Industrial Clusters and Districts in Environmental and Social Transitions

Guest Editors:

Anna Lis, Faculty of Management and Economics, Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland
Amir Maghssudipour, Department of Economics and Management 'Marco Fanno', University of Padua, Italy

Aims and scope of the Call for Papers

In the face of escalating environmental challenges and intensifying social pressures, the very notion of competitiveness is being fundamentally redefined. Competitiveness is no longer assessed solely in terms of productivity, growth, and innovation; rather, it increasingly encompasses the capacity to generate long-term economic value by addressing environmental challenges and strengthening social sustainability. In this context, a key question concerns whether and under what conditions industrial clusters and districts can function as collective arenas where firms, communities, and institutions jointly pursue economic performance, environmental sustainability, and social value creation through shared strategies, coordinated action, and place-based development processes (Porter & Kramer, 2011; Becattini, 2015). Through networks of collaboration, knowledge flows, and shared development strategies, clusters and districts can shape local and regional development trajectories as well as environmental outcomes and social dynamics (Sedita et al., 2025). Such effects encompass environmental mechanisms and outcomes, including the diffusion of cleaner technologies, eco-innovation, the spread of circular economy principles (Ada et al., 2021), alongside social mechanisms and outcomes shaping employment structures, skills upgrading, job quality, labour relations, gender and generational inclusion, and the involvement of local communities in development processes (Becattini, 2015).

In response to such escalating environmental and social challenges, some clusters and districts are gradually expanding the scope of their traditional activities. Some of them are becoming platforms that can coordinate the green transformation and the social transition at sectoral, organisational, and regional levels. By developing networks of cooperation and initiating dialogue among enterprises, research institutions and public authorities, clusters and districts can enable the synchronisation of actions undertaken by actors involved in decarbonisation, circularity, resource protection processes, and social transformation processes related to employment, skills development, inclusion, and territorial cohesion. At the same time, clusters and districts can support implementation processes by initiating and facilitating activities that lead to tangible changes in business practices. This includes the development of environmental and social competences among firms, the provision of specialised services, the implementation of joint research and development projects, and the support of new business initiatives - including spin-offs and start-ups - based on green technologies, circular economy models, low-carbon solutions, and socially oriented business models addressing employment quality, skills development, and inclusion.

In parallel, the institutional dimension of cluster and district activity is gaining importance, as reflected in their growing engagement in co-creating public policies and shaping regulatory frameworks for green and social transformations. They can contribute to the formulation of environmental, industrial, and social policy strategies; develop shared standards, green certification schemes, and social norms, guidelines, and practices related to work, skills, and inclusion; and act as intermediaries between policy-making processes and business practice. As a result, such systems are evolving from traditional sectoral agglomerations into complex transformational ecosystems, in which coordination, implementation, and institutionalisation are tightly intertwined in the process of building a green economy that is also socially sustainable (Chowdhury et al., 2022; McCauley & Stephens, 2012; Lis & Mackiewicz, 2023; Xiu & Lis, 2024).

The green and social transition is not only reshaping the internal functioning and strategic orientation of existing industrial clusters and districts but is also fostering the emergence of new cluster configurations. These emerging forms reflect profound changes in production systems, value chains, and governance arrangements driven by climate neutrality goals, resource constraints, energy system transformation, and evolving social challenges related to work, skills, inclusion, and territorial cohesion. Rather than being organised around single industries or technologies, these socio-economic systems increasingly take the form of cross-sectoral, mission-oriented, and territorially embedded ecosystems designed to address complex sustainability challenges (Feola et al., 2021). From a theoretical perspective, these new configurations resonate with recent advances in sustainability transitions research, industrial ecology, mission-oriented innovation policy, and socio-economic approaches that foreground social relations, institutions, and power dynamics in transformation processes. These configurations can be understood as transformational clusters and districts that operate as collective platforms for systemic innovation, where economic coordination, technological experimentation, and institutional change co-evolve at the local level (Baldassarre et al., 2019), while remaining embedded in production systems organised across different phases of global value chains (De Marchi et al., 2018).

