Download 2026 Aisre Summer School Call

Green Transformation and Inequalities:
New Challenges for Regional Policies

25-29 May 2026

Complesso San Michele, Salerno

AISRe is pleased to announce a new Summer School on Green Transformation and Inequalities: New Challenges for Regional Policies, promoted by the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Salerno research group in collaboration with AISRe. From a regional science perspective, the green transformation constitutes a major structural shift, reshaping the spatial organisation of economic activities, regional development paths, and multi-level policy frameworks. While the transition towards environmental sustainability is a key response to climate change and ecological pressures, it also poses crucial challenges in terms of territorial cohesion, spatial inequalities, and differentiated regional impacts.

Regions differ markedly in their productive structures, innovation capacity, energy systems, and institutional quality, resulting in deeply uneven abilities to adapt to and benefit from the green transition. Structurally weaker regions, often characterised by low productivity, limited diversification, fragile labour markets, and constrained policy capacity, face particularly severe adjustment costs. In these contexts, the green transformation may not act as a driver of convergence, but rather as a mechanism reinforcing long-standing development traps and path dependencies. Furthermore, for inner and peripheral areas already exposed to processes of depopulation, deindustrialisation, and declining accessibility, the green transition may represent a critical turning point. If poorly designed or weakly embedded in local territorial specificities, environmental and climate policies risk becoming a final blow, further eroding economic viability, social resilience, and development prospects. Conversely, when framed through a place-based and spatially informed perspective, the green transition may open new opportunities for endogenous development, sustainable tourism, and green innovation.

Understanding these contrasting dynamics is a key challenge for contemporary regional science. The Summer School aims to engage PhD students and early-career researchers in this debate by providing advanced theoretical and empirical tools to analyze how green transformation interacts with regional inequalities and regional policy. By combining conceptual frameworks with applied quantitative and spatial methods, the School seeks to stimulate critical research on the conditions under which sustainability transitions can either deepen territorial divides or foster more inclusive and resilient regional development paths.

More info: https://www.aisre.it/7th-summer-school-aisre-salerno-2026/