave the way to institutional change and form the arena where the mutual adaptation of niche and regime takes place. Therefore we argue that while transition governance on the sectoral level is crucial, stimulating circular results on the project level is at least as crucial to help the transition move forward. Our aim is to gain deeper insight into the activities that actors involved in the construction chain actually do in circular building projects. Drawing on the ecological systems metaphor, we view the construction chain as a system of multiple actors that each perform one or multiple functions. The sum of these functions produce a system service (i.e. the circular building). We developed and applied a functional diversity perspective to analyse the activities that the involved actors perform in this system. The perspective of functional diversity is particularly relevant in the context of circular building construction, because it is not based on pre-assumed relations between activities and actors and may thereby be helpful in developing new configurations of actors and activities in the construction chain needed for circular projects. By using this perspective to analyse four circular cases, we uncovered five functions that are crucial to realize circular buildings: 1 connecting though vision; 2 matching supply and demand; 3 providing used materials; 4 constructing circular building elements and 5 controlling safety and quality. The functional diversity perspective indeed reveals that functions are interchangeable between and independent from actor characteristics. Further functional diversity applications could reveal its relevance to support the transition to a circular construction practice in the Netherlands.