In light of the escalating breakdown in our climate and the natural world, we need to transition to a circular economy, amongst other fundamental changes. Accelerating this transition requires a systemic shift in how we produce, build and consume, using multiple levers of change. Although law and regulation are often viewed as a barrier to change, they also offer opportunities that can be leveraged to speed up or scale the circular transition. The regulatory system is an often underappreciated societal scale device that can facilitate the shifting of markets and behaviours.
In close collaboration with the City of Amsterdam and a growing coalition of knowledge and funding partners, and building on previous work on regulatory innovation, Dark Matter Labs is working on accelerating the transition to a circular economy by enabling and stimulating more and better use of existing laws and regulations, as well as better understanding regulatory gaps, voids and barriers. This is done through research, exploration and creating of multiple services, including communities of practice and the creation of a legal knowledge platform, circulaw.nl. Policymakers can navigate opportunities and possibilities in existing laws and regulations for different themes, like timber construction and circular wind turbines. The insights are created through systemic legal analysis based on a methodology developed by the CircuLaw team and shared through a comprehensive overview of instruments on the online platform. We help policymakers select and apply those instruments. And we provide insights into the distribution of authority across the multiple levels of government, to enhance collaboration and enable sense-making of where regulatory change will be needed to achieve ambitious transition goals.