The MUSA Model: A Social Sustainability Analysis of Circular Economy for Smallholder Farmers and stakeholders in Cundinamarca, Colombia

The Circular Economy (CE) has become a relevant framework for reconciling economic activity with ecological limits, yet its scholarship and practice have concentrated on technological efficiency and business model innovation while treating social outcomes as an assumed by-product rather than as a dimension requiring analysis. Empirical case study research connecting CE to social sustainability remains scarce, and scarcer still in Latin America. This thesis addresses that gap through an exploratory qualitative case study of the MUSA model, a design-stage proposal for an agro-industrial symbiosis system organising smallholder banana and plantain production into agroecological cooperatives in the Magdalena Centro, Cundinamarca, Colombia. The findings show that stakeholders do not doubt the social sustainability of a cooperative circular model in principle, they credit what collective organisation produces, including bargaining power, price stability and peer-to-peer learning. What they doubt are the conditions of delivery: institutional continuity, the terms of compensation, and the fit between the model and territorial conditions. The study concludes that social sustainability in this context depends less on the ambition of a proposal than on the consistency with which it is sustained.