Driving Regional Development: A Case-Based Perspective

Recent geopolitical tensions, energy shocks, and regulatory developments have intensified pressure for Europe’s twin transition, exposing structural vulnerabilities and deepening regional disparities in adaptive capacity. Understanding how regions respond to these pressures requires a framework capable of capturing region-specific pathways of transformation. The regional path development framework offers a valuable lens to analyse how regions evolve through mechanisms such as extension, upgrading, diversification, importation, branching, or creation. Yet its application to the twin transition remains limited. Existing studies are often fragmented and case-specific, offering little comparative insight into how structural and institutional conditions shape regional engagement in green, digital, and twin transitions. To address this gap, this paper develops a configurational framework linking development paths to twin transitions, based on a review of regional case studies and operationalising the derived conditions through fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis for Italian NUTS-2 regions. The resulting configurations are interpreted through the lens of path development, revealing how distinct combinations of structural and institutional factors correspond to different regional transition trajectories. The study contributes to bridging evolutionary economic geography and transition-oriented policy, offering a comparative diagnostic tool to support place-sensitive strategies across structurally diverse regional contexts.