2023 RSA Annual Conference Plenary Sessions

As the globe transitions to net zero emissions, more goods and services will become inherently green. This will create new and different “Green” Global Value Chains (GGVCs) to bring these products and services from conception to end use (and beyond) across multiple countries in more sustainable ways.  In turn, these changing forces altering local comparative advantage have the potential to affect the geography of GVCs and will likely modify the trade and FDI advantages of countries and regions. Thus, while the direction of change for regions and their policies is still difficult to see with clarity, the “greening” of GVCs needs to be carefully considered by regional policymakers in their pursuit for sustainable regional development.

Building upon the recent RSA Policy Impact Book “Harnessing Global Value Chains for Regional Development”, this plenary session will bring together latest academic evidence and public policy insights to discuss three main questions.

1. Why will greening GVCs become an increasingly important area of study and discussion for sustainable investment and local development?
2. How can policymakers best build, embed and reshape (or harness?) GGVCs for sustainable development thorough trade and FDI?
3. Where are our knowledge gaps and how regional studies research can help to address them in innovative ways?

Riccardo Crescenzi is a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics. He has been a European Research Council (ERC) grant holder, leading a major five-year research project on foreign direct investment (FDI), global value chains (GVCs) and their territorial impacts across the globe. He is currently the LSE Principal Investigator of a large collaborative research project funded by Horizon Europe and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) on inequalities in the era of global megatrends.

He is also an Editor of Regional Studies.

Riccardo has a long track-record of teaching and research in regional economic development, innovation, FDI and GVCs, and in the analysis and evaluation of public policies. This research is published in top peer-reviewed journals in economic geography, international economics and international business and management and widely cited in academic and policy circles. His most recent book “Harnessing Global Value Chains for Regional Development” (2023, Routledge) explores how regions, cities and clusters can build, embed and reshape global value chains for local enhancement

Oliver Harman is a Cities Economist for the International Growth Centre’s (IGC) Cities that Work initiative based at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and Associate Staff at the London School of Economics.

Oliver is also a Clarendon Scholar studying the financing of Sustainable Urban Development in low-income and fast-growing cities. In these roles, he attempts to help bridge the gap between research and policy translating economic literature into clear urban policy guidance for emerging country city governments.

Marco Kamiya is Chief of the Division of Innovation Strategies and Digitalization at UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization). The Division works on frontier
technologies, innovation ecosystems and the digital economy applied to industrial sectors at a territorial level. Smart and Intermediary Cities are an important focus of work.

Sandrine Kergroach is Head of SME and Entrepreneurship Performance, Policies and Mainstreaming unit at the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities (CFE). She leads work on innovation and internationalisation, and the conditions that enable SMEs “scale up” capacity to drive a more sustainable, resilient and inclusive growth. She supervises activities of policy monitoring, the production of the “OECD SME and Entrepreneurship Outlook”, and the development of knowledge infrastructure. She also leads efforts and dialogue for mainstreaming the SME&E policy agenda. Prior to joining CFE, Mrs Kergroach worked at the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation on issues related to measurement, policy mix and foresight. She holds a Doctorate in Economics (TU Berlin), a Master in Strategy and Management and a Master in Applied Economics and Statistics (Paris Dauphine-PSL), and a Master in Modern History (Paris Sorbonne).

More details to follow shortly

Professor Katherine Brickell joined the Department of Geography as Professor of Urban Studies in January 2023. She was previously Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Katherine’s feminist-oriented research seeks to understand gendered experiences of precarious home and working lives in Cambodia, the UK, and Ireland. In recognition of research excellence, Katherine was conferred the Gill Memorial Award by the Royal Geographical Society (2014) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2016). Katherine is Editor of the journal Gender, Place and Culture.

Vincent is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, working on his three-year project ‘Remittances and microfinance in times of compounding crises: Work, social reproduction and digitalisation’. The Fellowship is generating new knowledge on: (i) the emergence and strengthening of a ‘digital finance for climate resilience’ discourse that frames digital financial technologies as key in reducing risk to climate change and building climate resilience at the household and institutional levels; and (ii) whether and how new technologies such as credit-scoring algorithms designed by Fintechs might contribute to new and continuing forms of racial and gender inequality.

My research develops three related themes under the umbrella of critical macro-finance.

