The transition to circular cities requires whole-scale system reforms, new regulations, investment, and partnerships, as well as a new body of knowledge and capacities. Above all, circular transitions require new forms of democratised innovation so that all actors in cities can benefit from the opportunities that the circular economy will create. In the REFLOW project, collaborative governance was understood as a long-term, systemic process of steering and coordination of all different levers in cities, to allow distributed capacity, legitimacy, and agency for circular change across public and private sectors.

The REFLOW Collaborative Governance Toolkit (RCGT) was developed as a practical guide to design and develop collaborative governance approaches, supporting cities in their circular and regenerative transition. In other words, the toolkit offers an open collection of tools and resources to support collaborative journeys towards circularity. The toolkit is based on the collaborative governance framework, illustrating the open-ended infrastructure process of transforming cities. This process operates at different scopes and scales with different emphases on strategic, operational, and relational aspects. Circular levers, enabling innovation from individual to societal scale, can foster each aspect. These levers, as a set of instruments, can be found in the toolkit and each tool is tagged according to the infrastructures and levers it belongs to. The RCGT comprises fourteen tools with detailed advice of use and theoretical background. Further, the RCGT website provides stories of circular cities using the toolkit to provide inspiration and best practice examples for all actors involved in the circular transition.

The tools:

- Circular Theory of Change: A tool that helps you defining the logic concatenations and connectivity between long-term goals and impacts, outcomes, outputs and activities.

- Circular Mission Wave: A tool that helps you define and visualize a mission-oriented transition to circular and regenerative cities based on a systemic and long-term approach of intervention.

- Circular Challenges & Opportunities: A tool that helps collaborative brainstorming on circular challenges and opportunities, as well as their prioritization for action.

- City Portrait Canvas: Inspired by the four lenses of the City Portrait, this canvas helps understand how to assess city strategies, policies, and programmes in a holistic way, integrating environmental, social and economic, as well as local and global considerations.

- Circular Experiment Deployment Canvas: A tool that helps you and your team in defining, planning and resourcing a circular experiment towards impact.

- Circular Experiment Canvas: A tool that helps you and your team in designing the key characteristics of a circular experiment and to carry them forward into iterative cycles, towards a more detailed delivery plan.

- Circular Portfolio Canvas: A visual tool that helps you and your team in scaffolding circular activities and experiments across different horizons of time, and to reflect on ‘’connectivity’’ and ‘’linkages’’ towards higher ambitions of circular and regenerative cities.

- Map & Visualise Circular Ecosystem (Kumu): A tool that allows dynamic mapping and visualization of your circular ecosystem, including stakeholders, individuals and circular initiatives and projects.

- Circular Team: A combination of tools that support the definition of circular teams and the overall decision-making path.

- Matrix of Circular Collaboration: A tool that facilitates coordination, matchmaking and collaboration across different circular projects and initiatives.

- Circular Loops Diagram: A diagram that helps you mapping the specific value chains and actions to form circular loops and drive systems change. 

- Backcasting Diagram: A diagram that helps you redesign the local ecosystem starting from a previous identified circular loop (you can first work on the Circular Loops diagram if you don’t already have one).

- Circular Business Model Canvas: The circular business model canvas integrates buildings blocks from the generic business model canvas, while highlighting additional aspects making your business circular.

During the development-process of circular solutions, all pilot cities designed and illustrated their ideas, and made use of the regenerative governance tools such as the circular business model canvas. Throughout the process of the project, each pilot city set performance goals with particular focus on joint activities to reach these. To validate and refine the causal pathways within each pilot, recurring iterations were conducted based on the circular theory of change.