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Introduction
Publications
Publications (131)
In today’s world of increasing spatial inequalities, geopolitical tensions and global shifts in value chains, having a solid grasp of the spatial and multi-scalar dynamics that condition transition dynamics is of ever more importance. Initial theories of sustainability transitions have been criticized for being insufficiently equipped to assess the...
The paper addresses tensions in organizing civil society activities in urban sustainability transitions. It argues that these activities need focus to be impactful while also demanding flexibility to remain adaptive. The latter can hardly be achieved by individual organizations alone but requires closer examination of the ecology of organizations i...
The “circular city” is a recent addition to a string of urban sustainability concepts that call for transformative changes in the way we plan, build and (re-)shape cities. However, it is often criticised for its ambiguity. Experimentation is a prevalent mode of urban governance for realising transformative ambitions in the face of deep uncertainty...
The growing attention to the political goal of achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century reflects past failures to alter the trajectory of GHG emissions. As a consequence the world now needs to decarbonize all economic sectors at unprecedented pace. This commentary discusses how the net-zero challenge presents transition scholarship with four enh...
This article explores underlying mechanisms triggering a change in conceptualization of innovation in the European Union (EU), the impact of this change on institutional demands upon European universities and implications for evaluation procedures. We mobilize the theoretical concept of critical junctures to explore significant periods that have af...
This article explores underlying mechanisms triggering a change in conceptualization of innovation in the European Union (EU), the impact of this change on institutional demands upon European universities and implications for evaluation procedures. We mobilize the theoretical concept of critical junctures to explore significant periods that have af...
The urgency of reduction of emissions as a key action to address the climate crisis has led to increasing focus on the importance of ending the use of fossil fuels, specifically through closure of coal-fired electricity generation. Given the common geographic concentration of such facilities, and of their workers, in specific communities, the prosp...
Research and innovation policies (IPs) across Europe, particularly in Sweden, are increasingly framed by an orientation towards societal challenges, missions, and transformative change. Innovation-funding agencies are adapting to these new approaches but struggle with a host of new questions and challenges on how to re-structure public policy inter...
This report introduces a tested reflection framework addressed to policy practitioners and experts working in regions and countries willing to strengthen the sustainability dimension of their smart specialisation strategies. The framework features reflection questions based on extensive theoretical research and tested in practice. The questions are...
Experimentation has become one of the prevailing modes of governing the transition toward sustainable practices in urban environments. The spatial variation of urban sustainability transition has been attributed to a variety of conditions erected at different spatial scales. What remains less well-understood is how spatial situatedness shapes agenc...
Innovation is high on the agenda for decision-makers in urban policy and planning. With the rise of innovation districts, cities have seen entire precincts being dedicated to facilitating and boosting innovation. The aim of this paper is to better understand the potential of innovation districts for transformative innovation policy aligning innovat...
Considering intractable uncertainties and the wicked nature of many sustainability challenges, there is a need to both forecast and assess the potential for improvements in sustainability with new ventures. While it is tempting to think of forecasting in terms of ‘predicting outcomes’, such an interpretation assumes a causal logic, failing to ackno...
Universities are increasingly recognized for playing a proactive role in supporting culture and creativity-led regional development. Meanwhile, they are also expected to distinguish themselves in their core activities via mission differentiation. Often these two demands are pitched against each other while little attention has been paid to the way...
Automobility, including the infrastructures, technologies and institutions that created high dependence on private car use, has led to significant environmental and climate problems and notably high carbon emissions. Now cities are attempting to move beyond this failed regime by experimenting with a range of different mobility innovations. In this...
This article describes and analyzes the transfer of smart specialization (S3) from Europe, where it originated, to Gippsland, Australia. It identifies factors that are likely to enhance and, on the other hand, diminish the contribution of S3 to development in this region, and, more generally, to peripheral regions around the world. The policy mobil...
Under pressure from fiscal austerity measures, rapidly rising housing prices and growing wealth disparities, cities are increasingly unable to meet the need for affordable and accessible housing for their citizens. Across many regions, including Australia, the UK, the US and much of mainland Europe, responsibility for the delivery of this housing i...
Cities are considered key sites where innovation can be nurtured to drive sustainability transitions. While existing studies recognise that transitions occur unevenly across space and time, predominant theories of change offer limited understanding of the geographical conditions shaping whether and how low-carbon innovations are scaled. As sustaina...
