Policy options for green regional development: adopting a production and application perspective

Green and sustainable development has received increasing attention in recent years due to challenges emanating from climate change and worsening environmental conditions. Although these are problems of global nature, actions have to be taken often at lower spatial scales. We focus on innovation and industrial policies and on the regional level, since green development often can be supported here by respective policies. However, effective policies have to consider that individual regions face different kinds of challenges for moving towards a ‘greener’ future. This article develops a framework that allows taking such differences into account. We distinguish between the production side of ‘green technologies’ (that is, the industries that develop and produce such technologies) and the application side (that is, the adoption of such technologies by firms and the wider society), and we investigate what challenges might prevail on both sides and explore the potential role of policies for different types of regions.