An important lens through which these emerging configurations can be interpreted is that of the twin transition, referring to the intertwined dynamics of green and digital transformation (Montresor and Vezzani, 2023). Recent contributions highlight how clusters and industrial districts increasingly act as key meso-level arenas where digital technologies - such as data analytics, automation, artificial intelligence, and digital platforms - enable, accelerate, or reshape green transition processes (Hervás-Oliver & Capone, 2024). At the same time, the twin transition raises critical social questions related to skills transformation, workforce polarisation, digital divides, and the uneven capacity of firms and territories to benefit from digital-enabled sustainability strategies. In this regard, clusters and districts play a crucial role in mediating the interaction between digitalisation, environmental upgrading, and social outcomes, shaping transition pathways that are technologically ready, environmentally viable, and socially sustainable.

An emerging body of literature has begun to document how sustainability-oriented cluster models are taking shape in response to environmental and climate-related challenges, highlighting organisational forms that differ from traditional sectoral clusters in terms of governance, coordination, and innovation dynamics (Boix-Domenech et al. 2025).
Circular economy-oriented clusters represent one of the most prominent new organisational forms emerging in the green transition (Bourdin & Torre, 2024). These clusters bring together actors involved in recycling and recovery of raw materials, advanced material management, circular logistics, eco-design, and waste-to-resource processes. By enabling industrial actors to close material loops and reduce primary resource dependency, circular economy clusters contribute to both environmental performance and regional resilience (Cohen et al., 2019). Importantly, such clusters often span multiple sectors, like manufacturing, logistics, waste management, digital services, and rely on intensive coordination to align technological solutions, business models, and regulatory requirements. As a result, they function as experimental spaces for circular business models and collective governance arrangements that go beyond firm-level eco-innovation.

Another key cluster configuration emerging from the green transformation is rooted in the principles of industrial ecology and industrial symbiosis. Eco-industrial parks and industrial symbiosis networks facilitate the exchange of energy, materials, and industrial by-products among co-located or networked firms, thereby increasing resource efficiency and reducing environmental externalities (Ashton, 2011; Bain et al., 2010). These clusters emphasise systemic optimisation rather than individual firm performance and require strong coordination mechanisms, trust-based relationships, and enabling institutional frameworks. They also highlight the spatial dimension of sustainability transitions, as geographical proximity and territorial governance play a crucial role in enabling symbiotic exchanges and shared infrastructures (Xiu & Lis, 2024).

Energy transition dynamics have given rise to a diverse set of energy-related cluster configurations. These include energy clusters and energy-based industrial clusters focused on renewable energy generation, storage, and smart grids, as well as more specialised forms such as hydrogen valleys, energy islands, and renewable energy communities or cooperatives (Bourdin, 2026). Such systems operate at the intersection of industrial transformation, energy system restructuring, and regional development (Cooke et al., 2024). They often combine large-scale industrial actors with public authorities, research institutions, and local communities, reflecting a shift toward more decentralised, participatory, and territorially embedded energy systems. As mission-oriented ecosystems, energy transition clusters play a key role in coordinating investments, aligning infrastructures, and facilitating the diffusion of low-carbon technologies.

Another recent configuration is represented by bio-clusters as territorially embedded cluster configurations centred on biological resources, life sciences, agri-food systems, and bioeconomy-related activities, where knowledge creation, recombination, and diffusion play a pivotal role in shaping innovation and sustainability outcomes (Abbasiharofteh & Hermans, 2025). Rather than being defined solely by sectoral boundaries, bio-clusters are characterised by complex and heterogeneous knowledge networks that connect firms, research organisations, universities, public agencies, and intermediary actors across multiple domains. These networks support processes of experimentation, learning, and adaptation that are crucial for addressing sustainability challenges related to resource use, environmental protection, and socio-economic resilience. Recent research highlights that bio-clusters differ markedly in their internal knowledge structures, governance arrangements, and innovation dynamics, giving rise to diverse developmental pathways and transition potentials. Understanding bio-clusters therefore requires moving beyond homogeneous cluster models and paying closer attention to the configuration of knowledge networks and their implications for green and social transformation processes.

