Whose circular repair economy counts? Four competing discourses of electronics repair.

• Repair's limited success is often explained through barriers, policies and user acceptance. • The study finds four competing political choices related to repair, requiring attention to facilitate systemic thinking. • A focus on barriers, policies and user acceptance may downplay these political choices and limit systemic thinking. • To facilitate such thinking, reflection of repair scholars, practitioners and policymakers is needed on these choices. • Reflection process raises difficult questions about barriers, policies and acceptance for whom and what mode of repair. Policies intended to promote circular economies have recently gained momentum, but the potential of repair, as a key circular strategy, remains untapped. To explain this issue, repair scholars have focussed on three factors: overcoming barriers, developing better policies and identifying user acceptance. However, this paper argues that these approaches may downplay the tensions and choices involved in repair and, consequently, limit the systemic and transformative thinking required for a shift to repair. It therefore illuminates these choices through an empirical analysis of the discourses of electronics repair in Flanders. Four competing discourses are identified, highlighting the difficult, political choices that need to be made. Two discourses of powerful actors, promoting narrow modes of repair, are gaining influence and reproduce specific, established producer-consumer and labour relations. If repair scholars, policymakers and practitioners neglect such political choices, their analyses may embed and incite impoverished modes of repair. To facilitate systemic and transformative thinking, they need to reflect on these choices by asking difficult questions about barriers, policies and user acceptance for whom, for what repair discourse and for what kind of circular repair economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]