Substitution or overlap? The relations between geographical and non-spatial proximity dimensions in collaborative innovation projects.

Traditionally, economic geographers stress geographical proximity's positive impact on collaboration processes. However, effects of cognitive, organizational, social and institutional proximity dimensions have been emphasized recently. This paper examines the relations between geography and these non-spatial dimensions by distinguishing two mechanisms: the substitution mechanism, where non-spatial forms of proximity substitute for geographical proximity; and the overlap mechanism, where geographical proximity facilitates non-spatial proximity. The two mechanisms’ importance is analysed in collaborative innovation projects in the Danish cleantech industry. Regression models are complemented by a qualitative analysis of the relationship between the geographical and institutional dimensions

The Geography of Sustainability Transitions: Review, Synthesis and Reflections on an Emergent Research Field.

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-organisational relations. It is found that these contributions focus on the geography of niche development rather than regime dynamics, and that there is an emphasis on understanding the importance of place-specificity at the local level. While there is a wide consensus that place-specificity matters there is still little generalisable knowledge about how place-specificity matters for transitions. Most contributions add spatial sensitivity to frameworks from the transitions literature, but few studies suggest alternative frameworks to study sustainability transitions. To address this, the review suggests promising avenues for future research on the geography of sustainability transitions, drawing on recent theoretical advancements in economic geography

Interdisciplinary research and geography: Overcoming barriers through proximity

Contributions on interdisciplinary research have so far focused on barriers to such collaborations and strategies for overcoming these. In this paper, we propose that a geographical perspective contributes to understand the formation of successful interdisciplinary research collaborations. The empirical analysis of a centre for clinical cancer research illustrates the importance of considering the role of geographical proximity to collaborators and decision-makers, as well as the co-location of excellent research groups within different fields, in overcoming barriers to interdisciplinary research. We suggest that policies aimed at stimulating lasting interdisciplinary research collaborations should take the distance between collaborators into account

Exploring alternative economic pathways: a comparison of foundational economy and Doughnut economics

A number of intersecting crises are currently ongoing at multiple scales, including increasing inequality, environmental degradation, and climate destabilization, as well as new surges of populism and mounting public health threats. These emergencies question our economic model of past decades and provoke a rethinking of the general approach to economic policy from a multi-scalar perspective. In this article, we compare two approaches aiming to rethink economic development policy: foundational economy and Doughnut economics, and consider if and how they complement each other. We conclude that the two approaches are potentially complementary, most prominently in their call for high-income countries to refocus from growth per se to purpose-driven economic strategies that prioritize public services and redistribute incomes. However, they differ in respect to their geographical focus, environmental concerns, and application. To properly address tradeoffs between social needs and environmental effects, foundational scholarship would benefit from deeper engagement with the socioenvironmental perspective presented in Doughnut economics, which stresses the need to consider human-nature interlinkages. In sum, combining different aspects of the two approaches promises to provide a more robust response to contemporary challenges, especially for local policy making.publishedVersio

Building communities in times of crisis - Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work of transition intermediaries in the energy sector

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic affects people worldwide. The policies in response to the virus range from closure of national borders to curfews for entire metropolises, like Paris. While we can expect severe impacts on the world economy, the consequences of the pandemic for local sustainability transitions are entirely unclear. In this exploratory study, we investigate how the current situation affects the work of transition intermediaries in the energy sector. More concretely, we aim to analyse the impact of COVID-19 policies on community energy projects and the subsequent change of work practices of intermediaries in this situation. Our data consists of qualitative data we collected between January and October 2020. Our results show that transition intermediaries are affected in different ways. Most notably, the work on networking suffers during these times of crisis. We found that intermediaries are particularly challenged in their ability to build trust. This particularly affects new and complex community energy projects and intermediation activities needed for systemic change. We found that established projects with a strong trust base are least affected by these limitations. Intermediaries dependent on private funding face much bigger problems than publically funded organisations. Our results offer some novel and relevant insights in the role and work of transition intermediaries and the development of community energy projects in times of crisis. These findings can help governments, intermediary organizations and citizen groups to design future transition processes in ways that are more resilient to external shocks

Unpacking resource mobilisation by incumbents for biorefineries: The role of micro-level factors for technological innovation system weaknesses

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 for improving existing technologies) by pulp and paper incumbents. Drawing on the technological innovation system perspective complemented with insights from the management literature on the role of incumbents in technological change, four issues are empirically identified as important for improving resource mobilisation for biorefinery technologies: establishing loosely coupled divisions in pulp and paper firms; creating internal markets for new bioproducts aimed at further technological development; entering purchasing agreements with downstream actors; and investing in new managerial competencies

Assessing the feasibility of archetypal transition pathways towards carbon neutrality – A comparative analysis of European industries

Analyses of the future for manufacturing and heavy industries in a climate constrained world many times focus on technological innovations in the early stages of the value chain, assuming few significant changes are plausible, wanted, or necessary throughout the rest of the value chain. Complex questions about competing interests, different ways of organising resource management, production, consumption, and integrating value chains are thus closed down to ones about efficiencies, pay-back times, and primary processing technologies. In this analysis, we move beyond this to identify archetypal pathways that span across value chains in four emissions intensive industries: plastics, steel, pulp and paper, and meat and dairy. The pathways as presented in the present paper were inductively identified in a multi-stage process throughout a four-year European research project. The identified archetypal pathways are i) production and end-use optimisation, ii) electrification with CCU, iii) CCS, iv) circular material flows, and v) diversification of bio-feedstock use. The pathways are at different stages of maturity and furthermore their maturity vary across sectors. The pathways show that decarbonisation is likely to force value chains to cross over traditional boundaries. This implies that an integrated industrial and climate policy must handle both sectoral specificities and commonalities for decarbonised industrial development.publishedVersio

Can foundational economy save regions in crisis?

We perform, to our best knowledge, the first systematic mapping of the foundational economy (FE) at the sub-national level by looking at the FE employment in Swedish regions between 2007 and 2016. We show that the FE itself not only suffered less than traded activities from employment decline during the Great Recession of 2007–2009 but was also a domain of substantial job creation in the post-crisis recovery. At the same time, regions with higher dependence on foundational employment were hit harder during the crisis in terms of overall labour market performance. We demonstrate that it is specific compositions of foundational and traded activities in the regional employment mix that relate differently to regional employment growth in times of crisis and recovery. Jointly, these findings allow us to contribute to the literatures on the FE and regional resilience.publishedVersio

Knowledge recombination for emerging technological innovations: The case of green shipping

The paper explores knowledge recombination by analysing how knowledge networks in established technological fields influenced the formation of the emerging field of green shipping in the period 2007–2018. Previous research has demonstrated that embeddedness, proximity, and status are important mechanisms for the evolution of single technological fields. We investigate if these mechanisms also apply across technological fields. By employing dynamic social network analysis models, we find that actors transferred knowledge across technological fields through (re)combination mechanisms, which affected the emergence of the new technological field, but in different ways. While embeddedness and proximity played an important role, status was less important.publishedVersio