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Regional development faces mounting challenges, including persistent inequalities, climate change and social fragmentation, that render regional futures increasingly complex and contested. Traditional approaches grounded in path dependence and structural analysis often overlook the role of imagination, agency and contested visions in shaping future trajectories, leaving a critical gap: the absence of forward-looking, inclusive and methodologically diverse tools to study and influence regional futures. This article presents a comparative review of eight methodological approaches that together constitute a pluralistic toolbox for studying regional futures. We organise these methods into three clusters evaluating each by purpose, techniques, data requirements and user suitability. Drawing on recent literature and empirical cases, we show how their integration reveals power dynamics, fosters agency and supports ethical, inclusive futures. We conclude with a call for critical reflexivity regarding the politics of knowledge production.

Rapidly developing countries like India face numerous challenges related to social and environmental sustainability, which are associated with their fast economic growth and rising energy demand, climate change, and widening disparities between the rich and the poor. Recently, a number of claims have been made in the literature that the prospects of alternative development pathways in emerging economies in Asia are becoming more likely, and that these economies might even leapfrog Western initiatives. This paper contributes by reporting on the five most visible and established initiatives in the area of off-grid PV solar energy in India, specifically homing in on the innovative business models that are evolving. We develop a new typology of upscaling dimensions in order to analyze these five initiatives. They are found to be quite successful, but have difficulty in terms of reaching the poorest of the poor (deep upscaling) and bringing about required institutional change (institutional upscaling).

It is generally accepted that the concept of sustainability is not straightforward, but is subject to ongoing ambiguities, uncertainties and contestations. Yet literature on sustainability transitions has so far only engaged in limited ways with the resulting tough questions around what sustainability means, to whom and in which contexts. This paper makes a contribution to this debate by unpacking sustainability in India and Thailand in the context of solar photovoltaic and urban mobility experimentation. Building on a database of sustainability experiments and multicriteria mapping techniques applied in two workshops, the paper concludes that sustainability transition scholarship and associated governance strategies must engage with such questions in at least three important ways. First, there is a need for extreme caution in assuming any objective status for the sustainability of innovations, and for greater reflection on the normative implications of case study choices. Second, sustainability transition scholarship and governance must engage more with the unpacking of uncertainties and diverse possible socio-technical configurations even within (apparently) singular technological fields. Third, sustainability transition scholarship must be more explicit and reflective about the specific geographical contexts within which the sustainability of experimentation is addressed.

Abstract The increasing deployment of renewable energy (RE) hinges on the development and upscaling of manufacturing and logistics capacities, offering industrial development opportunities for regions and countries. In this paper, we analyse how contextual factors pertaining to pre-existing regional assets and multi-scalar institutional environments influence RE-related industrial development at the regional scale. To this avail, we purposefully selected two contrasting regional case studies of offshore wind energy-related industry developments in Southern Denmark (a pioneering region) and Normandy (France, a latecomer region) and discuss developments until 2020. Our qualitative analysis is informed by theoretical and empirical insights from the economic geography and sustainability transitions research fields. The identified contrasting regional path creation processes reflect substantial differences in context conditions, providing insights into how regions can capture value in the ongoing energy transitions. There has been significant interest regarding the development of new regional green industries and how to promote them to achieve desired objectives, such as meeting national climate goals, industrialization and creating new green jobs. Amid this growing regional and national interest in developing new regional green industries, the paper provides novel insights regarding the key factors that can make some regions more successful while others are less successful. Graphical Abstract Graphical Abstract

Despite significant interest in regional industrial restructuring in economic geography, surprisingly scarce attention has been paid to the changing role of agency over time. The current paper develops a framework for understanding the role of multiple types of agents and the agency they exercise for new path development. The framework is employed in a longitudinal study of industry development in Värmland, Sweden, from forestry towards a bio-economy. The analysis highlights how actors exercise very different types of agency in different periods of path development.

With 19550 MW installed in 2013, India is considered a success story in terms of net installed capacity of wind power. Few existing studies on wind energy in India have highlighted the important role of institutions, and most lack a detailed account of how influential institutions came about through the work of advocacy groups, or tend to focus on short time periods. This paper uses the notion of collective institutional entrepreneurship to analyse institutionalisation of wind energy in India across three time periods (1985-1995, 1995-2003, and 2003-2013). The analysis shows that wind power development in India was driven by efforts of collective institutional entrepreneurs using two aggregated strategies, i.e. (1) creation of supportive techno-economic and socio-political networks; (2) creation of an indigenous innovation infrastructure. The paper highlights setbacks, controversies, contestations and tensions between various actor groups in collective institutional entrepreneurship and argues that actions must be taken for inclusion of actors who have been marginalized in the process.