Bregje van Veelen
Associate senior lecturer
Green and just regional path development
Author
Summary, in English
Path development and path creation are prevalent concepts in efforts to understand regional economic change and innovation. A recent focus has been on ‘green’ path development: industrial change associated with environmentally beneficial products and services. This provides a moment to take stock of the path development literature to date and ask: What or who is it for? In this article we use the concept of just transition to explore ways that (green) path development concepts could be more attuned to concerns for human and environmental well-being as opposed to economic growth and innovation as goals in themselves. Building from Geographical Political Economy approaches and injecting complementary cultural economic and sociological perspectives, we generate a conception of green and just path development. This conception builds a more variegated understanding of path development as a theory of change, focusing on negotiation, struggle, inclusion and exclusion in path development processes, and leaning to a stronger orientation towards outcomes for people and places, especially implications for work and communities. This matters for understanding what the purpose of investigating path development is, and what counts as ‘success’ in evaluating path development processes.
Department/s
- LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)
Publishing year
2023
Language
English
Pages
218-233
Publication/Series
Regional Studies, Regional Science
Volume
10
Issue
1
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Topic
- Human Geography
Keywords
- decarbonization
- diverse economies
- just transition
- path creation
- path development
- regional development
Status
Published
Project
- Changing places of work: A place-based approach for re-imagining work in fossil free industrial towns of the future
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 2168-1376