21.1 Introduction & Brief History of the Geography of Transitions

Over the past two decades, studies on sustainability transitions have developed into a thriving field of research that deals with long-term, systemic and fundamental transformation processes towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption through socio-technical innovation. Initial theory-building of sustainability transitions was structured around several ‘foundational’ frameworks – MLP (Chapter 2), SNM (Chapter 5), TM (Chapter 3) and TIS (Chapter 4) – which emerged in the early 2000s based on cross-overs between evolutionary economics, social constructivist accounts of technology development, reflexive modernisation and research on innovation systems (Grin et al., Reference Grin, Rotmans and Schot2010). Foundational research on sustainability transitions originated in the Netherlands but grew quickly into an international, if not global, scholarly community.

At its onset, questions concerning how sustainability transitions emerge across places and scales were largely off the radar with the focus instead on the development of universal, a-geographical explanations and singular scales of analysis (typically national-level case studies). In spite of the obvious relevance and importance of the profound impacts that globalisation and urbanisation were having on socioeconomic development and environmental change, early transition theorising showed little interest in its spatial dimensions and multi-scalar processes and provided limited analytical purchase to deal with them (Coenen et al. Reference Coenen, Benneworth and Truffer2012). The field’s often implicit methodological nationalism led many early transition studies to draw ex-ante national boundaries around sectors, technologies and systems in transition (Markard et al., Reference Markard, Raven and Truffer2012). This national bias has weakened substantially over time but still remains present. For example, Geels and Turnheim (Reference Geels and Turnheim2022, page 49) recently argued that:

To further add to geographical misperceptions in transition theory, pioneering work on, especially, MLP and SNM made allusions to scales that by-and-large failed to disrupt the singular focus on the national. Geels and Raven (Reference Geels and Raven2006), for example, placed niche development trajectories into a ‘local–global’ perspective. Here, local niche experiments are considered to evolve to the global level as local outcomes are aggregated into more universal lessons and rules. Similarly, Geels and Deuten (Reference Geels and Deuten2006) argued that transitions depend on localised innovation networks evolving into inter-local, trans-local and finally global networks, paralleled by the emergence of higher-level epistemic communities shaping those technologies and innovations’ evolution. Both cases reflect an overly simplistic and containerised means of understanding scales; as aggregated products of lower-level processes (e.g. niche-to-landscape) rather than recognising the multi-scalar nature of the MLP’s three analytical levels. That is, landscapes can be localised in micro-social behaviours, practices and norms, while niches can be shaped by global forces and factors and multi-locational networks. In sum, transition scholars have often empirically equated (or, rather, conflated) landscape, regime and niche levels in MLP with spatial scales. Such allusions have been problematic when seeking to understand and explain geographical dimensions and aspects of transitions. Also, the complex translation and re-scaling processes that necessarily accompany the spatial diffusion of transformative ‘niche’ solutions have remained suspiciously absent from transition studies’ key conceptual frameworks (Miörner and Binz, Reference Miörner and Binz2021; Sengers and Raven, Reference Sengers and Raven2015).

The initial methodological nationalism (Heiberg et al., Reference Heiberg, Binz and Truffer2020; Fuenfschilling and Binz, Reference Fuenfschilling and Binz2018) and spatial/scalar naivety of transition studies has been readily met and criticised by geographers and scholars in other spatial sciences such as urban and regional studies (Bulkeley et al., Reference Bulkeley, Broto, Hodson and Marvin2010; Coenen et al., Reference Coenen, Benneworth and Truffer2012; Hansen and Coenen, Reference Hansen and Coenen2015; Hodson and Marvin, Reference Hodson and Marvin2010; Murphy, Reference Murphy2015; Truffer, Reference Truffer2008). These studies voiced a concern that transition theories were insufficiently equipped to assess the advantages, unevenness, conflicts and tensions that are constituted by the economical, institutional, social and cultural contexts in which transitions dynamics and pathways are embedded. Central to these criticisms was the notion that transition theories had failed to recognise why and for what reason transformative instances of institutional, entrepreneurial and innovation occur where they do and how factors and forces at multiple scales shape these processes. This blind spot could very easily lead to the naïve assumption that sustainability transitions can take place anywhere through generalised processes rather than place-specific, contingent and multi-scalar dynamics.

