Scholarly record
RESEARCH TRENDS AND THEMATIC EVOLUTION OF CIRCULAR PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS: A BIBLIOMETRIC AND NARRATIVE REVIEW
Abstract
The transition toward a circular economy (CE) requires collaborative governance arrangements that mobilize public authority, private capital, and technological capacity beyond the reach of any single actor. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have long been used to finance and operate infrastructure, waste, and energy assets central to circular transitions, yet the intersection of CE and PPPs – Circular PPPs – remains conceptually dispersed and empirically thin. This study maps the emerging field of Circular PPPs and assesses whether it constitutes a distinct domain or an intersection of adjacent literature. A bibliometric and narrative review of 108 Scopus-indexed publications (2018–2026) was conducted, retrieved via a Boolean search for CE and PPP terms and manually screened for full-text availability and relevance. Output remained marginal until 2020 and accelerated from 2021, peaking at 43 publications in 2025; the corpus has accumulated 2,078 citations (19 per paper). Keyword co-occurrence reveals three clusters: governance and environmental applications, sustainability transitions and circular business models, and recycling and resource circularity. Waste management is the most mature domain (with an average of 38.25 citations), while governance design, partnership structuring, and municipal-scale implementation remain underexplored. Theoretically, the study provides the first structured map of Circular PPP literature and argues that Circular PPPs are best understood as an emerging cross-disciplinary intersection rather than a consolidated field. Future research should develop multi-level governance frameworks, examine partnership design and risk allocation in circular contexts, and broaden the empirical base beyond single-sector applications.
Publication details
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