Multilevel governance and strategic planning: supralocal governments influencing local circular economy adoption

Local governments use strategic planning (SP) to address grand challenges like climate change. More and more local governments adopt the circular economy (CE) into their climate strategies to reduce their impact. The CE requires collaboration among different levels of government. However, there is little research considering multiple government levels in the CE transition. At the same time, the SP literature has ignored the multilevel governance (MLG) setting in which local SP takes place. Therefore, we study if supralocal governments influence the adoption of the CE in local SP for climate change and, if so, how they influence the local SP. Supralocal governments are found to have influenced the CE adoption in climate strategies of Flemish local governments. Moreover, interviews showed their influence on both the SP content, process, and implementation. These results highlight the importance of considering the MLG context in which local SP takes place and the influence of supralocal governments.