Regional Studies (SSCI)

影响因子：4.672

JCR分区：

Q1, ECONOMICS, 45/376

Q1, ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, 31/125

Q1, GEOGRAPHY, 17/85

Q1, REGIONAL & URBAN PLANNING, 9/40

中科院分区：

经济学2区

 

期刊平均接收率：18%

第一轮审稿周期：89天

 

https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cres20

 

Rethinking regional development under the imperative of environmental and socio-economic sustainability

 

Silvia Rita Sedita  

University of Padova

silvia.sedita@unipd.it

 

Lars Coenen (Western Norway University of Applied Sciences; University of Oslo; University of Melbourne)

lars.coenen@hvl.no

 

Dieter F. Kogler

 (University College Dublin)

dieter.kogler@ucd.ie

 

Abstract deadline: 03 May 2022

Manuscript deadline: 31 August 2022

 

https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/rethinking-regional-development/?_gl=1*1nvk89m*_ga*MTkwOTg1ODc5MC4xNjQ5NjAzNDA1*_ga_0HYE8YG0M6*MTY0OTYwMzQwNS4xLjEuMTY0OTYwMzUwMC4w#?utm_source=CPB&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JPG15743 

 

Social and environmental sustainability issues are increasingly considered pivotal for shaping future trajectories of regional development and can be analysed under a variety of perspectives: innovation governance, management and process, organisational forms and business strategies, the institutional setting and the consumption angle. A cross-disciplinary approach is needed to create the basis of a theoretical and empirical understanding of how to include social and environmental concerns into consolidated trajectories of regional development. The aim of the special issue is to cover four areas of research, which remain unresolved and require further attention.

 

· First, sustainability-oriented innovation and technology studies have received increasing attention over the past 10 to 15 years. The prevalence  of sustainable innovation management and governance is growing both in practice and in academia. Sustainable innovation entails the development and implementation of a radically new or significantly improved technical, organisational, business-related, institutional or social solution that meets a triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social value creation. How to govern and manage innovation in the face of this multiplicity and complexity raises questions for dominant concepts and paradigms of regional development such as competitive advantage, clusters and smart specialisation.

 

· Second, novelties that integrate economic, ecological, and social values seem to have the potential to promote complex socioecological transformation at the local, regional, or national system level. These transformations are led by processes of cross-fertilisation that include direct/indirect knowledge spillovers to other actors in the economy, through the implementation of business strategies oriented towards a socially desirable outcome. In such a normative turn, questions of directionality and responsibility loom large yet run the risk of becoming black-boxed in totalising accounts of missions.

 

· Third, the sustainability of regions can be captured as a sum of initiatives put forward by local, national or supranational institutions, which stimulate actions towards new production processes, new forms of organisations and new business models. An example is the rise of sustainability certifications, and certified companies, such as the B-Corps. The majority of studies in the literature address such multi-scalarity through case study methods. Greater methodological pluralism is warranted to capture the multi-scalar interconnections of environmentally, socially and economically sustainable regional development in both granular and systematic ways.

 

· Fourth, bottom-up movements involving organisations (for profit and non-profit) and communities of consumption are emerging, creating the basis for an ecology of sustainability. Grassroot innovation has not only yielded a more capacious understanding of development; it has also opened up questions around agency and leadership in and of regions and the role of the commons, community and informality. Paradoxically we can witness that such informal and community-based approaches to innovation and experimentation are becoming increasingly formalised and institutionalised by policy through, for example, living labs and fab labs.

 

 

Moreover, the special issue will welcome contributions that develop innovative approaches in concepts, theory, methods or analysis and have deep or broad implications to inform transitions to sustainability, and that use observational, experimental or theory-driven modes of inquiry.