Sabine Dörry is a Senior Research Fellow at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg. She was previously a GSO Leadership Fellow and held a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford (2013-2015). Sabine is a board member of the FINGEO Network, the Global Network on Financial Geography, where she is also editor for the network’s working paper series. Sabine is also an editor of Articulo – Journal of Urban Research.

European Union considers itself a leader in the field of sustainability transition. The Green Deal is a package of initiatives designed to catalyse the ambition to achieve Net Zero by 2050. However, the implementation of these initiatives is not straightforward. This Territory, Politics, Governance Annual Lecture plenary session considers what will be required and identifies three areas that deserve close attention in the coming years:

• the nature of co-operation within the Union of 27 member states;
• the need to improve the underpinning governance of sustainability futures and
• the impact of systemic change, which includes dealing with the fall-out of the EU’s parlous relationship with Russia and more competitive co-existence with China and the United States.

The speaker, Dr Janez Potočnik, an economist and diplomat from Slovenia with extensive knowledge and experience of the EU and its institutions, is an ideal guide for those seeking to better understand challenges and prospects for a more sustainable future – and a fitting tribute to the subject matter of Territory Politics Governance.

Territory, Politics, Governance is an interdisciplinary journal from the Regional Studies Association.  It is committed to the development of theory and research in territorial politics and the governance of space.  The journal creates a platform on which to explore the interface between territory, politics, economy, identity and the organisation of political space. It confronts topical and emergent issues of world economic and political concern. The journal publishes original, high quality international scholarship from this growing, international and increasingly vibrant field directed at a worldwide academic audience and at policy makers, activists and other communities of practice.

The journal is indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ Social Sciences Citation Index and Scopus and has a significant circulation footprint as it is distributed with its sister journals, Regional Studies, Spatial Economic Analysis and Area Development and Policy. It is essential reading for academics and practitioners alike. For more details on the journal, go to www.tandfonline.com/journals/rtep20.

Alexander L. Q. Chen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 2022 from the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, based on his research on the spatial division(s) of labor between China’s coastal and inland regions. His current research participates in the “Governing the Green Transition” (GOGREEN) project, which involves a comparative analysis of 32 local and regional case studies worldwide on co-created green transitions. The project aims to establish the necessary and sufficient governance factors to facilitate successfully co-created green transitions based on a qualitative comparative analysis of the 32 case studies. To this end, he is involved in the execution of five regional case studies in Denmark and Indonesia, addressing a plurality of sustainability issues such as mangrove conservation, nature parks, sustainable student housing, and residential energy communities.

Dr Janez Potočnik was born in 1958. He graduated with honours from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Ljubljana. He continued his studies at the same university where he did his master’s degree in 1989 and a Ph.D. degree in 1993.

For several years (1989-1993), he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Economic Research in Ljubljana. In July 1994, he was appointed Director of the Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development of the Republic of Slovenia. In April 1998, the Government of the Republic of Slovenia appointed Dr Potočnik Head of Negotiating Team for Accession of the Republic of Slovenia to the European Union. From June-December 2000, he was also the acting director of Government Office for European Affairs. In June 2001, he was appointed a Minister Councillor at the Office of the Prime Minister. On 24 January 2002, the Government of the Republic of Slovenia appointed him as the Minister without portfolio responsible for European Affairs.

Virginie Mamadouh is Associate Professor of Political and cultural geography at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies (GPIO) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA).

Research

Her research interests pertain to diverse aspects of political and cultural geography and can be grouped around the following themes

• electoral geography and representations, (urban) social movements and collective actions
• geopolitics and globalisation, (de)territorialisation and (de)bordering processes and more specifically supranationalism and the (multilevel) governance in the European Union, and the role of cities and city networks in European and global politics.
• geopolitical representations and national and other territorial identities, languages and territories , citizenship, multilingualism, migration and new media”
• institutional transplantation and policy transfer, gridgroup analysis, Cultural Theory, theory of sociocultural viability
• history of political geography and geopolitics

She recently contributed to the FP7 research programme Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe (MIME) https://www.mime-project.org/

Professor Klaus Dodds is Executive Dean for the School of Life Sciences and Environment at Royal Holloway and Co-Director of the Living Sustainably research catalyst (with Professor Redell Olsen). He is a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe, Warsaw Poland.

He researches in the areas of geopolitics and security, ice studies and the international governance of the Antarctic and the Arctic.