In response to these shortcomings, work on the ‘geography of sustainability transitions’ (GeoST) has been a relatively recent addition to transition theorising, addressing the need for greater sensitivity and attention to the scales, spatialities and context-specific factors that shape transitions. Interest and engagement with the geographical dimensions of sustainability transitions quickly grew into a prominent sub-field, characterised by a fruitful trading zone that is populated by geographers, transition scholars and other social scientists seeking to better account for place specificity, multi-scalarity and spatial unevenness in their studies of socio-technical change. In fact, the GeoST subfield now has its own thematic group within the STRN network, and it has become a core theme at the International Transition Conference series, as well as in major international conferences in (human/economic) geography. Nonetheless, however, misconceptions on the aims and scope of GeoST research prevail in human geography and the transitions community as exemplified by Köhler et al.’s (Reference Köhler, Geels, Kern, Markard, Onsongo, Wieczorek, Alkemade, Avelino, Bergek and Boons2019: 14) claim that the geography of transitions is ‘primarily concerned with understanding how and why transitions are similar or different across locations.’ Moreover, their (Köhler et al., Reference Köhler, Geels, Kern, Markard, Onsongo, Wieczorek, Alkemade, Avelino, Bergek and Boons2019) subsequent discussion on transitions in cities and the Global South further reifies the notion that empirical location is the only geography that matters (for a critique, see Binz et al. Reference Binz, Coenen, Murphy and Truffer2020). Such overly simplistic, descriptive and outcome-focused geographical understandings ignore the contributions that GeoST scholars are making with regard to the multi-scalar, context-specific mechanisms, processes and relationalities shaping transitions and their uneven outcomes within and between places and regions (North and South).

In the remainder of this chapter, we aim to transcend an empirical concern with the geography of transitions and, instead, outline the contours of the GeoST’s wider theoretical research agenda and ongoing debates, framing these specifically around conceptualisations of place and the scales in/through which transitions unfold. While many books and papers have been devoted to discussing these concepts, we need to limit ourselves to the following definitions. To start with the former, place refers to a location or a site in space where an activity or object is located and which relates to other sites or locations because of interactions, movements and diffusions between them (Agnew, Reference Agnew1987). Places are thus relationally constituted – that is they are (re)produced through socio-material, multi-scalar and power-laden relations that interconnect and situate actors, materials, histories, identities, markets and built environments within particular space-time contexts that condition the pathways and prospects for transitions, and which create a sense of place (Pierce et al., Reference Pierce, Martin and Murphy2011). Scale, on the other hand, refers to the socio-material size and areal extent of phenomena (Bridge et al., Reference Bridge, Bouzarovski, Bradshaw and Eyre2013). Human geography generally assumes that the scales at which social structures and dynamics (like transitions) unfold are not pre-set, but socially constructed and fluid. Key decisions on whether and how a given sector transforms may then not be allocated to one distinct scale, but rather depend on interactions between local, regional, national and global scales or be consciously ‘rescaled’, e.g. from being a ‘local’ to a ‘national’ problem.

Why do transitions occur in one place and not in another? How do transitions unfold across different geographical contexts? How do spatial features and scalar dimensions shape transition dynamics? These questions typically characterise a geographer’s perspective and provide highly relevant theoretical inroads to explore the spaces and spatiality of transition processes. Current research is relatively strong in explaining past transitions, focusing predominantly on qualitative case studies that draw on historical insights (Zolfagharian et al., Reference Zolfagharian, Walrave, Raven and Romme2019). Even though there is growing interest by transition scholars into the role played by geographical difference in shaping the co-evolution of technologies, actors and institutions (Bergek et al., Reference Bergek, Hekkert, Jacobsson, Markard, Sandén and Truffer2015), place and scale are all too often treated at best as a passive background variable providing little causal explanation or theoretical purchase.

21.2 Place

A review of studies on the geography of transitions (Hansen and Coenen, Reference Hansen and Coenen2015) found that the majority of the geographical analyses have zoomed in on the importance of spatial context for transition processes. Here they adopt a relational and evolutionary view of space, one that views it as a socially produced phenomenon that is the outcome of interactions between actors, institutions, practices, materials and routines that are historically and culturally situated in places and times. For example, an energy (socio-technical) regime where coal is the primary source (material) of (for) electricity will have associated with it relations, institutions and practices that reinforce interdependencies between mining communities, companies and workers, power utilities and generation facilities, state actors and consumers, among others. Importantly, each of these features, materials and actors is embedded in particular spatial (and multi-scalar) relations that shape regime-specific path dependencies, lock-ins and the prospects for realising a sustainability transition. Ignoring such geographies risks developing overly deterministic, and/or (universal) thin understandings of the drivers of, and strategies to achieve, transitions.

