Green and just regional path development

Path development and path creation are prevalent concepts in efforts to understand regional economic change and innovation. A recent focus has been on ‘green’ path development: industrial change associated with environmentally beneficial products and services. This provides a moment to take stock of the path development literature to date and ask: What or who is it for? In this article we use the concept of just transition to explore ways that (green) path development concepts could be more attuned to concerns for human and environmental well-being as opposed to economic growth and innovation as goals in themselves. Building from Geographical Political Economy approaches and injecting complementary cultural economic and sociological perspectives, we generate a conception of green and just path development. This conception builds a more variegated understanding of path development as a theory of change, focusing on negotiation, struggle, inclusion and exclusion in path development processes, and leaning to a stronger orientation towards outcomes for people and places, especially implications for work and communities. This matters for understanding what the purpose of investigating path development is, and what counts as ‘success’ in evaluating path development processes.