Correspondence: chlebna@zsi.at
Summary of the Session’s Theme and Objectives
Despite widespread recognition of climate change and other environmental challenges’ direct impact and dependence on territories and sectors, engagement with material, environmental and ecological dimensions remains limited in the geography and innovation communities. For example, it is becoming increasingly clear that socio-technical transitions are both reliant on and lead to changes in nature-society interactions (take, for example, how minerals, metals and various ecosystems are used to serve human energy needs). These have direct implications for sectoral and territorial development which are key issues across the geography and innovations studies fields. Weak engagement with the complex interactions between socio-technical transitions and innovation trajectories and the natural systems they are coupled with bears the danger of promoting solutions that do not fundamentally decrease our activities’ strain on nature but rather shift the ecological burdens of current production and consumption patterns across natural resource systems and therefore also across territories (Hyldmo et al 2025). For example, the current shift towards increased use of bio-based materials in the construction sector, as in other sectors, shifts ecological strains from carbon-intensive regional industries such as steel and cement to regions and areas rich in biomass. However, this also moves nature-society problems from climate change to biodiversity loss and ecosystem destruction (Giurca & Befort 2023). Arguably, this is an additional facet of the ‘dark side of innovation’ which has recently increasingly been debated (Boschma et al 2025).
To tackle these issues and bring nature-society interactions more to the fore requires conceptual rethinking, for example in considering how natural resource availability, land/sea access and other biophysical, ecological and material preconditions influence environmental innovation and societal transition processes and their outcomes within and across territorial contexts (Chlebna et al 2024; Steen 2024). In doing so, scholars from across the geography and innovation studies fields may benefit from drawing for example on earlier work on innovation in natural-resource based industries (e.g. Andersen & Wicken 2021), materialities and the “tangible” (Njøs et al 2024), or on research about the geography of bioeconomy innovation (Mazzoni & Losacker 2024). Contributions might draw insights from related fields, such as sustainability science, social-ecological systems thinking, political ecology, or resilience literatures, among others. This is an emerging debate in the wider geography and innovation communities that so far remains rather fragmented. Our intention for this special session is to bring together scholars from the geography, the innovation studies, and the sustainability transitions communities, who share an interest in nature-society interactions, bioeconomy sectors, and the role of natural resources and ecological systems for innovation and industrial transformation and development.
List of Topics to Be Presented in the Special Session
Key References
Andersen, A. D., & Wicken, O. (2021). Making sense of how the natural environment shapes innovation, industry dynamics, and sustainability challenges. Innovation and Development, 11(1), 91–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/2157930X.2020.1770975
Boschma, R., Fitjar, R. D., Giuliani, E., & Iammarino, S. (2025). Unseen costs: The inequities of the geography of innovation. Regional Studies, 2445594. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2024.2445594
Chlebna, C., Evenhuis, E., & Morales, D. (2024). Economic geography and planetary boundaries: Embracing the planet’s uncompromising call to action. Progress in Economic Geography, 2(2), 100021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peg.2024.100021
Giurca, A., & Metz, T. (2018). A social network analysis of Germany’s wood-based bioeconomy: Social capital and shared beliefs. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 26(80-), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2017.09.001
Hyldmo, H. D. S., Wardhani, I. S., Kurniawan, N. I., Cahayati, D. D., Rye, S. A., & Vela-Almeida, D. (2025). Urgent transition, urgent extraction? Global decarbonization, national governance and local impacts in the Indonesian nickel industry. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adc31c
Mazzoni, F., & Losacker, S. (2024). What hinders the transition towards a bio-based construction sector? A global innovation system perspective on its value chain. Progress in Economic Geography, 2(2), 100023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peg.2024.100023
Njøs, R., Sjøtun, S. G., Jakobsen, S.-E., & Fløysand, A. (2024). (Re)Incorporating “the Tangible” in Industrial Path Development Analyses: The Role of Sociomaterial Contingencies in Explaining Potential Emergence of Hydrogen Production in Western Norway. Economic Geography, 100(5–6), 437–458. https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2024.2389858
Steen, M. (2024). Green upscaling of an established path? The case of salmon farming in Norway. Progress in Economic Geography, 2(2), 100027. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peg.2024.100027