The greater spatial resolution adopted in geographical analyses of sustainability transitions has helped to specify that niche formation and formation processes in emergent technologies are contingent on place-dependent factors such as technological and industrial specialisation, natural resource endowments, market formation dynamics, urban and regional visions and policies and localised informal institutions (Hansen and Coenen, Reference Hansen and Coenen2015). While a higher level of sensitivity concerning the importance of locality is gained in these studies, it may have come with a bias towards emphasising particularities found in single case studies of distinct places, typically nation-states. As a result, the consensus is still that place matters while there is little generalisable knowledge about how spatial specificities matter for transitions. There is a risk that such analyses simply observe spatial specificity and establish differences in transition dynamics as an empirical matter-of-fact without seeking to typologise, explain or theorise the observed differences. This in turn may limit the contribution of geographical analysis to sustainability transitions to that of topical contrivance: of interest to geographers but with limited reach beyond this discipline (Bridge, Reference Bridge2008). This suggests that there are yet un-theorised sources of spatial difference in transition dynamics observed as place specificity.

One particularly prominent perspective afforded by adopting a geographical vantage point with regard to place is through the notion of territorial and spatial embeddedness. Here, economic geographers have drawn extensively on institutional analysis to successfully explain geographically uneven technology development, diffusion and innovation (Asheim and Gertler, Reference Asheim and Gertler2005). The basic tenet in these analyses is that institutions enable and constrain innovation in spatially differentiated, place-specific ways. However, geography of transitions requires an expanded understanding of institutional conditions beyond technological innovation, taking into account more diverse, non-technological forms of innovation and social adaption and configuration processes (Hansmeier and Kroll, Reference Hansmeier and Kroll2024). Importantly, it entails a focus on the institutional factors that shape emergent, ‘sustainability’ directionalities or transitions, and which help to contextualise the heterogeneity of societal challenges, problems and solutions such as those related to public health, security, basic services and the environment (Wanzenböck et al., Reference Wanzenböck, Wesseling, Frenken, Hekkert and Weber2020). Such an approach is essential for transitions studies to identify and conceptualise mechanisms that can account for contexts beyond the archetypical settings of Western Europe and conventional sectors such as energy and transport. In other words, to diversify the geographies, places, and socio-technical configurations that form the empirical basis for transitions frameworks and theories.

Instead, theorising institutional difference across locations will allow scholars to generalise the institutional contingencies and particularities of the various contexts where transitions take place. A well-known empirical example is provided by the comparison between the evolution of the Danish and US wind turbine industries as described by Garud and Karnøe (Reference Garud and Karnøe2003). The example demonstrates that the Danish success with developing wind turbines is not just a matter of picking the right strategy by firms and entrepreneurs but that these strategies are conditioned by specific territorial institutional advantages in terms of e.g. public-private co-ordination, collaboration practice and informal sharing of information in Denmark’s coordinated Variety of Capitalism (VoC). For a more extensive review of the VoC literature, in a context of sustainability transitions, we refer to Loewen (Reference Loewen2022). This study highlights that key concepts from VoC could enrich transitions’ political, economic, social and, ultimately geographical, perspectives which include a more analytically granular treatment of coordination, strategic interactions and comparative institutional advantage.

Beyond comparative analyses such as this, there is also a need for transitions researchers to critically rethink the ‘wheres’ with regard to the places from which transformative changes may originate. Here we take inspiration from recent work on peripheries that argues that their spatial isolation, distance and disconnection from so-called ‘cores’ creates opportunities for radical, novel experiments, niches and socio-technical configurations to emerge in sectors such as mobility, sanitation and agriculture (Feola and Nunes, Reference Feola and Nunes2014; Hautala and Ibert, Reference Hautala and Ibert2018; Zuev et al., Reference Zuev, Tyfield and Urry2019; Glückler et al., Reference Glückler, Shearmur and Martinus2023; Wainaina et al., Reference Wainaina, Truffer and Murphy2023). Despite the potential, such innovations are rarely able to diffuse widely thus raising critical questions regarding how and why ‘peripheralised’ transition configurations might diffuse or become rescaled into global regimes, best practices and strategic actions (Grabher, Reference Grabher2018; Miörner and Binz, Reference Miörner and Binz2021). Moreover, diversifying and expanding the ‘wheres’ of transitions research to include more studies of non-Western, developing/emerging and/or peripheralised places/regions offers a critical means for rethinking, contrasting and/or replacing the euro-centric, linear spatial diffusion models that underlie many pioneering transitions studies. A key concern here is to develop more varied models of transition pathways, ones that explicitly take more granular, place-based spatial perspectives that avoid methodological nationalism and account for innovation processes within cities, regions and contexts that differ significantly from the Anglo-European experience (Hansen, 2019; Van Welie et al., Reference Van Welie, Cherunya, Truffer and Murphy2018).

