Value Profiles as Tools to Understand and Guide Societal Decision Making: Applications for Circular Economy Transitions

Complex transitions toward circular economy face implementation challenges despite broad goal support, stemming from conflicting interests and difficulty making values explicit. We present a framework combining decision support methods with participatory approaches to systematically document stakeholders' factual beliefs and value judgments. The framework organizes policy-relevant information as interconnected objects: actions, scenarios, nodes, hypotheses, impacts, and value profiles. We tested this approach by analyzing 18 Finnish parliamentary candidates' responses to environmental policy questions in a voting advice application, documenting their reasoning within the framework structure. Analysis of 36 contributions produced an insight network of 23 nodes and 12 value profiles. The framework distinguished between factual disagreements and value differences, revealing that apparent conflicts often stemmed from different assumptions rather than different values. This distinction enables more focused debate and sense-making. The approach is relevant for circular economy transitions, where multiple stakeholders must coordinate across value chains and complex trade-offs exist between environmental, economic, and social impacts.