Unveiling the gaps in circular economy performance assessment: a research agenda

The circular economy (CE) paradigm has garnered significant attention in recent years as a response to escalating pollution, the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and the urgent imperative for sustainable development. These global challenges are largely intensified by industrial activities, prompting companies, particularly within the manufacturing sector, to adopt CE strategies such as recycling, reuse, remanufacturing, product-service systems, and disassembly. This sector-specific implementation of CE is commonly referred to as circular manufacturing. Despite the growing adoption of CE principles, substantial gaps remain in how CE performance assessment is conceptualized and measured, with limited guidance available to support future research. To address this issue, this paper conducts a systematic literature review aimed at identifying, categorizing, and prioritizing the main research gaps in CE performance assessment methods. The analysis reveals five key categories of gaps: Scalability and application, Indicator development, Methodological gaps, Social dimension, and Data limitations. Based on a criticality assessment of these categories, a research agenda has been developed to guide future investigations. This study contributes theoretically by systematizing existing knowledge, proposing a structured research agenda based on the relevance and frequency of the identified gaps, and highlighting the interdependencies among them that hinder the development of comprehensive CE assessment frameworks. In doing so, it offers actionable insights for researchers by identifying the most pressing areas for investigation, and for practitioners by highlighting challenges in data collection for performance evaluation. It also provides guidance for policymakers by suggesting directions to support CE performance evaluation at the macro level. Ultimately, this work underscores the need to develop effective and measurable CE performance assessment methods applicable across different levels of analysis in industrial contexts supporting practitioners in accelerating the transition to CE.