Concerns about place are also very much about context-specificity and, particularly, the kinds of localised institutional, social, cultural and political conditions that can foster sustainability transitions. Here we argue that an engagement with evolutionary economic geography offers a powerful approach through which to understand how place or region-specific combinations or varieties (related and unrelated) of skills, capabilities, institutions, industries and markets can facilitate structural, socio-technical transformations that lead to new industries and service (sectoral) provisioning regimes (Boschma et al., Reference Boschma, Coenen, Frenken and Truffer2017; Hidalgo et al., Reference Hidalgo, Balland, Boschma, Delgado, Feldman, Frenken, Glaeser, He, Kogler and Morrison2018). Results reported by van den Berge et al. (Reference van den Berge, Weterings and Alkemade2020) in their analysis using patent data for 201 European regions confirmed the assumption in evolutionary economic geography that technological relatedness enhances regional diversification potentials into cleantech industries. Qualitative studies have also drawn on the notion of relatedness to explain the emergence of green industries in space. For example, Simmie (Reference Simmie2012) shows how Danish agricultural machinery manufacturers, such as Vestas – a leading Danish manufacturer of mobile cranes and agricultural equipment at that time, saw a market opportunity to diversify their product ranges into wind turbines exploiting technological relatedness. Unrelated diversification, that is, leaps into development pathways that are not technologically or institutionally similar, may also be associated with sustainability transitions and is an area of place-based scholarships that demand further exploration by economic geographers and transitions researchers (Binz and Diaz Anadon, Reference Binz and Diaz Anadon2018; Grillitsch and Hansen, Reference Grillitsch and Hansen2019).

Place and its influence on transitions can also be understood relationally, namely as networks and other interconnections between actors, institutions and innovations that serve as socio-spatial contexts within and through which transition dynamics play out. Such relational contexts can facilitate learning processes (van Mierlo and Beers, Reference Van Mierlo and Beers2020), empower ‘green’ entrepreneurs (Yu and Gibbs, Reference Yu and Gibbs2018) and enable legitimisation and trust-building processes to occur such that niche and regime alignments come into being (Murphy, Reference Murphy2015). Gibbs and O’Neill (Reference Gibbs and O’Neill2014), for example, show how evolving networks of actors, institutions, innovations and entrepreneurs in the Boston metro region challenged the dominant regime in support of a green economy transition. Such processes are inherently power-laden and political, with relational places serving as contexts where state-society-economy struggles over development pathways play out, albeit often in exclusionary ways that can constrain the prospects for sustainability transitions (Pierce et al., Reference Pierce, Martin and Murphy2011; Johnstone and Newell, Reference Johnstone and Newell2018).

GeoST scholars have recently also engaged with relational views as a means to understand if and how sustainability concerns become integrated into place frames and to what degree these are mobilised in development policies and strategies (Murphy, Reference Murphy2015; Frantzeskaki et al., Reference Frantzeskaki, Van Steenbergen and Stedman2018). Here, especially place-making theories, which have a long tradition in human geography, primarily in the political, social and urban sub-fields, could add important insights (Massey, Reference Massey2005). Frames serve as views of, or visions for, a place’s past, present and future that provide a ‘gaze’ for local actors in how they frame a given place’s past and future development (Hommels, Reference Hommels2005). Most places have a diversity of frames associated with them that are held together by differing actor coalitions and associated institutions who may seek to mobilise them through social movements, politics, socio-technical innovations and initiatives that strive to ensure a particular status quo or transition. Place frames are thus key contributors to directionality (Parks, Reference Parks2022) and the development of transition pathways. They can also obstruct transitions, particularly in cases where deeply embedded place frames create cognitive, institutional, technological and/or political lock-ins that stifle change (Newey and Coenen, Reference Newey and Coenen2022), lead to watered-down, unambitious transformations (Westman and Castan Broto, Reference Westman and Castan Broto2022; Torrens and von Wirth, Reference Torrens and von Wirth2021) and/or even strategically prevent sustainability transitions.

