Johan Miorner
Associate Professor, Department of Human Geography and CIRCLE, Lund University
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We all depend on societal infrastructure – water from the tap, electricity in the socket, mobile payments, the bus to work, rubbish collected every week. Yet despite rising challenges such as climate change, geopolitical uncertainty, and rapid urbanisation placing ever greater demands on these sectors, they change remarkably slowly. Solutions also look broadly similar the world over, despite places having vastly different physical, institutional, and economic preconditions. My research is driven by questions about what gives rise to this pattern and what it takes to renew systems we all fundamentally depend on.
I draw on my background as an economic geographer, focusing on regional industry dynamics and innovation-driven structural change, to study infrastructure transitions at multiple levels: how firms and public actors develop, commercialise, or implement new solutions; how global templates for infrastructure solutions emerge and are implemented across places with very different preconditions; and what it takes for cities and regions to deviate from the status quo. With a particular focus on the geography of sustainability transitions, I study how places shape different conditions for new infrastructure solutions to emerge – and how these solutions diffuse between cities, regions, and countries.
I have been an advisor to European policy makers on regional innovation policy, digitization, and transformative innovation policy for sustainability. I have published policy reports with the Swedish Institute, OECD, Vinnova, and the European Research Council, among others.
I am a member of the Young Academy of Sweden.
Selected publications
- How Transformative Innovations Travel: Tracing the Diffusion of Circular District-Scale Sanitation Systems in Europe
- How the structural composition of sectors shapes socio-technical transitions
- The productivity effects of regional anchors on local firms in Swedish regions between 2007 and 2019—evidence from an expert-informed machine learning approach
Publications
Infrastructure and sustainability transitions
11
- Diffusing transformative innovations through templating – The case of onsite water reuse in the United States
- Global circular networks and couplings: Towards a multi-scalar architecture of the circular economy
- How the structural composition of sectors shapes socio-technical transitions
- Success factors for implementing decentralised urban water management solutions–a systematic comparison of lighthouse initiatives in the US, Europe and India
- The geo-economization of sustainability transitions: Spatial dynamics and trade-offs between sovereignty and sustainability
- Bridging the methodological divide
- How Transformative Innovations Travel: Tracing the Diffusion of Circular District-Scale Sanitation Systems in Europe
- The Role of Global Actors in Sustainability Transitions – Tracing the Emergence of a Novel Infrastructure Paradigm in the Sanitation Sector
- Axes of contestation in sustainability transitions
- How global regimes diffuse in space – Explaining a missed transition in San Diego's water sector
- Towards a multi-scalar perspective on transition trajectories
Regional industry dynamics and path development
14
- Imaginaries as prospective structures: towards a typology of regional development
- Rescaling: Change agency and the emerging geography of economic relationships
- Shaping opportunity spaces: the role of narratives in place leadership
- The productivity effects of regional anchors on local firms in Swedish regions between 2007 and 2019—evidence from an expert-informed machine learning approach
- Evolving regional economies: Resources, specialization, globalization
- Contextualizing agency in new path development: how system selectivity shapes regional reconfiguration capacity
- Reconsidering regional structural conditions for industrial renewal
- The road towards autonomous driving–A differentiated view of institutional agency in path transformation
- Towards a stage model of regional industrial path transformation
- Developing and sustaining new regional industrial paths: investigating the role of ‘outsiders’ and factors shaping long-term trajectories
- Embracing the future: path transformation and system reconfiguration for self-driving cars in West Sweden
- (Re-)shaping regional economies
- Creating institutional preconditions for knowledge flows in cross-border regions
- Paving the way for new regional industrial paths
Innovation policy
4
- Exploring heterogeneous Digital Innovation Hubs in their context
- Putting digital innovation hubs into regional context
- Innovation policy for system-wide transformation: The case of strategic innovation programmes (SIPs) in Sweden
- Identification of regions with less-developed research and innovation systems