Nogueira López, Alba2023-01-242023-01-242022Nogueira, A. Are Soft Legal Measures in Circular Economy Action Plans Enough to Permeate EU Strong Economic Core Regulations Bringing Systemic Sustainable Change?. Circ.Econ.Sust. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43615-022-00227-02730-597Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10347/29994This paper provides a legal assessment of the EU circular economy action plans [2015, 2020] to determine whether their implementation aims at transformative change or is embedded in the prevailing neoliberal ideology. Measures intended to promote the circular economy (CE) are classified according to their public or private nature, the degree of public or private intervention (command and control, economic instruments, information, self-control). It also analyzes how core EU economic policies shield a narrow, technocratic conception of the CEeng© 2022 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Atribución 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Legal measuresCore economic legislationCircular economyEU action plansSoft lawInstruments assessmentjournal article10.1007/s43615-022-00227-02730-5988open access