Correspondence: maximilian.benner@univie.ac.at

Summary of the Session’s Theme and Objectives

The grand societal challenges of the contemporary era (e.g., climate change, toxic pollution, rising inequality) call for significant changes in industrial production (Nilsson et al., 2021; OECD, 2023). Therefore, many regions find themselves confronted with considerable pressures of phasing out unsustainable industries, technologies and institutional structures through exnovation and phasing in new and more sustainable ones through innovation (Trippl et al., 2020; While & Eadson, 2022), while at the same time ensuring and advancing procedural, distributive, restorative, cosmopolitan, and recognition justice (Heffron & McCauley, 2018; Wang & Lo, 2021). Doing so places high demands on regional policymakers and stakeholders as reconciling different environmental, social and economic goals involves complicated trade-offs and dilemmas (Benner, 2025), and these will be particularly acute for left-behind regions experiencing both industrial decline and environmental degradation (Benner et al., 2024; Bez, 2024; Feltrin et al., 2022).

For these reasons, while the need for many regions to achieve just regional industrial transitions is acknowledged (Eadson & van Veelen, 2023), their barriers, processes and outcomes are still poorly understood. Therefore, we invite contributions that advance research on concepts, empirics, and policies related to just regional industrial transitions.

List of Topics to Be Presented in the Special Session

In particular, we invite conceptual and empirical contributions dealing with topics including, but not limited to, the following ones:

• Contributions on justice criteria, agentic processes, power relations, and barriers to just regional industrial transitions involving innovation and exnovation in different spatial contexts (both in the Global North and Global South and particularly in left-behind regions)
• Contributions on environmental and socio-economic trade-offs and dilemmas involved in just regional industrial transitions
• Methodological innovations for studying processes and outcomes of just industrial regional transitions
  Transdisciplinary approaches and methods to co-develop just regional industrial transitions
• Policy approaches at the regional level to cope with trade-offs and dilemmas involved in just regional industrial transitions
• Beyond the special session, we are planning a thematically related call for papers for a special issue in a journal and encourage eventual abstract submissions by presenters.

Key References

Benner, M. (2025). Multiple-challenge regional industrial transitions: the example of chemical regions. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 55, 100971.

Benner, M., Trippl, M., Hassink, R. (2024). Sustainable and inclusive development in left-behind places. Review of Regional Research, 44, 237-249.

Bez, C.S. (2024). Conceptualising the environmental dimension of left-behind places. Ecological Economics, 228, 108448.

Eadson, W., van Veelen, B. (2023). Green and just regional path development. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 10, 218-233.

Feltrin, L., Mah, A., Brown, D. (2022). Noxious deindustrialization: experiences of precarity and pollution in Scotland’s petrochemical capital. Environment and Planning C, 40, 950-969.

Heffron, R.J., McCauley, D. (2018). What is the ‘just transition’? Geoforum, 88, 74-77.
OECD (2023). Regional industrial transitions to climate neutrality. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Trippl, M., Baumgartinger-Seiringer, S., Frangenheim, A., Isaksen, A., Rypestøl, J.O. (2020). Unravelling green regional industrial path development: regional preconditions, asset modification and agency. Geoforum, 111, 189-197.

Wang, X., Lo, K. (2021). Just transition: a conceptual review. Energy Research & Social Science, 82, 102291.

While, A., Eadson, W. (2022). Zero carbon as economic restructuring: spatial divisions of labour and just transition. New Political Economy, 27, 385-402.