In 2022, our RSA Policy Impact Book, Harnessing Global Value Chains for Regional Development, closed by looking ahead to a green transition that would create “new and different” green value chains. The world it looked out on has since changed. Our new book, Green Global Value Chains for Sustainable Development (Cambridge University Press, open access), asks what globalisation now means for regions that want both sustainability and development. It launches at LSE on 18 November.
When Harnessing Global Value Chains for Regional Development was published in the RSA Policy Impact Books series, it argued that regions, as well as national governments, can build, embed and reshape global value chains (GVCs) through policy on foreign investment and trade, and that they do best competing on tasks and fine-grained specialisms instead of whole sectors. Its final chapter, “Looking to the future“, asked how automation, the green transition and the data available to track either would change those chains, and it is the seed of the new book.
Value chains and regions as they looked in 2022
The chapter’s claim was that as economies move to net zero, more goods and services become inherently green, creating “new and different” green global value chains, and that sustainability enters those chains through firms, markets and governments. For regions one implication was that energy-intensive production would move towards clean energy. Norrland in Sweden, with hydropower beside iron ore, was already drawing green steel, while the Ruhr in Germany and Silesia in Poland, with coal-based steel, risked being left behind.
A year later the RSA Annual Conference gave us an opening plenary to test the idea on a regional studies audience, and a summer blog to write it down. Green technologies are concentrated in a few regions and green sectors are fought over by many, so most regions should green the tasks they already do well, for example, making the brake for an electric bike before the whole bike.
The 2022 book was published in the year the United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act, committing over US$400 billion to cutting emissions, with the European Green Deal and the UK’s net-zero programme alongside it. Since then, the political ground has shifted. A new US administration left the Paris Agreement in January 2026 and the July 2025 budget law stripped out most of the Act’s clean energy tax credits, with wind and solar support phasing out by 2027. EU climate policy also faced headwinds after the 2024 elections, and defence spending, strategic autonomy and geopolitical fragmentation have crowded climate down many governments’ priorities. Tariffs are rising and the push to reshore production is intensifying, from the US itself to India’s Make in India. The framework of building, embedding and reshaping still holds. But what has changed is the world it has to work in, and that calls for new ideas and better data. The new book starts from this tension between sustainability and a fragmenting globalisation, which every region feels directly, and argues that regions can act on it.
What the new book adds for sustainable regional development
Green Global Value Chains for Sustainable Development: Environmental Upgrading in a Fragmented Spatial Economy sets itself three tasks, to define the terms, measure the flows and give areas a policy framework. On terms, the new book sorts chains into green, brown and ordinary. A brown chain keeps drawing on natural capital at the same or a rising intensity, emitting carbon, polluting and depleting resources as it goes. A green chain reduces that pressure. Most real chains are ordinary, a mix of the two, so what counts is whether a chain is greening or browning.
The new book then separates environmental upgrading, which reduces pressure on natural capital, from green upgrading, where that reduction also brings value, and redraws the familiar smile curve as a Green Smile Curve to show where the two coincide. In solar photovoltaics the final module adds 43% to the cost of its inputs and polysilicon adds 200%, so the value, and with it the opportunity to upgrade, sits in the intermediate goods.
On measurement, the 2022 book called regional data the binding constraint. The new book’s Section 5 loosens it by classifying investment projects against the EU Taxonomy with large language models, a method set out in the companion LSE discussion paper by Alvarez-Vilanova, Crescenzi and Mager (2026). Across Europe from 2013 to 2024, about 17% of foreign investment projects are green, and half of those fall outside the sectors usually labelled green. In the UK, renewable energy investment lands in Scotland, the North East and Humberside, while the greening of existing manufacturing lands in the West Midlands, the North West and Wales. In Spain, renewable investment follows the sun to Andalusia and Castilla-La Mancha, and the greening of existing production clusters in Catalonia and the Basque Country. The two maps are nearly inverted in each country, because each kind of green investment follows a different regional endowment, though the two can meet, as in Scotland, where the offshore wind hub is beginning to attract turbine component manufacturing.
The new book also looks beyond Europe. Applied to Vietnam, the same method shows green investment rising from 2015 on the back of the country’s strengths in manufacturing and assembly, then stalling in manufacturing from 2021, when US anti-circumvention investigations caught up with the solar panel assembly that Chinese firms had moved there to escape tariffs. Green investment built on tariff arbitrage, the new book warns, is exposed to the same politics that created it.
On policy, the regional worry of 2022 returns as the new book’s model of reshaping. In Sweden, regional investment promotion agencies used hydropower and minerals to draw in SSAB and Volvo, and Castellón’s ceramics cluster in Spain reshaped itself from within, moving to tiles with 80% recycled content on the strength of local firm capabilities. Ethiopia’s Hawassa Industrial Park, built around renewable power and water recycling to attract apparel lead firms, is the new book’s example of embedding, with place-based and value-chain-oriented policy working together. Ghana’s ‘green’ red-carpet for sustainable investors, by contrast, sits in the weakest box of the new policy typology, since it is neither place-based nor tied to a value chain. More broadly, the new book identifies a green regional policy gap. On Net Zero Tracker data from February 2026, 58% of national governments and 62% of large firms have active net-zero policies. Among regions the figure is 29%, and 69% have no target at all.
Two books, one regional argument
The 2022 book remains the toolkit for diagnosing a region’s position in a chain and for building, embedding and reshaping from there. The new book takes that toolkit into a fragmented world economy, where the climate emergency has to be reconciled with growth, and asks how regions can do the reconciling. The Regional Studies Association runs through both. The plenary, the summer blog and the RSA Research Network on Green Global Value Chains for Sustainable Regional Development each shaped the new book’s arguments. The book launches at LSE on 18 November 2026 at ‘Can global value chains go green? Trade, investment and the net-zero development challenge’, in person and online. Much of this makes a similar case, that in a fragmenting world the task for regions is to green the connections between places and to keep them.