De-cluttering "green" to unlock economic development opportunities

Future economic promotion approaches in local and national territories need to be able to provide more environmentally sustainable solutions. During the last few years, terms like “green economic development”, “industrial ecology”, “eco-innovation”, “sustainable production and manufacturing” and others have emerged to express the need for new thinking and practice models, but also the need for new innovation- and knowledge-intensive formats of cooperation.

The topic itself is not only in vogue, it is also of critical future importance for policy-, institutional and business representatives as well as for practitioners in economic development. Nevertheless, there are very few answers as to how to promote new production models in favour of sustainable competitiveness. At the same time, the topic includes highly diverse areas and lacks differentiation. Different economic sectors, territorial realities and development prerequisites require very different promotion approaches and the identification of different opportunities.

Practitioners who want to promote green production methods, renewable sectors or value chains will have problems finding practical and differentiated information on this topic.

Mesopartner wants to provide this differentiation and is working on the theme to

• contribute to the development of concrete intervention approaches. training modules and opportunity-driven strategies that are able to unleash green economic potentials

• promote a learning-intensive reflection process with economic development experts on this topic

• provide case studies, podcasts and articles that demonstrate local and regional opportunities, as well as the systemic and innovation-driven requirements in this field

There are a number of areas of work we wish to focus on in the coming months. These include the following subtheme questions we would like to answer:

• Looking at different renewable energy sectors: to what extent do the different value chains in e.g. the windmill sector, the solar energy sector and bio energy sector demand different technological, institutional and actor constellations and requirements? To what extent do they differ from the possibility of promoting the chains at the local level?

• What are the different climate change innovations in rural areas and in urban cities? What are the opportunities and good practices in this regard?

• Climate change innovations also mean “international competitiveness on best environmental, technological and non-technological solutions”. How will this affect developing countries and less competitive regions?

• What are the requirements of local and national innovation systems to promote more sustainable manufacturing and resource-efficient methods?

• How can resource efficiency be integrated into the promotion of value chains and clusters using life-cycle assessments?

• How can we unleash more green economic business opportunities?

Mesopartner is interested in exchanging information on these subtheme-questions with other experts and will contribute to a more differentiated hands-on discussion including tools and methods that can be used in practice. Mesopartner already provides study tours, and workshop and training formats for economic development practitioners on this topic (see also right-hand column). For further information please contact Frank Waeltring from Mesopartner.