12.30-13.30 BST / 13.30 - 14.30 CEST

Keynote Lecture from Bernhard Truffer, Swiss Federal Insitute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), Switzerland.

Title: Matters beyond knowledge – the role of valuation in transition studies and potential lessons for regional policy

The recently coined concept of transformative knowledge regions is a welcomed addition to an increasing field of scholarship that aims at informing regional policy beyond industrial competitiveness. In this talk, I will argue that besides knowledge, in its different forms and functions, we need to focus on the diverse institutional resources and dynamics that typically get mobilized in such transformation processes. I will in particular argue that “valuation processes” provide a productive perspective on how new directionalities in a region result from strategies of specific actors but finally emerge as a systemic resource of their interplay. Even though values and knowledge can conceptually not be fully separated, I will argue that a genuine focus on the way actors mobilize values is key for understanding regional transformation processes. Empirically, this argument will be illustrated by our recent work on how manufacturing regions in global value chains can become proactive agents in sustainability transitions. The specific case reports on the South Indian region of Tirupur, host of one of the largest textile production clusters in the world, which has developed an explicit green textiles strategy over the past decade. I will show how a series of dedicated innovation processes were accompanied by a wide variety of valuation processes at different levels to lay the ground for such a dedicated green strategy to emerge.