A movement is gathering to overthrow the intellectual incumbents of economics. Started by students, advanced by academics, and funded by philanthropists, until recently it has remained largely unnoticed by governments. Now the world’s largest emerging economies are starting to take an interest. For the sake of avoiding dangerous climate change, the revolution cannot come too soon.

This chapter reflects on the normative and social dimensions of the transition to a circular bio-based economy (CBE). It first argues that current practices in a CBE are framed within the market or economic logic and miss the normative dimension of the call for circularity. The transition to a CBE requires a fundamental reflections on the role of economic actors in the social and ecological environment with significant consequences for their business practices. Second, the chapter argues that the transition to a CBE requires an acknowledgement of the normative and social dimension of this transition at the meso and macro levels, and the establishment of an environmental and social logic on the micro level of business practices. Third, it argues that the concept of responsible innovation can help to articulate the normative and social dimension of the transition to a CBE, and enables the operationalisation of the environmental and social logic at the micro level. In this respect, responsible innovation can be understood as a driver for the transition to a CBE.

A movement is gathering to overthrow the intellectual incumbents of economics. Started by students, advanced by academics, and funded by philanthropists, until recently it has remained largely unnoticed by governments. Now the world’s largest emerging economies are starting to take an interest. For the sake of avoiding dangerous climate change, the revolution cannot come too soon.

Europe’s network structure had evolutionary advantages in its adaptability in innovation and resistance to collapse. While China’s imperial dynasties bequeathed political, social, and ideological foundations for national unity that endured largely intact for two millennia, behind that legacy resides a source of enduring structural weakness. Its system stability comes at a loss of flexibility. Fear of emerging chaos is memorialized in the narrative by which the Chinese Communist Party justifies its grip on power. An awareness of how vulnerability has led to failures predisposes China’s leaders to take insulating measures, e.g., censoring the Internet, constraining academic course content, imposing party oversight on enterprise, and hindering the acquisition of power and prestige that is independent of the regime. But bolstering system stability by strengthening centralized control mechanisms may undermine system resilience, reproducing the very weaknesses its designers seek to avoid and causing a massive disruption in the future. As these two great cultural systems begin to impinge on one another, network analysis has much to reveal about the choice of separation or integration that is before us.