Finally, place frames – and consequently place-based sustainability transitions – are fundamentally about identity and shaped by identity politics (Pierce et al., Reference Pierce, Martin and Murphy2011). That is, successful regime reconfigurations can occur when transition promoters, innovators, state actors and activists are able to align new technologies, institutions, markets, rules and routines with the (evolving) place frames and ‘selves’ of the users, firms and practitioners who will need to absorb them into their everyday actions (Murphy, Reference Murphy2015). Achieving such alignments is inevitably a contested, power-laden and contingent process that will vary significantly from place to place depending on whether the innovations and institutions associated with an emerging transition can be seen as legitimate and trusted; embedded in new, alternative place frames that reflect new identities or ‘senses’ of place. The geographically variegated outcomes of these processes ultimately produce uneven transition landscapes within and between communities, regions, cities and nation-states. Paying closer conceptual and empirical attention to their dynamics will thus generate critical insights to inform transition frameworks and policies.

21.3 Scale

Another general, oft criticised, tendency in transition studies, concerns an implicit assumption that transition processes play out (and can be analysed) within the boundaries of pre-given geographical scales such as ‘regions’ and ‘nations’ or seemingly fixed spatial categories such as ‘the global South’ or ‘the city’. Such an approach is problematic in that it fails to consider the fluidity, permeability and multi-scalarity of transitions processes.

Empirical research by GeoST scholarship has early on problematised these implicit spatial connotations. Adopting a relational and constructivist understanding of scale, economic geographers and transition scholars have explored the multi-scalarity of niche and regime structures (Fuenfschilling and Binz, Reference Fuenfschilling and Binz2018) with standards, rules and regulations institutionalised at supranational scales conditioning the variations of innovation processes at (sub-)national scales, noting at the same time that the configuration of ‘global’ structures often have an antecedent or formation at the local level (Binz and Truffer, Reference Binz and Truffer2017). Multi-scalar formations such as these can influence the direction and significance of transition processes by producing opportunity spaces for innovation and transformative change (Yap and Truffer, Reference Yap and Truffer2019; Chlebna et al., Reference Chlebna, Martin and Mattes2023) At the same time, overlooking essential cross-country relationships may lead to misinterpretations of actual transition dynamics. Quitzow (Reference Quitzow2015) for instance showed how the global shift of the photovoltaic industry around 2010 from Germany to China was less a consequence of Chinese government protection, but rather resulted from the strategies of German machine tool manufacturing to build up an export market for PV manufacturing equipment in China.

Central to a relational approach to scale is recognising that understanding actors’ behaviour requires understanding the influence of all of those scales (and relationships). This suggests to start from a network perspective and ‘following the network wherever it leads’ throughout its development over time (Coenen et al., Reference Coenen, Benneworth and Truffer2012) and using the relational properties of the actors to identify relevant places and scales of a TIS or regime a posteriori. Based on social network analysis of a co-publication dataset on innovative water reuse technology, Binz et al. (Reference Binz, Truffer and Coenen2014) illustrate that the spatial characteristics of collaborations in knowledge creation may vary greatly over relatively short periods of time. While the local scale may sometimes empirically be the most determining, this need not be the case a priori. Globally active actors develop particular dependencies on places with which they have key relationships (to which they are ‘structurally coupled’) to achieve their goals, yet they may also develop distinct strategies at supra-regional and -national scales, which largely diverge from any concrete territorial contexts.

Similarly, a constructivist notion of scale implies that scale is not something that exists ‘out there’, waiting to be discovered by objective researchers, but something that is constructed by social actors pursuing their goals through their relationships. A multinational electrical engineering company may have a renewable energy laboratory conducting R&D geared to global solutions while lobbying national governments around market regulation and price setting. Actors construct scales as they seek to look after their own interests within the networks most salient to them. The geographies of these networks are those that fit these actors – such as corporate structures – and not those convenient to either policy objectives or researchers studying those phenomena.

