Abstract deadline: 12 June 2026
Manuscript deadline: 25 September 2026
Rethinking Regional Skills: Place-Based Capabilities and Economic Transformation
Skills are central to regional development, influencing labour markets, industrial evolution, and economic trajectories. Yet despite their long-standing recognition, regional skills are often under-theorised and frequently conflated with education, human capital, or occupational structures. Conceptual frameworks that treat skills as multidimensional, place-based capabilities that emerge from the interactions of people, firms, and local institutions remain limited, and systematic empirical evidence on skill formation, mismatch, mobility, and utilisation across regions is still sparse. Meanwhile, rapid skill-biased technological change, digitalisation, and green transitions are reshaping jobs, tasks, and production systems, altering regional skill demands, reinforcing divergence in development paths, and raising urgent policy questions.
Building on emerging conceptual and empirical work, this Special Issue seeks to advance understanding of regional skills as active, context-dependent capabilities, and their role in economic transformation. We invite conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that explore how regional skills are formed, adapted, deployed, and leveraged to support regional development, labour market inclusion, and industrial transformation. Submissions may address advanced, emerging, and developing economies, and analyses may cover sub-regional to supra-regional scales.
We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:
- The nature and dynamics of regional skills formation and transformation due to technological change (skills creation, resilience, obsolescence, disappearance);
- The links between education, skills transformation and job dynamics in the green and digital transitions of regional economies;
- The drivers and barriers of a regional skills transition for the innovation, growth and resilience of regional economies;
- The regional skill mismatch and skill formation in new labour spaces, e.g. green jobs, remote working, new platformised digital industries, gig economy.
- The enablers and barriers of a regional skills transformation for the green and digital transitions of industrial clusters and regional economies;
- Regional skills transformation and mismatch within shifting regional labour markets;
- Regional skills transformation and mismatch in regions as open economies: skills mobility, remote skills and migration;
- The opportunities and constraints of stranded and stressed regions: left-behindedness, regional low-skill traps, transitioning carbon-intensive regions,
- The links between vocational education, lifelong training and on-the-job upskilling and, regional skills transition in the context of technological change;
- The opportunities and constraints of regional skills transition in emerging and developing economies;
- Policy debates and policy experiences to address the regional dimension of skill mismatch, skill formation and skill transition for just and inclusive growth
The Special Issue encourages early-career researchers and scholars from underrepresented regions, including the Global South, to submit contributions. We welcome both qualitative and quantitative studies, conceptual and theoretical analyses, as well as case studies that provide new insights into the formation and utilisation of regional skills. All submissions should ground their analysis in place-based contexts and address implications for theory, practice, or policy.
Submission Instructions
Authors interested should submit an extended abstract of max. 500 words + references by email to David.Morris1@Nottingham.ac.uk by the 12th of June 2026 at the latest in order to verify the potential fit with the Special Issue objectives before final submission of full manuscripts. We further welcome informal inquiries relating to the Special Issue and proposed topics. Please direct any questions on the Special Issue to our team of guest editors.
Afterwards, all submissions are subject to the Regional Studies Journal’s usual full peer review process. Full manuscripts should be submitted via the journal’s online submission system by the 25th of September 2026. On submission, please select the special issue title and consider if your submission could further become part of the ‘Policy Debates’ or ‘Urban and Regional Horizons’ Sections of Regional Studies.
The guest editors intend to host a Special Session at the RSA 2026 Conference in Gothenburg between 15th-18th June 2026, where manuscripts can be presented and discussed. It should be noted that invitations to the RSA Conference Special Session do not guarantee a paper’s acceptance to the Special Issue.
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