RSA Early Career Research Grant Scheme

Previous and Current Grant Holders

Renewable Energy Transition and the Local Economic Development of Lagging-behind Regions

Renewable energy sources are becoming increasingly important in the energy mix, making up to 35% of the electricity production in the EU in 2019, with wind power accounting for 35% of the total electricity generated from renewable sources. There is a need to better understand how the rapidly growing renewable energy sector could promote local economic development in peripheral and lagging-behind regions, where abundant natural resources useful for the generation of green renewable energy are located. This research project will investigate how investment in renewable energy generation could offer opportunities for the redevelopment of local economies in lagging-behind regions. This could allow many peripheral regions, once dependent on mature agriculture and manufacturing industries, to regenerate their local economies by sustainably transitioning towards new higher added-value green industries. By mapping the location of offshore wind farms and link these to onshore local communities through the location of ports and other servicing infrastructures, we will develop an econometric analysis to evaluate the impact of offshore wind farms on the economic development of local onshore coastal communities in the UK. This will be the first study providing empirically robust analysis at a granular level on this topic, advancing existing knowledge by following two paths. First, it will consider the current impact of this transition on the economic development of places, analysing employment and productivity growth in local industries directly affected, as well as the magnitude of potential externalities along the supply-chain. Secondly, it will investigate the role of renewable energy for the dynamic industrial path development of lagging-behind regions, considering how it could foster regional branching and transition to new but related industries, pooling skills and expertise from other declining manufacturing industries, and creating new green jobs by retraining and upskilling workers. This is particularly relevant for the UK, where offshore wind is becoming the main source of green energy, and could positively contribute to rebalancing the economy, one of the most spatially unequal in the OECD, in line with the UK Government flagship policy on levelling-up.

“I am honoured of the support received from the Regional Studies Association Early-Career grant. The grant will support the development of this promising research project, investigating how investment in renewable energy generation could offer opportunities for the redevelopment of local economies in lagging-behind regions. I hope that, thanks to the RSA support, I will be able to provide important insights to understand how the rapidly growing renewable energy sector could promote local economic development in peripheral and lagging-behind regions. The Early Career grant will help me bridging together economics and GIS methodologies to provide empirically robust analysis at a granular level. This will give me the opportunity to consolidate my knowledge and expertise in these fields, and to partner with the ORE Catapult to inform stakeholders about the complementarities between the Net-Zero and the Levelling-Up policies.”

Moritz Breul

Setting the course for lignite mining regions in transition – Unpacking the pre-formation phase of path creation

The current lignite exit in Germany has created a situation in which the dominant industrial path in lignite mining regions is removed and immense structural funds are turning these regions into playgrounds for new path creation. But which actors and processes shape the formulation of new path development? While existing research made great progress in retrospectively understanding path creation, the retrospective view overlooks why other potential paths did not successfully emerge. At this pre-formation stage, the design of policy interventions can play a decisive role for enabling or constraining regional path development as illustratively shown by the priority setting of certain domains within the smart specialization strategy. Therefore, this research project aims to investigate to what extent the configuration of regional policy-making processes in the Lausitz and Rhineland shape the direction of regional transformation strategies – i.e. the mechanisms of why the promotion of a certain path is selected over another. I plan to reconstruct key events in the formulation of the two regional transformation strategies by two means: First, I will reconstruct the policy networks using social network analysis techniques. Second, I will conduct expert interviews with various participants involved in the policy network to gather information about the governance of the priority setting, the agency and interactions of the various participants involved in the policy network as well as reasons for non-participation. This will show how diversification domains were developed and selected over others and consequently reveal the factors that have shaped the outcome of this multi-actor policy process.

“I am very honored for being awarded for the Regional Studies Association Early Career Grant. The support by the RSA will help me to explore how the configuration of regional policy-making processes shapes the direction of regional transformation strategies in lignite mining regions. I am looking forward to this great opportunity and being part of this vibrant community.”