This viewpoint identifies three interrelated transition imperatives to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 – increasing the speed, scope and level of decarbonization. First, the urgency of climate action places temporality and radically accelerated sociotechnical change at the heart of the net-zero 2050 challenge. Second, the net-zero challenge impl...
This study assesses the entrepreneurial potential and feasibility of developing a mobile system for purifying and bottling biogas in portable cylinders for wider society consumption and benefit. Our findings reveal that existing research has neglected the entrepreneurial potential in biogas energy that could increase energy supply and access in dev...
This paper focuses on the interaction between political and cognitive lock-in in stalling attempts at regional renewal of old industrial regions. It draws on analysis of the city of Anchorage, Alaska. The decline of the oil industry has been followed by a gridlock: a pattern of being stuck and polarized. This gridlock is caused by a particular type...
Building from two strands of literature within "Sociotechnical agendas: Reviewing future directions for energy and climate research", this perspective piece seeks to open a discussion about how to responsibly accelerate transitions. First, we identify a managerial literature on how innovation and diffusion can be accelerated, which focuses on delib...
Due to a spatial turn in the socio-technical transition literature, the geography of energy transitions has recently been taken increasingly seriously, leading to burgeoning research output on regional energy transitions since early 2010. Amidst this wealth of publications, however, it can be difficult to keep track of its diverse and constantly ev...
The aim of this paper has been to explore, in depth, the place-based conditions enabling and constraining the directionality of responsible innovation in the Tasmanian salmon farming industry, and to discuss how this case can inform the broader literature on directionality of innovations. Theoretically, we argue that the combination of literature o...
Climate change is one of the most challenging environmental and social problems for contemporary urban planning. In response to this phenomenon, city networks have emerged as new configurations of urban climate governance that encourage the implementation of experiments such as testing new solutions regarding sustainable transport. While city netwo...
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are heralded as tools to address and tackle a variety of socio-ecological challenges. NBS are increasingly discussed as a response to shocks and stresses such as loss of biodiversity, air pollution, heat waves, flooding, droughts; and issues around residents' health and wellbeing. In recognition of these multiple functi...
Established urban policy and planning approaches are ill-equipped to deal with the wicked nature of urban resilience problems and challenges. To break down bureaucratic silos and foster transformative change, ‘governance experiments’ are heralded as promising platforms for testing new ways of collaboration and urban innovation. This paper introduce...
One of the central, flagship actions of the Resilient Melbourne Strategy has been the development of a metropolitan urban forest strategy, called ‘Living Melbourne’. Its explicitly metropolitan scope has been one of the distinct features of Resilient Melbourne, established through the global city network 100 Resilient Cities, pioneered by the Rocke...
This viewpoint takes stock with the 'geography of sustainability transitions' (GOST) as it is presented in the transitions research agenda. GOST has been a relatively recent addition to transition theorizing, addressing the need for greater sensitivity and attention to the scales, spatialities, and context-specific factors that shape transitions. I...
Theory development on the geographies of innovation has been very successful in incorporating the changing patterns of knowledge dynamics due to globalization, lifting the gaze beyond processes of localized learning and increasingly acknowledging the multilevel, multiscalar governance of innovation. Arguably less attention has been directed to the...
In the last decade, there has been a marked growth in formalised city networks. City networks of late have transcended beyond municipal collaborations towards more complex networked governance arrangements. City networks are noted also to raise the level of ambition among cities learning from and competing with each other with regard to the deploym...
The responses by Acuto, Frantzeskaki, Gordon & Johnson, Pinault and Smeds all draw attention to the need to situate C40 in a wider political and economic context. Global city networks such as C40 facilitate, orchestrate, test and diffuse critical innovations for urban climate action through processes of experimentation. How these processes of on‐th...
Since the early 1990s, social scientists and policy‐makers have been paying increasing attention to regions as designated sites of innovation. The popularity of this argument can be traced back to a number of regional success stories such as Silicon Valley or the industrial districts in the Third Italy as well as Michael Porter's work on clusters....
Networked urban governance is emerging as a major feature of metropolitan strategy and activity. The field of urban studies is yet to deeply engage in the debates on the new forms of cross national networking that are potentially framing and reframing urban governance and strategy. Yet this dimension of urban governance can no longer go unnoticed....
More and more cities are developing strategies and implementing actions to increase their resilience to a diversity of environmental, social and economic challenges. International networks such as 100 Resilient Cities, established by the Rockefeller Foundation, are supporting cities to find and implement solutions to ‘shocks and stresses.’ This new...
