Abstract Regional development has become a key site of geopolitical competition. Existing scholarship conceptualises regional development as a relational process of strategic coupling between transnational and place-based actors, driven principally by market logic and commercial imperatives. Yet national governments, motivated by ever-expanding national security concerns, increasingly compete to influence the geography of global production networks. We introduce the concept of geostrategic coupling to emphasise the growing involvement of national governments in driving coupling, and the growing influence of geopolitics in shaping the firm–region nexus, and regional development strategies and outcomes. This is illustrated with cases from Vietnam and the USA.
Abstract Although the current era is one of multiple global crises that call for more sustainable solutions, the futures imagined in many regions do not seem to address these crises adequately but are marked by irresponsibility, that is, the shifting of negative effects in time, space or within the population. These futures can be irresponsible in regions whose imagined future is a continuation of the past, as well as in regions whose imagined futures involve radical transformations. The article uses the discursive-institutionalist concept of ideational power to discuss how irresponsible futures emerge in these regions and which role power relations play in these imagined futures.
Bridging the literatures on regional industrial path development and global production networks, this article examines the conditions under which regional industrial path extension based on structural coupling can generate sustained positive development outcomes. Drawing on a case study of Malaysia's semiconductor industry (1971-2025), with the state of Penang at its centre, the analysis combines export and foreign direct investment data with 22 semi-structured interviews. Contrary to expectations of path exhaustion and decoupling, Malaysia's experience shows that prolonged positive development outcomes can occur based on repeated multinational reinvestment, driven by industry dynamism (motivation to invest) and by facilitative policy and cumulative cluster effects reinforcing a competitive cost-capability ratio (location choice). While recent geoeconomic tensions have intensified investment inflows, standard global production network drivers remain decisive, highlighting the need to contextualise geoeconomics within broader production network dynamics.
This article explores the role of local politicians and planners as public agents of change in the creation of new economic paths in municipalities. Drawing on current literature, we suggest three public legitimation practices employed by these actors. Focusing on the establishment of a mining industry in Pajala municipality, Sweden, we demonstrate how local public actors act as agents of change by employing three legitimation practices: articulating compelling visions that encourage stakeholders to envisage desirable local and regional future possibilities, aligning new economic paths with broader regional and national political agendas, and reinterpreting the local past. This paper demonstrates that these legitimation practices employed by local public agents operate paradoxically: they not only enable new economic trajectories but also marginalise alternative visions, reflecting the contested and uneven nature of spatial transformation in resource-rich regions. We conclude with a model of local public legitimation practices in new path creation.
Regional development in polarised times requires alternatives to growth-centred models. This study explores how circular economy (CE) practices among fashion and textiles firms in the southwest of England contribute to the construction of alternative regional development pathways. Based on 40 interviews and 8 participatory workshops, we show how firm-level CE practices interact with regional imaginaries and community logics to expand opportunity spaces for alternative development, yet structural constraints hinder scaling. We propose a framework linking CE transitions to broader debates on progressive regional development, contributing to understanding of how peripheral places navigate uncertainty in times of overlapping crises.
