A Socio-Technical Perspective on Transitioning to a Circular Plastic Economy in Africa

Socio-technical niche innovations offer significant opportunities to accelerate Africa's transition to a circular plastic economy. However, information on how these opportunities can be operationalised is fragmented, and stakeholder networks appear to be significantly under-developed on the continent. This paper applies the multi-level perspective of socio-technical transitions theory to analyse the shift from a linear plastics system to a circular plastics economy enabled by digital innovations. Drawing from an inter-sectoral engagement with 151 circular economy stakeholders and a cross-sectional survey of 1475 households across five (5) African countries, along with a critical synthesis of the extant literature, this study illuminates the multi-stakeholder dynamics that underpin the technology-society interactions in advancing a digitally enabled circular plastic economy in Africa. It identifies the emerging technologies for niche innovations that could hasten Africa’s embrace of the circular plastic economy with a cross-section of stakeholders playing an important role. It provides new insight into the seven regime dimensions and further explores some of the pressing external pressures from the exogenous landscape.