More and more cities are developing strategies and implementing actions to increase their resilience to a diversity of environmental, social and economic challenges. International networks such as 100 Resilient Cities, established by the Rockefeller Foundation, are supporting cities to find and implement solutions to 'shocks and stresses.' This new...
This paper is a record of the 2018 MSSI Oration delivered by Professor Lars Coenen for the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute on Tuesday 20 November 2018, at the University of Melbourne.
This special issue deals with various research questions regarding the impact of urban experimentation on transitions towards sustainability in different industries and sectors. Cities have been identified to play a vital role for sustainability transitions. Not only are they places with an increased urgency for change, but they also bring about ma...
The orientation towards grand societal challenges can be seen as a new wave or paradigm for innovation policy. Such policy aims at system-wide transformation and is often referred to as system innovation policy. While insights from transition studies have provided novel and useful rationales for innovation policy targeting system-wide transformatio...
Urban Living Labs (ULL) are considered spaces to facilitate experimentation about sustainability solutions. ULL represent sites that allow different urban actors to design, test and learn from socio-technical innovations. However, despite their recent proliferation in the European policy sphere, the underlying processes through which ULL might be a...
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in innovation studies towards grand challenges , and in how demand-side policy instruments can supplement traditional supply-side policy measures. To contribute to an improved understanding of how demand-side policy requires new governance responses, this article presents a case study of triall...
This chapter aims to better understand the implications of transformative change for regional innovation systems (RIS) research and policy by looking more closely into processes of structural change within coal regions against a context of transitions to a low-carbon future. Case studies of Germany’s Ruhr and Australia’s Latrobe Valley are used to...
Regenerative development is a whole systems approach that partners people and their places, working to make both people and nature stronger, more vibrant and more resilient. It aims to increase the vitality, viability and adaptability of a place through understanding its story, its flows and how developing positive relationships enhance the potenti...
The need to view innovation policy through the lens of policy mixes has gained momentum given the growing complexity and the dynamics of real-world policy, and the wide array of difficulties to address the current great societal challenges, notably the increasing pressure on the ecosystems that support our society. One of the main challenges concer...
Energy-intensive processing industries (EPIs) produce iron and steel, aluminum, chemicals, cement, glass, and paper and pulp and are responsible for a large share of global greenhouse gas emissions. To meet 2050 emission targets, an accelerated transition towards deep decarbonization is required in these industries. Insights from sociotechnical and...
Debates on how to address societal challenges have moved to the forefront of academic and policy concerns. Of particular importance is the growing awareness that to deal with issues such as ageing, it will be necessary to implement concerted efforts on technological, social, institutional or political fronts. Drawing on a number of theoretical pers...
This article provides an overview of the literature on demonstration projects and trials, and accounts for how insights drawn from this literature can contribute to the development of a sustainable bioeconomy. The article reviews the literature on demonstration projects and trials, covering both more broad-based studies on demonstration projects ma...
The concept of a bioeconomy can be understood as an economy where the basic building blocks for materials, chemicals, and energy are derived from renewable biological resources. Biorefineries are considered an integral part of the development toward a future sustainable bioeconomy. The purpose of this literature review is to synthesize current know...
Towards a theory of regional diversification: combining insights from Evolutionary Economic Geography and Transition Studies. Regional Studies. This paper develops a theoretical framework of regional diversification by combining insights from Evolutionary Economic Geography and Transition Studies. It argues that a theory of regional diversification...
This paper unpacks resource mobilisation for biorefineries by studying investment decisions of incumbent pulp and paper firms in Sweden and Finland. The analysis highlights that the limited adoption of biorefinery technologies can be attributed to both insufficient abilities (lack of needed competencies and partnerships) and interests (preference f...
Urban Living Labs (ULL) are advanced as an explicit form of intervention delivering sustainability goals for cities. Established at the boundaries between research, innovation and policy, ULL are intended to design, demonstrate and learn about the effects of urban interventions in real time. While rapidly growing as an empirical phenomenon, our und...
Energy-intensive processing industries (EPIs) such as iron and steel, aluminum, chemicals, cement, glass, and paper and pulp are responsible for a large share of global greenhouse gas emissions. To meet 2050 emission targets, a transition to low carbon, often radical innovations is required, but this process is going slow. Insights from sociotechni...
This report provides an overview of visions, scenarios and road maps for the circular bioeconomy in Scandinavia. The report is a part of the SusValueWaste Project, which aims to address the potential for value added, and improved sustainability in the valorisation of organic waste streams, residual feedstock and by-products by analysing value chain...