Despite the growing relevance of social issues in sustainability transitions, the social sustainability dimension of clusters and districts remains comparatively underexplored in the literature. This gap can be attributed to several factors. First, research on clusters and districts has traditionally been rooted in economic geography, industrial economics, and innovation studies, where performance has been predominantly measured through economic and technological indicators. Second, social outcomes such as job quality, inclusion, or power relations are inherently more difficult to observe, measure, and attribute to collective meso-level structures like clusters and districts. Third, the social effects of sustainable transformations often unfold unevenly over time and space, making them less visible than environmental or technological outcomes. As a result, social sustainability dynamics within such configurations are frequently treated as secondary effects rather than as core dimensions of transformation processes.

The social sustainability dimension of sustainability transitions - including, but not limited to, the green transition - is a central yet still insufficiently theorised component of the clusters’ and districts’ literature. Beyond technological change and environmental performance, transitions are inherently social processes that reshape work organisation, skills, professional identities, power relations, and patterns of inclusion and exclusion within territories (Sedita & Maghssudipour, 2024). We suggest that clusters and districts can play a critical role also in mediating these dynamics, as they structure interactions among firms, workers, trade unions, educational institutions, public authorities, and local communities.

Contributions are therefore invited to examine clusters and districts also as arenas of social negotiation and contestation, where issues of employment security, skills mismatch, social acceptance, and inequality become particularly salient. Particular attention may be devoted to issues of inequality, uneven development, and social acceptance, as well as to the capacity of clusters and districts to foster inclusive, participatory, and socially sustainable forms of transformation. By explicitly foregrounding the social dimension, the special issue aims to move beyond a narrow techno-economic view of transitions and to advance a more holistic understanding of how green and social transformations unfold within clustered production systems.
There is therefore a need to integrate environmental and social indicators into cluster performance assessment and to combine quantitative analysis with qualitative methods. Particularly promising are mixed-methods designs, network analysis, system dynamics modelling, experimental methods, and transition pathway analysis. Such methodological innovation is essential for identifying the mechanisms through which clusters and districts can act as agents of green and social sustainable transformation.

Moreover, there is a growing need for multi-level and interdisciplinary research that links firm-level strategies and practices with meso-level cluster and district governance arrangements and macro-level public policy frameworks. Methodological approaches that bridge management studies, regional economics, geography, sustainability science, and public policy analysis are essential for understanding how clusters and districts operate as agency between business innovation and systemic green and social transitions (Bridge et al., 2013; Leventon et al., 2023). This methodological pluralism is crucial for advancing both theoretical and policy-relevant insights.

Comparative research encompassing both developed, emerging economies, and cases from the Global South constitutes an additional area of inquiry. While clusters and districts operating in European countries increasingly focus on transitioning towards low-carbon activities and managing the social implications of transformation (e.g., skills upgrading, job quality, inclusion), similar socio-economic systems in emerging economies often face the dual challenge of accelerating industrialisation while simultaneously limiting environmental and social pressures. Understanding these divergent development trajectories is essential for identifying the institutional, technological and socio-economic conditions shaping green and social transformation in different contexts. Such a perspective enables the formulation of theories and policy recommendations with truly global relevance for the sustainable development of clusters and districts.

Clusters and districts may also serve as key vehicles for policy learning and experimentation, enabling the diffusion of best practices while also revealing the limits of one-size-fits-all approaches. In particular, analyses can illuminate how place-specific factors condition the effectiveness of cluster and district-based strategies for social and environmental sustainability (Kuo et al., 2019). Such insights are critical for designing context-sensitive cluster and districts policies that support green and social transformation while addressing uneven development and structural constraints at different stages of economic development.

