Political Ecology of Circular Economy: Informal Agency, Situated Knowledge and Power Dynamics in China's E‐waste Recycling Economies

ABSTRACT

Recently, economic geography has seen growing interest in the circular economy. However, existing scholarship, largely generalised from Western industrial and policy contexts, often embeds a progressivist teleology. It prioritises resource optimisation while understating the inherent socio‐political conflicts within circular economy transitions. Responding to recent calls for a critical geography of circular economy, this paper proposes a three‐dimensional political ecology framework by drawing on emerging Southern circular economy studies and the geographies and anthropologies of waste. It complements dominant economic‐geographical approaches by foregrounding the context‐ and sector‐specific agency of informal actors, their situated knowledge and power asymmetries embedded in the spatial organisation of e‐waste circularity. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork in Guiyu, China's largest deep‐dismantling cluster, we show that the capacity to recompose e‐waste is allocated through kinship rather than through certification and that park‐based formalisation simultaneously depends on and disqualifies this capacity. It redistributes recognition and liability without redistributing the epistemic authority on which recovery depends. Formalisation is thus better understood as a distributive and epistemic settlement, a condition we call ‘dependence without recognition’, than as a linear transition from informality to formality. We argue for critical geographies of actually existing, heterogeneous circular economies attentive to diverse epistemologies, power asymmetries and socio‐ecological justice.