The Research Project

This research project aims to map the regional combination of the digital and the green transitions and to investigate how the resulting twin transition (TT) is affected by regional techno-economic and socio-institutional characteristics.

The inspiring motivation of the project is a gap between the emphasis TT is receiving as a policy priority in Europe and the limited scientific knowledge about the factors that could affect its unfolding and facilitate/hamper its implementation across space.

Despite its relevance, academic research has paid limited attention to the drivers and obstacles of the TT. An important knowledge gap exists about how the TT could be achieved across regions that are marked by different economic development, heterogeneous industrial structures, varied knowledge bases and socio-institutional set-ups, and in which the digital and green transition are proceeding with diverse speeds. This is a worrying gap, which risks leading to place insensitive policies, conflicting with the need of ensuring a fair transition as recognised by the 8th EU Report on Economic, Social and Territorial Cohesion.

This project aims to fill this gap. First, it will draw on different streams of regional research – geography of innovation, transition studies, and new industrial path development – to build up a conceptual framework of the TT geography, within which the regional drivers and capabilities of combining digital & green transitions could be accounted for. Second, it will engage in an intensive process of collection, classification and harmonisation of new primary and secondary data, through which to map European (in particular Italian) regions with respect to their endowment of green digital technologies and digitally enabled green technologies, production and consumption modes. Third, using these data, the project will carry out empirical analyses to ascertain the extent to which the techno- economic and socio-institutional features along which European regions differentiate (e.g., between rural vs. urban, core vs. peripheral regions) can affect the unfolding of the TT, and the latter could in turn affect their economic convergence and cohesion. This will provide suggestions about how to set TT recommendations at work in the realm of European regional policies.