Finally, the special issue explicitly welcomes critical and reflexive perspectives that examine the unintended, adverse, or uneven social and environmental effects associated with cluster and district development and transition processes. While such configurations are often portrayed as engines of innovation, competitiveness, and recently of sustainability, their outcomes are neither automatic nor uniformly positive. Contributions may explore how cluster and district-based dynamics can generate social lock-ins, precarisation of work, skills polarisation, exclusion of vulnerable groups, or uneven territorial development, as well as environmental lock-ins, rebound effects, forms of greenwashing, the displacement of environmental externalities across territories or along global value chains, and path dependencies that hinder deeper ecological transformation, alongside technological or environmental path dependencies. Particular attention may be devoted to power asymmetries among firms, institutions, workers, and communities, and to how these asymmetries shape social outcomes as well as the direction, depth, and environmental effectiveness of transition pathways, and to how these asymmetries shape the direction and social acceptability of transition pathways. By engaging with these tensions and “dark sides” of clusters and districts, the special issue seeks to advance a more nuanced and realistic understanding of such configurations as contested arenas of transformation, where green and social transitions involve trade-offs, conflicts, and negotiated outcomes rather than linear progress.

We invite authors to submit theoretical and empirical contributions that advance a more integrated understanding of clusters and districts as economic, environmental and social actors facing today’s sustainability challenges and transformation opportunities. Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following potential research areas:

Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following potential research areas:

  • redefining the role of industrial clusters and industrial districts in green and/or social transitions;
  • the emergence of new cluster and district configurations and their role in green and/or social transitions;
  • advancing methodological approaches to studying the green and/or social transformation of clusters and districts;
  • divergent pathways of green and/or social transformation of clusters and districts in developed, emerging economies and the Global South;
  • clusters and districts in the twin transition: interactions between green, digital, and social transformations;
  • the “dark side” of clusters and districts: inequality, exclusion, power relations, and contested transitions.

Submission Guidelines

Submission deadline: August 31, 2026
First-round decisions (after peer review): November/December, 2026
Final version of papers: February, 2027 
Issue published: 2027

Manuscripts must be submitted in English, with a length between 8,000 and 12,000 words (excluding references, tables, figures), and must comply with the style and formatting guidelines of the JEMI journal, available at: https://jemi.edu.pl/submission-and-policy. Submissions that do not adhere to these formal requirements will be desk-rejected.

Manuscripts should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., with the subject line: "Industrial Clusters and Districts"

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Guest Editors

Anna Lis, Faculty of Management and Economics, Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland

Anna Lis is a Professor at Gdańsk University of Technology and a member of the University Senate for the 2024–2028 term. A lecturer, researcher, and practitioner in the field of innovation management and interorganizational cooperation, she is also an advocate of sustainable development across academic, business, and social contexts. A Dekaban Foundation Scholar at the University of Michigan, she has completed research internships at universities in Europe, the United States, and Asia, and has participated in national and international research projects funded by the INNET, COSME, Horizon 2020, and Horizon Europe programmes. Co-author of over 100 scientific publications and numerous expert reports on innovation policy, regional innovation strategies, and clusters, she collaborates with consulting and training companies, cluster organizations, and business environment institutions.

Amir6Amir Maghssudipour, Department of Economics and Management 'Marco Fanno', University of Padua, Italy

Amir Maghssudipour is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Padova. His research lies at the intersection of firm innovation and socio-environmental sustainability, with a focus on how firms develop responsible, inclusive, and innovation-driven strategies under changing institutional, sectoral, and territorial conditions. His work examines innovation processes within firms and local production systems, including industrial districts, business clusters, and renewable energy communities, highlighting the role of collective action, governance, multi-level networks, and inter-organizational dynamics in shaping their structures and evolution. More broadly, he investigates how innovation acts as a lever for entrepreneurial development, environmental responsibility, and social value creation, shaping firms’ development trajectories and competitive strategies. He teaches Business Strategy and Economics and Management of Innovation. His research has been published in national and international peer-reviewed journals and in book chapters with leading international publishers.