Green industry development in different types of regions

ABSTRACT

At the regional level, the imperative of sustainable development often manifests itself in an emphasis on developing green industries. However, regions vary in their preconditions for achieving this. In this paper we link regional preconditions to various pathways for green industry development. This provides the foundation for identifying place-based policy implications for growing green industries in different types of regions, grounded in the emerging perspective in innovation studies on transformative innovation policy. The paper thereby helps to understand the pathways for greening the economy in different regional contexts and how such green pathways can be promoted through policy.     

REGIONALIZING “MODE 2”? THE ADOPTION OF CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE IN SWEDISH RESEARCH POLICY

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the role of university research for innovation and economic growth, a debate highly influenced by concepts such as Mode 2 and regional innovation systems and clusters. A prominent trend in many EU and OECD countries is to direct research funding towards so‐called Centres of Excellence (CoEs) in order to stimulate the industrial output of scientific research. The implementation of the CoE approach is viewed as an attempt to bridge research and innovation policy. By using Sweden as an example and providing an overview and critical discussion concerning Swedish research policy during the period 2001 to 2007 we show that the rhetoric within research policy has changed and become increasingly intertwined with innovation policy. In practice, however, this is not as evident. The study draws on (a) an analysis of policy literature pointing out regulatory and organizational changes concerning the increasing emphasis on linking research to competitive industrial milieus, and (b) a comprehensive database including 110 CoEs, presenting a detailed picture of university‐industry collaboration, cross‐disciplinarity, and prioritized sectors. We fiind that the CoEs account for a relatively small share of government funding, but may however have a strengthening impact on particular research milieus and industries, especially in the life sciences. Additionally, although contemporary policy rhetoric appears to highlight steering funding to geographically‐concentrated milieus, thereby linking leading university research to regional industrial clusters, this has only been manifested in a few cases – notably in the Vinnväxt programme run by Vinnova, the national agency promoting innovation systems.     

The costs of putting Valencia on the map: the hidden side of regional entrepreneurialism, ‘creative city’ and strategic projects

ABSTRACT

Strategic projects based on culture and sports have been one of the vectors of regional development since the 1990s. Accordingly, local and regional governments have drawn up entrepreneurial strategies to project their image internationally and foster investment and tourism. These developments have been described in Spain as ‘The Calatrava Model’ for putting a city/region on the map and for boosting tourism. However, from the study of the case of Valencia and four strategic projects (The Fifth World Meeting of Families, The America's Cup, Formula 1 and The City of Arts and Sciences), we will show how there is a hidden side to this paradigm, which boils down to an unsustainable, top-down system whose sole purpose is to gain and maintain political hegemony. We will also assess the medium and long term impacts of these projects in terms of: opportunity costs, snowballing debt, corruption, and an utter breakdown of democratic controls as a result of Valencia’s poor regional governance.     

THE OUTSIDE AND INSIDE IN NORWEGIAN AND ENGLISH PRISONS

This article is based on our first experiences visiting prisons, and being surprised by the ways in which the inside and outside often seemed indistinct. One of our narratives comes from England, the other from Norway. Our analysis emerges from a recognition that, despite visiting prisons for different research projects in different countries, our experiences in prison spaces shared striking similarities. We had each expected prisons to have clear and demarcated boundaries between inside and outside, consistent with Goffman's binary distinctions in the total institution model. However, this model was not a good fit with our view of prisons, since it did not capture the importance of indistinction. The inside and outside were often entangled and fused with one another, having both distinctions and indistinctions simultaneously. The seemingly incompatible juxtapositions between inside and outside were consistent with the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, as a better fit with our ideas. Our observations improve our understanding of confinement as a dynamic and often contradictory state of be-tweenness. After exploring our personal narratives from visiting prisons, some theoretical implications of the concept of heter-otopia within institutional research are discussed and contrasted to that of total institution.     

In Search of Causality: A Regional Approach to Urban Growth in Eighteenth-century England

The simple equation of industrialisation and urbanisation contains much truth: recent national surveys confirm that rapid coal-based industrial growth spawned massive urban development in Britain. And yet at the local level a wide diversity of growth experiences reflect a complex and overlapping nexus of growth stimuli which defy attempts at generalisation. In taking a regional perspective, this paper seeks to occupy a productive middle ground in this ongoing debate. Placing urban growth in north-west England into its real economic and geographical context, it recognises the complexities of urban growth but transcends the narrowness of the particular. In so doing, it challenges some of the certainties of industrial urbanisation, emphasising instead the importance of rural industry, urban commercial functions and inter-place linkages. Most fundamentally, it argues for a more nuanced understanding of the geography of causality.