Empowering Citizens for Circular Economy: a HUMAN-centred law model (“ECCE HUMAN”)

The circular economy is a paradigm shift that intends to combine new business models and digital infrastructure for reaching sustainability in our society. The core idea of the project is to transpose to the legal level the human-centred model that is being pursued for the development of new technologies. Therefore, it is necessary to orient the paradigm transition towards the human needs in term of wellbeing of individuals, empowering their role as citizens, also exploiting the potentiality of digital technologies. In the project’s vision, this means that humans as citizens should become the reference for the legal rules governing the transition to a Sustainable Digital Circular Economy, not merely as consumers of the digital age.

This perspective is in line with the goals promoted by the EU. However, from this point of view, the legal dimension of individuals is often overlooked. But the normative framework cannot resort to old schemes if it wants to follow up properly such a paradigm shift. Actually, the empowerment of citizens in the new society based on a Sustainable Digital Circular Economy risks being incomplete, without a clear set of individual “legal powers” recognized by the law.

The project proposes to fill this gap with its research agenda, in order to re-conceptualize citizens’ rights to meet the new challenges of this paradigm shift.