Assessing stakeholder engagement to the EU strategy for sustainable and circular textiles: A Systematic review integrating stakeholder and institutional theories

The European Union Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles introduces a policy framework to guide the textile sector towards circularity by 2030. Grounded in Stakeholder and Institutional Theories, this study analyzes how stakeholder responses to coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures influence the potential effectiveness of the Strategy. A PRISMA-based systematic literature review and content analysis of 175 peer-reviewed articles was conducted to classify thematic priorities, stakeholder coverage, and theoretical foundations. Findings strongly emphasize the role of downstream actors, particularly consumers, brands and retailers, while upstream stakeholders receive limited attention. This imbalance appears driven by two factors: the greater accessibility of downstream actors to researchers and their prominence in prevailing sustainability narratives. Strategic actions related to consumer empowerment and business model innovation are frequently discussed, whereas regulatory and production-oriented interventions are comparatively underexplored. The study also identifies differentiated compliance behaviors across stakeholder groups, shaped by their position in the value chain and the institutional pressures they encounter. Downstream actors adopt proactive or strategic responses, while upstream stakeholders often engage reactively, constrained by resource limitations and weaker integration into sustainability dialogues. By clarifying how institutional pressures interact with stakeholder positioning, this review contributes to a more granular understanding of policy alignment in the textile sector. It underscores the need for more inclusive governance approaches that account for underrepresented actors and support the balanced implementation of the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles across all tiers of the value chain.