The evolutionary turn in economic geography has shed new light on historically contingent regional preconditions for innovation and economic growth, which has the potential of improving the analytical input to regional innovation system approaches. Evolutionary economic geography has renewed interest in and sharpened the conceptual lens on firms, t...
Where and how new industrial paths emerge are much debated questions in economic geography, especially in light of the recent evolutionary turn. This article contributes to the ongoing debate on path creation with a new analytical framework that specifies the formation of generic resources in embryonic industries. It suggests that path creation pro...
Grand challenges such as climate change, ageing societies and food security feature prominently on the agenda of policymakers at all scales, from the EU down to local and regional authorities. These are challenges that require the input and collaboration of a diverse set of societal stakeholders to combine different sources of knowledge in new and...
Highlights: The aim of this commentary is to discuss how to engage analytically with the changing spatial realities of clean-tech sectors and TIS. The commentary argues for a situated rather than a descriptive notion of context in TIS studies. The commentary suggests how concepts and mechanisms from economic geography can be incorporated into TIS r...
Over the past decades, a systemic perspective on innovation (Freeman, 1987) has been highly influential not only to study conditions and processes of innovation at the level of regions, nations, industries and technological fields but also to inform policy-making and enable policy-analysis (Smits & Kuhlmann, 2004). In such analysis, most attention...
This paper analyses the potential, barriers and limitations for regional innovation policy to facilitate industrial renewal in old industrial regions. It draws on a case analysis of the policy programme ‘Biorefinery of the Future’ geared to promote renewal of the forest industry in Northern Sweden. It is shown that infusion of radical emergent tech...
This review covers the recent literature on the geography of sustainability transitions and takes stock with achieved theoretical and empirical insights. The review synthesises and reflects upon insights of relevance for sustainability transitions following from analyses of the importance of place specificity and the geography of inter-organisation...
According to some scholars in evolutionary economic geography (EEG), the role of (territory-specific) institutions is relatively small for explaining where a new industry emerges and grows as firms develop routines in a path-dependent and idiosyncratic manner. This article evaluates this assertion by studying the evolution of the biogas industry in...
This report is a literature review on the role of policy instruments for a sustainable and competitive pulp and paper industry.
The paper ca be retrieved at: http://www.nifu.no/files/2014/02/NIFUarbeidsnotat2013-19B.pdf
Studies on technological innovation systems (TISs) often set spatial boundaries at the national level and treat supranational levels as a geographically undifferentiated and freely accessible global technological opportunity set. This article criticizes this conceptualization and proposes instead to analyze relevant actors, networks and processes i...
Despite increased awareness of the urgency to respond to climate change and to promote sustainable development, there are few powerful initiatives that are decisively shifting urban development in a sustainable, resilient and low-carbon direction. This Special Volume of the Journal of Cleaner Production explores sustainable urban transformation foc...
Norway has built up a remarkable solar photovoltaic (PV) industry over the last 15 years with central industrial players such as the Renewable Energy Corporation Group and Elkem. Norwegian companies are mainly active in manufacturing materials for solar cells, but also other elements of the value chain for solar PVs, such as manufacturing of solar...
The article discusses the strategic roles of public policy and institutions and the way this effect to the efficiency of regional innovation systems in the landscape of evolutionary economic geography. It argues that the current emphasis on path dependency historically contingent preconditions has provided important insights into the interdependenc...
The article discusses the strategic roles of public policy and institutions and the way this effect to the efficiency of regional innovation systems in the landscape of evolutionary economic geography. It argues that the current emphasis on path dependency historically contingent preconditions has provided important insights into the interdependenc...
In the past decade, the literature on transitions towards sustainable socio-technical systems has made a considerable contribution in understanding the complex and multi-dimensional shifts considered necessary to adapt societies and economies to sustainable modes of production and consumption. However, transition analyses have often neglected where...
Attention is drawn to the dynamic interaction between what different kinds of
actors do and what can be observed at the system level. It aims to provide a closer look at how strategies, resources and capabilities of individuals, firms and other organizations impact the overall system and trigger transformation processes, and how these changes at th...
TRUFFER B. and COENEN L. Environmental innovation and sustainability transitions in regional studies, Regional Studies. Sustainable development and environmental innovations have received increasing attention in regional studies and the related literature. In how far sustainability concerns might also lead to fundamental transformations in technolo...
This news item provides a brief report of the second International Conference on Sustainability Transitions which was held in Lund, Sweden, June 2011.