Emma Colven

Speculating on Jakarta’s Future: Real Estate and Water Crisis in Jakarta

The aim of this project is to understand the role of speculative urban development in generating water crises, and how water crises in turn shape real estate markets in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital city. I will use mixed methods, combining remote sensing analysis with interviews, surveys, and participant observation. While the proliferation of large-scale, private real estate developments under conditions of speculative urbanism has been well studied, their environmental implications have been given less academic attention. Furthermore, the literature on financialization and speculation has not sufficiently examined how nature poses barriers to these processes. This research will elucidate the co-production of transformations in water regimes and land markets and make a valuable contribution to geographical understandings of the impact of speculative development on urban ecologies. While Jakarta’s experience is particularly acute, continued urbanization coupled with climate change will intensify water shortages and flooding in urban metropolitan regions around the world. Consequently, water crises will constitute one of the primary urban planning challenges of the twenty first century. This research will contribute a better understanding of how water crises emerge, and how cities can equitably plan for and mitigate against them.

I am honored to receive this grant to support my research on the intersections of speculative urbanism and water crisis in Jakarta. With the support of the Regional Studies Association, I will be able to undertake extensive fieldwork for this project, which will be foundational to my future work and research trajectory.

Ersilia Verlinghieri

Exploring the potential of a postgrowth-inspired agenda for urban transport planning after COVID-19

Private cars’ dominant role in urban transport imposes huge health and environmental costs on cities worldwide, with the greatest share paid by more vulnerable citizens, including children and ethnic minorities. Traffic fatalities, reduced space for safe social interactions together with dangerous levels of air-pollution and carbon-emissions are key issues for cities struggling with both a public health and climate emergency. However, reducing the number of private cars in urban environment it’s proven to still be a substantial challenge for planning and policy, as it requires a radical reconfiguration of infrastructure, lifestyles, cultures as well as of transport planning and policy frameworks, politics and economy. The reduced capacity of public transport linked to the Covid19 pandemic risks to exacerbate the situation.

Theoretical insights showed that postgrowth-inspired, slower, and more sociable mobilities, combined with the rearrangement of municipal land use and economies, have the potential to help in this direction, and catalyse a substantial reduction in car-dependency. But how can this be done in practice? How can such a radical idea help re-shaping urban planning and policy making?

Although explicit examples of a comprehensive post-growth agenda for urban planning are still unavailable, in Barcelona and Turin, the concept of post-growth has been often circulating in public debates and featured also in the political manifestos of the latest municipal administrations. At the same time, both cities have adopted radical changes in their mobility systems, opening up wide portions of public space to slower forms of mobilities and away from private cars. They represent therefore two paradigmatic case studies to better understand the potential and criticalities of a post-growth inspired approach to transport planning.

Using interviews and focus groups, and inspired by Urban Political Ecology as a theoretical framework, I will analyse the complex interrelations of actors, institutions, practices, and discourses behind the framing and implementation of such interventions which aimed to challenge car dominance in the two cities, tracing how these have been influenced and shaped by ideas around post-growth. At the same time, I will consider how ideas around post-growth are contested, reframed and re-shaped during this process, and what their adoption means for different groups of the population.

This analysis will help to better understand the possibilities for, practical constraints on, and social implications of extensively adopting post-growth inspired planning approaches and their concrete contribution to tackling urban crisis, starting from rethinking urban transport, drawing key lessons for other western cities aiming to tackle car-dependency.

“I am honoured to be able, thanks to the RSA support, to conduct research on this topic. Cities are facing great environmental and social challenges with car-dominance being often overlooked as a main driver of urban inequalities. I have been developing the idea behind this project for a long time and I sincerely appreciate the trust by the RSA in its value and contribution”.

Maria Tsouri

Knowledge complexity of renewable energy technologies (RETs) in European regions: a network-based approach.

Climate change constitutes one of the most urgent problems nowadays, in which transition toward sustainability is considered necessary. Energy production is one of the most significant determinants of this transition. Within the literature of sustainability transitions, renewable energy technologies (RETs) constitute innovations aiming to fundamental changes to the existing energy production regime. While transition studies consider knowledge creation and transfer fundamental element of the innovation in RETs, very little is known about the relationship between knowledge creation and the characteristics of regions where RETs emerge. Therefore, my research primarily aims to understand how regional factors affect the development of different technological sub-trajectories in RETS, in terms of knowledge complexity. It will contribute to the existing literature by developing a framework on the relationship between regional characteristics and knowledge complexity in RETs. Empirically, it will provide an original dataset on knowledge network over time and across EEA regions. Finally, it will identify the regional determinants for the development of different technological sub-trajectories in RETs. The study of these regional factors may have important implications in the design and implementation of policies targeted to regions and into the transition process in the energy production field.