In sum, transition studies have started to develop concepts and methods that better account for the manifold ways in which apparently territory-specific processes are influenced by ‘distanciated’ policy interventions, narratives or institutional arrangements. Examples include works that examine the influence of multi-scalar ties on localised niches (Wieczorek et al., Reference Wieczorek, Raven and Berkhout2015; van den Heiligenberg et al. Reference van den Heiligenberg, Heimeriks, Hekkert and Raven2022), cross-scalar knowledge and legitimacy flows (Heiberg et al., Reference Heiberg, Binz and Truffer2020) or policy mobilities (Sengers and Raven, Reference Sengers and Raven2015). Moreover, multi-scalar approaches have been applied to studies of global innovation systems, regime-level dynamics, legitimation processes and the role that intermediary structures play in shaping transitions, (e.g. see Binz and Truffer, Reference Binz and Truffer2017; Heiberg et al., Reference Heiberg, Binz and Truffer2020; Bauer and Fuenfschilling, Reference Bauer and Fuenfschilling2019; Fuenfschilling and Binz, Reference Fuenfschilling and Binz2018; Späth and Rohracher, Reference Späth and Rohracher2012).

21.4 Final Reflections

The review above shows that GeoST constitutes a thriving and diverse field of study that promises key improvements and specifications to both human geography’s and transition studies’ conceptual and theoretical apparatus. A general tendency that can be observed in GeoST studies is that they layer geographic perspectives on scales and place ‘on top’ of existing theory in the transition literature, relying largely on concepts and frameworks related to MLP, TIS or SNM, while adding spatial and scalar sensitivity (Hansen and Coenen, Reference Hansen and Coenen2015; Sengers and Raven, Reference Sengers and Raven2015; Loorbach et al. Reference Loorbach, Wittmayer, Avelino, von Wirth and Frantzeskaki2020). This is problematic in that it may limit the scope of conceptual innovation, which could be achieved by more deeply engaging with related literature’s theorisations. Beyond the field of sustainability transitions, we find a growing literature grounded in alternative frameworks to study sustainability transitions that may challenge current theorisations of transitions geographies in more profound ways (Coenen et al., Reference Coenen, Hansen, Glasmeier and Hassink2021).

For example, Bridge et al. (Reference Bridge, Bouzarovski, Bradshaw and Eyre2013) suggest a conceptual language based on fairly traditional and well-known geographic terminology to explain and understand the spaces and places of energy transitions. Similarly, there is a burgeoning literature on urban sustainability transitions (Bulkeley et al., Reference Bulkeley, Broto, Hodson and Marvin2010; Frantzeskaki et al., Reference Frantzeskaki, Coenen, Castán Broto and Loorbach2017), see Chapter 22 for a more elaborate discussion. Such analyses often deal more explicitly and vigorously with aspects of power, governance and agency in instances of innovation and experimentation to produce particular transition outcomes and foreclose others in particular places (Bulkeley et al., Reference Bulkeley, Coenen, Frantzeskaki, Hartmann, Kronsell, Mai, Marvin, McCormick, van Steenbergen and Palgan2016; Grandin and Haarstad, Reference Grandin and Haarstad2021). This literature has also addressed a methodological limitation in (spatial) transition research geared to leveraging societal impact (Zolfagharian et al., Reference Zolfagharian, Walrave, Raven and Romme2019) by engaging directly with designing practical interventions, for example, through its focus on urban living labs (Bulkeley et al., Reference Bulkeley, Coenen, Frantzeskaki, Hartmann, Kronsell, Mai, Marvin, McCormick, van Steenbergen and Palgan2016). Last but not least, neo-institutional sociology provides a highly generative conceptual vocabulary to think through the multi-scalarity of transition processes and the manifold ways in which historically grown cultural-cognitive structures inhibit or support transformative socio-technical change (Fuenfschilling and Truffer Reference Fuenfschilling and Truffer2014; Miörner and Binz 2020).

Given these (and many other) highly promising conceptual trading zones with neighbouring social science disciplines, we would argue that our understanding and conceptualisation of the geography of transitions still stands at an early stage. Deepened and intensified dialogue between transitions and spatial scholarship will be highly relevant not only for scholarly advancements but also for improving the policy advice derived from transition studies conceived more broadly. In today’s world of increasing spatial inequalities, geopolitical tensions and shifts in value chains, having a solid grasp of the spatial and multi-scalar dynamics that condition transition dynamics is of ever more importance.