Levers and Barriers to the Transition to a Circular Economy: A Systematic Literature Review
Elmahdi MACHROUH, Laila ALIGOD
Abstract. The requirement for the CE in the current global scenario of climate change, biodiversity, and natural resource depletion because of unsustainable production and consumption patterns is an imperative requirement. It is identified as a sustainable development strategy in the local setting of countries to deal with the problems of ecology, ensuring economic, social, and environmental sustainability. This systematic review seeks to thoroughly explore the barriers and drivers of CE by strictly following the PRISMA protocol. The search engine utilized was Scopus. A total of 93 articles were retrieved from the search engine within the set time period, that is, 2019-2025. After the search process, the articles were filtered based on the categories of business, management, and accounting, social sciences, economics, econometrics, and finance. A total of 21 articles were selected after the reading process. This assisted in identifying the barriers and drivers of CE, which are categorized into 7 groups of supply chain, regulatory, technological, organizational, economic, socio-cultural, and environmental dimensions. The results of this systematic review may be useful for the decision-making processes of governments and corporate leaders in adopting the CE strategy by leveraging the available drivers and overcoming the barriers.
Keywords
Circular Economy, Levers, Barriers, Systematic Literature Review
Published online 4/25/2026, 13 pages
Copyright © 2026 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: Elmahdi MACHROUH, Laila ALIGOD, Levers and Barriers to the Transition to a Circular Economy: A Systematic Literature Review, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 64, pp 1205-1217, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644904091-148
The article was published as article 148 of the book Energy Futures
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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