Towards a Sustainable Future? Challenges for Regional Development and Innovation

Abstract

Regional development is a highly complex task. Its complexity is made up by the multitude of actors involved. It seems obvious that state institutions, responsible for regional planning and for allocating resources, are in charge professionally. With respect to sustainability as a development goal, the Kulunda research project has used a wider concept of development. The social side of development should be of special relevance. Its starting point was the sensitivity to what can be described as local or autochthonous knowledge. This kind of knowledge exists, of course, in the experiences and the procedures of regional authorities have established over long time. However, the region is facing the challenges not only of technical innovations. Understanding the interdependencies of land use, ecological gentle agrarian technologies and the necessities of enterprises and social and demographic change in a field of tension between cities and villages conceptually requires considering additional stakeholders. In this specific respect, the project defined “sustainability” as the capacity of a region—as the sum of individual and institutional actors—to implement new technologies as well as social innovations “on-site”. Such an approach necessarily has to deal with a full range of socio-spatial scales and an understanding of the interconnectedness of spaces as power relations. The following subchapters attend to various aspects of such capacities for innovation, touching issues like acceptance of “external knowledge” as well as implementing new content into the system of education.