Enablers and Barriers to Circular Economy Adoption: Insights from a Systematic Literature Review in Business and Management

The Circular Economy (CE) has emerged as a transformative sustainability paradigm, yet the organisational conditions determining CE adoption success remain poorly understood. Existing research treats enablers and barriers as independent variables, producing fragmented guidance of limited practical value. This study provides an integrative, cluster-based framework mapping CE enablers and barriers as dialectically interdependent forces across internal, hybrid, and external organisational contexts. Following PRISMA 2020 protocols and grounded in socio-technical transition theory and dynamic capabilities, the study screens Scopus and Web of Science for peer-reviewed articles published between 2016 and April 2025, retaining 93 studies for bibliometric and thematic analysis. Manual coding identifies nine enabler clusters, digital technologies; organisational and managerial; innovation and product design; supply chain and logistics; policy and institutional; financial and economic; stakeholder and community; education and awareness; and measurement and frameworks, and eight barrier clusters: organisational misalignment; human-capital and knowledge deficits; cultural and behavioural resistance; technical and infrastructural gaps; policy and regulatory barriers; financial constraints; digital divide; and collaboration barriers. A structural paradox emerges: dominant enablers, digital technologies, organisational leadership, and policy support simultaneously generate binding constraints when coherence, readiness, or inter-firm trust are absent. The framework equips managers with a diagnostic tool for circular readiness, provides policymakers with evidence-based priorities, and identifies stakeholder engagement, collaboration, and performance measurement as a structured research agenda. Limitations include restrictions to English-language sources and the time-bound scope.