Assessment of symmetries and asymmetries on barriers to circular economy adoption in the construction industry: A survey of international experts

This study evaluates simultaneously the symmetries and asymmetries on the classification of barriers to circular economy (CE) adoption in the building construction industry (BCI) of developing and developed economies. This is crucial because the vagueness of the impacts of CE barriers in extant studies affects encyclopaedic and specific CE policy formulation. Consequently, feedbacks from 140 CE experts across 39 developing and developed economies were analysed. Fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) was deployed to objectively determine the significant impacts of the barriers, whereas the Mann-Whitney U test was applied to identify significant differences in experts' opinions between the two economies. The FSE results indicated that organizational, information technology, and infrastructures and logistics barriers are the most critical to global CE adoption. The Mann-Whitney U test reveals a significant difference in the experts’ perspectives between developing and developed economies on regulatory, information technology, and economic and market barriers. Therefore, they are perceived as specific barriers as they impact CE adoption in BCI differently across the two economies. However, infrastructure and logistics, and organizational barriers are classified as general barriers. The findings of this study underscored the contextuality of barriers to CE adoption in BCI and demonstrated the need for generic and specific policy development. Also, the significance indices of the classification of the barriers using FSE serve as an allocative function that will help policymakers and stakeholders allocate requisite resources to the most profound barriers to achieving global systemic circularity and zero construction waste.