The support of Early Career RSA grant contributes to the communication and the dissemination of the results and findings of my current research to the wider RSA community.

RSA EC Grant holder Maria Tsouri shares her tips for grant applications here

Jacopo Canello

Production relocation and subcontractors’ resilience in manufacturing regions: does upgrading help to survive structural shocks?

The aim of this project is to assess how small subcontractors operating in low-tech manufacturing industries update their strategies in response to the decision of client firms to relocate production abroad. The main assumption is that, when small producers become more vulnerable in response to such unexpected shocks, strategic decisions are often taken out of necessity. In such circumstances, firms are forced to upgrade their status quo operations to successfully adapt to the changing economic circumstances. The focus of the empirical investigation is on Italian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) operating as subcontractors in the clothing and footwear industry. This empirical study will use a comprehensive approach to identify production relocation, focusing on the impact of both captive offshoring and offshore outsourcing decisions implemented by client firms. The proposed study aims to assess whether ‘forced’ upgrading (i.e. strategy change in response to production relocation shocks) has beneficial effects on subcontractors’ performances. The main findings of this work are intended to inform the current debate on the distributional effects of international fragmentation of production.

I am sincerely honored to be a recipient of the prestigious RSA EC Grant. I have been a proud member of the RSA community since I was a PhD student. During the last few years, I have had the chance to attend several RSA conferences around the world, building my professional network and expanding my social circle. This grant will now help me to explore the consequences of international fragmentation of production on local economies, focusing on the strategies developed by small subcontractors in response to production relocation shocks.

Watch a recording of Jacopo as he explains his research here.

Davide Luca

Does organised crime distort the market for low-carbon energy production? Geographical evidence from Italy.

The transition to low-carbon energy sources is considered as one of the key policies to tackle climate change and, to this aim, many European governments have been supporting the transition to renewable energy through subsidies. Growing anecdotal evidence suggests that the generosity of incentives has attracted the interests of corrupt politicians and criminal organisations, as the wind and solar-energy sectors offer attractive opportunities for mafia to benefit from generous national and EU grant and tax subsidies and to launder illegal money via legal business structures. Yet, no academic research has systematically explored the link between organised crime and the renewable energy sector at the local level. My proposal aims to fill this gap. I plan to combine, in a mixed-method approach, the econometric analysis of innovative GIS data on the geo-location of wind and solar plants across Italy and on the local presence of mafia groups with fieldwork and in-depth interviews.

I am honoured and excited for the support received by the Regional Studies Association. Transnational organised crime has increasing economic impacts around the world. While understanding the economic and policy impacts of mafias is a critical task, the topic has so far received limited attention by regional studies scholars. The Early Career Grant will help me carry out novel GIS and econometric analyses and fund in-depth fieldwork. In so doing, I will consolidate my expertise in the geographies of organised crime and leverage further funding for a larger project on the geographical impacts of mafia organisations on public policy.

Mia M. Bennett

Effects of Indigenous Land Rights on Land Use Decisions

Project summary: Responding to calls within Indigenous communities to more closely examine land claims processes, this project aims to understand whether land tenure in Indigenous communities leads to attitudes and policies favoring development or conservation. I will employ a mixed-methods approach combining globally-scaled satellite night-light imagery and fieldwork in two sites: Alaska, USA, which has a strong Indigenous land tenure regime, and Sarawak, Malaysia, which has a comparably weak one. While a significant amount of research has examined the processes driving land claims, it is not well understood how development proceeds once land claims are won. Furthermore, research regarding Indigenous peoples is often highly localized rather than comparative. Instead, through global analysis and comparison of case studies in North America and Asia, this research will broaden understandings of the relationship between land tenure, development, and conservation at a range of scales. Although Indigenous peoples are often imagined as stewards of the environment, this research asks whether the securing of Indigenous land tenure may actually lead to greater support for industrial development. As Indigenous peoples are gaining greater land rights worldwide, it is critical to understand the possible consequences of this shift in tenure for local livelihoods, the environment, and industry.

