Contextualizing transition: a multiscale approach to making resilience-oriented and place-sensitive strategies

The widening of regional disparities remains a critical concern in the political and academic debate at global scale. Given the scope of the phenomenon, recent evidence indicates how growing regional divergences are increasingly jeopardizing social cohesion, fueling inequalities even within regions. The dichotomy between less developed and core regions seems to lose the centrality in the political agenda. An example is provided by the new geography of knowledge that is giving rise to a complex divergence that rests also on the different internal regional contexts’ conditions. Regions are exposed to multidimensional shocks and stresses questioning territories’ resilience and their ability to manage the transition process. The paper argues that regions need to enhance their resilience to transition-induced shock (dynamics) understanding this internal complex divergence. The paper introduces the multiscale approach as a dynamic factor in the policy-making process to capture the sensitiveness of places to adaptation, resilience-oriented performance, and the disruption of path dependency - which may be considered as the main obstacle for an equitable distribution of competitive advantage derived from innovation - and lead the post-carbon transition required by the European Green Deal. The analysis conducted rests on the conceptual framework of the Open Access Toolkit conceived for the TREnD Research Project funded by the Horizon 2020 Program. The conceptual framework adopted, underpinned by sets of indicators that couple context conditions with innovation performance, can be used to explore and identify in further studies EU settings that are more exposed to systemic risks associated with the transition process.