Social circular economy for sustainable development in European Union member countries: a fuzzy logic-based evaluation

Although the concept of circular economy is a frequently encountered effective tool of sustainable development, its social dimension, the social circular economy, is a topic that has only begun to be discussed. Assessing the social circular economy performance of European Union countries from the sustainable development perspective is critical for monitoring their progress. In this study, a model that evaluates the social circular economy performances of countries for sustainable development is proposed. The importance weights of the evaluation criteria are determined using the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy VIKOR method’s linguistic scale. Then, the countries are ranked using the grey relational analysis method. In this study, the social circular economy performance of EU member states for 2021 are investigated with the proposed model. According to the results obtained, social circular economy performances are directly proportional to the success of countries in achieving sustainable development goals. The success rating achieved in this study may vary with the improvement activities of the relevant countries. The proposed model updates the ranking, considering each improvement. The findings of this study can help scholars and policymakers better understand the social circularity capabilities of the European Union member countries in the context of sustainable development. In the limited literature, there is no other study in which the social circular economy performance of EU member countries is measured with the relevant evaluation criteria. A model that can evaluate the social circular economy performances of the European Union member countries is proposed to fill the profound gap in this field. We contributed to the literature with a new model that differs with evaluation criteria, real and current data sets. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024.