From stakeholder mapping to ecosystem orchestration: Participatory action research on circular fashion marketing

Urban areas are experiencing significant changes due to rapid consumption and innovation, leading to urgent demands for sustainable transformation. All these processes can be realized with collaboration among stakeholders, including organizations, institutions, and citizens in the fashion and design sectors. However, the precise roles, responsibilities, and impacts of stakeholders remain unclear. This paper aims to examine how organizations, institutions, and citizens co-develop circular fashion marketing in Milan through a Participatory Action Research design that combines semi-structured stakeholder interviews with secondary qualitative data from the fashion-focused ideathon “Refashioning Milan”. Findings indicated a positive trend among organizations, institutions, and citizens in embracing circularity, with particular emphasis on the integrative role of knowledge institutions in facilitating systemic change. Theoretically, the study extends circular ecosystem and stakeholder engagement theory by explaining how boundary-spanning orchestration, rather than stakeholder participation alone, enables heterogeneous actors to align circularity framings. These insights can extend circular fashion ecosystem and stakeholder engagement research beyond descriptive role mapping and offer actionable implications for multi-actor governance and participatory innovation. We proposed practical recommendations to inform multi-stakeholder governance, entrepreneurship, and innovation strategies for the fashion market, while outlining future research directions for sustaining circular fashion ecosystems.