EXTERNAL ENABLERS OF COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE ACTORS ENGAGING IN THE CIRCULARECONOMY

The circular economy has emerged as a tool for addressing the current linear economic system, producing massive amounts waste and exacerbating climate change. During the recent crises and instabilities, the potential of the circular economy has been further highlighted.However, the concept remains undefined, and little is known of its implementation inpractice. This thesis explores the circular economy and its implementation among six Swedish commercial real estate actors, through interviews and an investigation of their official documents, with the aim of discovering signs of the circular economy, how those signs have emerged and the knowledge and capabilities necessary to capitalize on them. The External Enablers Framework by Davidsson et al. (2020) is used to find the external enablers thatfacilitate a shift towards more circular business practices. The thesis discovers multiple signs of circularity in the empirical material, in targets, strategies and activities. It also identifies several external enablers potentially impacting the implementation of circular activities in existing real estate ventures, such as collaboration networks, climate change awareness andthe recent crises and instabilities. The real estate actors themselves also potentially influence the industry around them towards circularity, in an ecosystem of enablement