From green transitions to statelessness, from fiscal geographies to urban manufacturing, the RSA’s active Research Networks cover a wide range of topics. Here’s a full look at the 14 networks currently operating under the RSA umbrella, including four launched in 2025.
New in 2025
MuniFisc
RSA Research Network on Municipalism and Regional Fiscal Geographies
With an estimated 85% of the world’s population living under austerity, this network examines policy responses at local, national and multilateral levels, including the return of structural adjustment across the Global South and its impact on municipal governance.
2025 – 2028
VOICES
RSA Research Network on VOICES — Visions on Inequality, Community, Exclusion, and Spatial Justice
Focused on denied agency in local and regional development, with particular attention to left-behind places. VOICES asks how people in marginalised communities can become active agents of change rather than passive subjects of policy.
2025 – 2028
GGVC4SRD
RSA Research Network on Green(ing) Global Value Chains for Sustainable Regional Development
The green transition is reshaping value chains and regional economies alike. This network interrogates how Green Global Value Chains and their actors, lead firms, labourers and institutions, interact with the politics and economics of sustainable regional development.
2025 – 2028
UP-SUM
RSA Research Network on Urban Policy for the Sustainable Urban Manufacturing
Climate crisis and digitalisation are transforming urban manufacturing and its footprint in cities. UP-SUM explores the evolving spatial configurations of urban industry and the policies needed to make it sustainable.
2025 – 2028
Bridging Governance Gaps in City-Regions
RSA Research Network on Bridging Governance Gaps in City-regions Addressing Land Take and City-Region Building through Comparative Research
Sustainability goals place cities at the centre of social-ecological transformation, but governance often lags behind the functional realities of city-regions. This network uses land take as a key indicator to examine how city-regional governance can better match the scale of the challenges it faces.
2025 – 2028
Established networks
ESPPRIT
RSA Research Network on Eco-Social Policy and Practice for Innovation and Transformation
Bringing together researchers across regional studies, planning, economic geography and governance to critically engage with eco-social transformations, examining change from below through social innovation.
2024 – 2027
SPRINT
RSA Research Network on Smart Policies for Regional Innovation, Sustainability and Transitions
Focused on smart specialisation strategy (S3) as a method for place-based innovation policy, SPRINT builds on the Marie Skłodowska-Curie research network. Early career scholars lead it in the field.
2024 – 2027
T2R
RSA Research Network on Transformative Regional Resilience
In an age of polycrisis, regions face a dual challenge: maintaining resilience while transforming. T2R develops and disseminates research on how regions respond to economic shocks and structural change without losing sight of long-term transformation.
2024 – 2027
EdgeNet
RSA Research Network on Peripheries and Peripherality
Advocating for and amplifying research on non-core places: rural, peri-urban, post-industrial, depopulating and remote regions. EdgeNet asks why peripheral places matter and how research can better serve them.
2023 – 2028
KIRDSA
RSA Research Network on Knowledge, Innovation and Regional Development in South America
Promoting research on regional development across South America, with a focus on knowledge flows and innovation capabilities in a region with a peripheral but significant role in global knowledge production.
2023 – 2028
TRAKR
RSA Research Network on Transformative Knowledge Regions
Explores the shift from knowledge-intensive to “transformative knowledge regions”, renewing our understanding of knowledge as a driver of regional development in the context of sustainability transitions.
2023 – 2027
Just Transitions
RSA Research Network Putting the ‘Just’ into Just Transitions for Cities & Regions
Emerging from a 2022 workshop in Rome, this network develops scholarship and policy on just transitions in response to industrial, environmental and technological change, combining green and digital twin transitions.
2023 – 2026
NOIR
RSA Research Network on Infrastructural Regionalisms
Challenges regional studies to attend to infrastructure, critically unpacking how it shapes regional lives, governance and developmental pathways through the lens of “infrastructural regionalism”.
2019 – 2027
FinGeo
RSA Research Network on Financial Geographies
Operating under the auspices of the Global Network on Financial Geography, FinGeo has grown into a major international presence since its 2015 launch, now comprising more than 600 members across 50+ countries on every continent. The network brings together geographers and economists to examine how finance shapes and is shaped by place.
2020 – 2029
The RSA’s research networks are open to members and offer a route into collaborative research around shared themes. Networks organise workshops, RSA sessions, and events open to members and non-members, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and policy impact.
If you’re interested in joining a network or proposing a new one, see here for details on how networks are supported and governed. The next deadline for Research Network grant applications is 12th October 2026.