Towards a greener future? Environment and economic recovery in old industrial regions

The paper focuses on how the environmental assets of old industrial regions were commodified and channelled in new productive processes , along with domesticating and distributing old and new negative externalities and risks unevenly in spatial and social terms. We adopted a political ecological approach to grasp how the emergence and dynamics of agency in such spaces are related to the mobilization of environmental resources, how peripheral industrialization is linked intimately to ecological exploitation jeopardizing the sustainability of old and new trajectories and how such processes are embedded in the ecological ‘lock-in’ position of OIRs. Our analysis rests on Hungarian case studies which produced empirical results and theoretical lessons beyond this context, for further studies in peripheral industrial regions.