Understanding the societal legitimacy of the circular economy for the water sector.

The water sector employs Circular Economy (CE) principles through many applications, such as the reuse and recovery of water, nutrients, and energy. Although such applications are helpful to tackle increasing global water and food demands, and help reach net zero emissions targets, there are many challenges to achieving wide uptake. Societal-based and cultural-based challenges are some of the least studied and most pressing barriers to address. Understanding the perceptions of various actors towards CE applications has narrowly focused on the acceptance perspective. However, perceptions may be better understood by connecting CE applications with their institutional landscapes using the theoretical framework of legitimacy. To date, the application of Legitimacy Theory to CE applications has been limited. This thesis aims to extend the prevailing theoretical thinking on legitimacy to a wide range of water-centric CE applications, including water reuse, nutrients and energy recovery in Europe, and understand the legitimacy of CE applications through perceptions. This study was underpinned by a tailored framework including four legitimacy categories: moral, cognitive, pragmatic, and regulatory. A qualitative and case study research design was employed, involving interviews with case study stakeholders (n = 44) and the public (n = 12). A thematic analysis using mainly a deductive logic was employed to associate interviewees’ perceptions with legitimacy categories. This thesis provided evidence of stakeholders’ perceptions towards contemporary case studies embedding CE applications in Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK, as well as public perceptions of hypothetical CE applications in the UK. For stakeholders and the public, findings described perceptions associated with the four legitimacy categories and thus showed the meaning of legitimacy associated with CE applications. For each case study and legitimacy category, interviewees portrayed a common basis of legitimacy and contextual specificities that included differences in the number of times a specific legitimacy sub- category was referred to in the interviews. Overall, perceptions placed high importance on legitimacy associated with social and environmental norms, and self-interested benefits, comprehensibility, and taken-for-granted routines whilst depicting low legitimacy associated with outreach and involvement practices as well as with regulations. Finally, the main linkages between legitimacy categories were reported. This research makes two contributions. Firstly, it contributes to the CE literature by providing a complementary view to an acceptance perspective and showing a non-binary, in-depth, and nuanced view of institutional, social, and cultural factors. Secondly, a theoretical contribution was made that extends the interpretation of legitimacy in a CE context, and challenges existing knowledge on legitimacy by providing a non-linear, context-dependent, and complex view on legitimation processes. Finally, practical recommendations were formulated for outreach managers, regulators, the government, and prospective companies. These are based on using the legitimacy framework as a diagnostic tool to build specific legitimacy categories.