Stakeholder insights and socio-technical perspectives for analysing sustainable transitions in energy-intensive industrial regions

Incorporating climate action, resource efficiency, and circularity performance within the EU’s industrial transition is a well understood necessity—especially in an environment contested by geopolitical developments and competitiveness concerns. However, the transformations and profound energy and material reconfigurations required towards a coordinated industrial transition are often hampered by divergent regional strategies and potential spatial inequalities. Research in support of these policy processes is often constrained by disciplinary boundaries; notably, energy- and climate-economy models typically used to enable assessments of decarbonisation efforts across multiple industrial value-chains and technologies lack the necessary spatial explicitness and often fail to represent the industrial sector with adequate granularity to address the physical realities and diverse needs of different industrial clusters. Here, we adopt a triangulation approach for informing the industrial low-carbon, circular transition in a transdisciplinary setting that revolves around co-creation and Systems of Innovation perspectives, with the aim to output actionable insights for quantitative systems modelling. Our approach is applied to four representative industrial clusters in Europe. We first establish a stakeholder engagement process with regional and EU actors, to produce key policy- and industry-relevant guiding questions. We then apply socio-technical analysis using integrated frameworks comprising the Multi-Level Perspective and Technological Innovation Systems, to uncover enabling mechanisms for, and hurdles to, the transition. Towards informing place-based scenarios that respond to industrial needs, societal expectations, and climate targets, we highlight aspects that modelling scenarios alone cannot capture without spatiotemporally refined inter- and trans-disciplinary methods, including the role of game-changing disruptions, cross-sectoral cooperation, and industrial symbiosis.