The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is partnering with the United Arab Emirates to co-design a national policy framework for textiles circularity, marking a step forward in the Gulf nation’s push toward a circular economy for fashion and apparel. The London-based nonprofit’s involvement forms part of the country’s wider Naseej initiative, a Presidential-level programme to create a circular economy for fashion and textiles.
The Naseej initiative aims to move the sector beyond linear consumption and disposal toward an integrated model that preserves resources, captures economic value, and aligns its sustainability goals with long-term national development.
The Foundation said its current strategic focus is on real-world implementation, engaging more directly with projects on the ground across its three missions of plastics and packaging, critical minerals, and fashion and textiles, to create learnings that help scale circular economy solutions. The UAE collaboration, in which the Foundation will help identify policy instruments to support circular outcomes, was cited as a direct example of that approach.
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The organisation said it is drawing on prior policy work to inform the UAE effort, pointing to a central role in shaping the EU Textile Strategy and extended producer responsibility design across multiple jurisdictions as relevant experience it now intends to apply to the Gulf context, alongside insights from its wider network on the opportunities and challenges of circular implementation in fashion and textiles in the UAE and beyond.
Jocelyn Bleriot, the Foundation’s Policy and Institutions Executive Lead, framed the UAE’s trading position as central to the initiative’s potential impact. According to Bleriot, the UAE holds an important place in global textile flows, notably as a re-export and trade hub, and that position creates a meaningful opportunity to put the country’s circular economy ambitions into practice.
Bleriot added that a successful policy framework in the country could serve as a replicable model for other countries in the Gulf and the wider Global South, where circular economy policy potential for textiles remains largely untapped.
The announcement, published August 12, positions the UAE as a potential proving ground for textile circularity policy in a region where such frameworks have so far lagged the EU’s more developed regulatory push, including extended producer responsibility schemes and the bloc’s broader textile strategy.
The Foundation’s emphasis on the UAE’s re-export role suggests policymakers see leverage in shaping practices at a major transit node for apparel and textile goods, rather than only at points of domestic production or consumption.