Iris Wanzenböck

Knowledge network dynamics in the presence of shocks: A network-based approach to regional resilience

My project aims at understanding how regional knowledge networks can stimulate regional economic resilience. This ambition is motivated by theories considering knowledge networks crucial for regions to gain, after a crisis, impetus towards renewal. Yet, empirical evidence on the dynamics of knowledge networks, their changing compositions or role for regional resilience is scarce. My project aims at (i) providing new indicators to systematically explore network dynamics, (ii) developing a topology to characterize network profiles for European regions, (iii) assessing how these network compositions relate to regional resilience for the case of the economic crisis in 2008. In this project I will develop regional indicators to capture the micro-based dynamics in network compositions and make use of large-scale network data to classify European regions according to these indicators. On this basis, I will investigate whether network re-bundling can explain regional renewal processes after the crisis.

Watch a video of Iris summarising her research here.

I-Chun Catherine Chang

Follow the Money: The Financing and Financialization of Sustainable Urban Projects in China

The recent two decades have witnessed a surge of urban sustainable projects in the global South. Under the guidance of relational geography and “Southern” urbanism, following the movement of planning ideas and policies has been the primary method scholars use to study these evolving urbanism models. This approach, however, largely overlooks the increasing importance of the profit-driven and technology-oriented urban sustainability industry. Nor does it offer insight into the indispensable role of financial arrangements in facilitating and shaping sustainable urbanism models. To address these shortcomings in the endeavor to understand sustainable urbanism, I propose to develop a new research approach that centers on tracing financial and economic interests. Adopting this new approach, this project aims to analyze the financial arrangements underlying Chinese sustainable urban projects, and focuses on two major Sino-Singaporean sustainable urban projects as relational-comparative case studies. This approach helps understand the influence of project funders, the allocation of critical resources, the workings of the urban sustainability industry, and the competition between sustainable urbanism models.

Watch a video of Catherine as she explains her research here.

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Grants

Watch the recording of our webinar and learn more about the Early Career Research Grant Scheme – 05.05.2021 Grants and Funding: An introduction to the Early Career Research Grant Scheme by the RSA with Stuart Dawley (University of Newcastle, UK), I-Chun Catherine Chang (Macalester College, USA) and Jacopo Canello (University of Groningen, The Netherlands).

This award is open to individual applicants in their early career (five years maximum between the date showing on their PhD certificate and the application deadline). Applicants must be based within an eligible higher education institution and must be a current, early career member of the RSA and throughout the duration of the grant (please note that applicants may apply for membership at the same time as applying for the grant).

The RSA Early Career Research Grant (EC) is provided to support a discrete piece of regional studies and/or regional science research.

The value of the grant is up to £10,000 (c. $13,300; c. €11,800). The grant has a maximum time span of 18 months and reporting conditions apply. The full Terms and Conditions governing the grant are available in the EC Handbook. Instructions and link for applications can be found at the bottom of this page.

Application Deadline (Expression of Interest): 10^th May 2023

A two stage application process is used for the RSA Research Grant Schemes. In the first round, applicants are asked to submit an expression of interest. The Expression of Interest should submitted via the form – please click on the button below to apply. Shortlisted applicants from this first round will then be asked to submit a full proposal. The Expression of Interest should include the following (see details in the handbook):

Applicant information details (Name, RSA membership number, Telephone number and Email)
Name of Higher Education Institution (HEI)
Title of the research project
Timings of the research
Details of research and the advances it is hoped to make
Brief overview of costs and budget

Apply for Early Career Research grant scheme

If you have any questions or need any help with the submission form, please send us an email to ecgrant@regionalstudies.org

To see about our grant holder research projects and to watch their videos explaining their research, please click on the Previous and Current Grant Holders grant holder names on the lower left of this page.

Anne Marie Jeannet, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan, gives advice to those considering applying for grant funding.

Jacopo Canello is the 2019 EC grant holder. In the video below, he shares his top tips for grant applications.

2019 EC Grant winner Maria Tsouri shares her tips below:

RSA Early Career Grant holder Davide Luca shares his top tips for applying for grants:

RSA Early Career Grant holder I-Chun Catherine Chang shares her top tips for grant applications:

RSA Early Career Grant holder Iris Wanzenböck shares her top tips for grant applications below:

Application Deadline (Expression of Interest): 10th May 2023

Application Deadline (Expression of Interest): 10^th May 2023