Creating New Paths? Offshore Wind, Policy Activism, and Peripheral Region Development
构建了一个超越企业中心视角的概念框架，强调国家和公共政策在路径创造中的多重作用，并通过对英国东北部海上风电产业30多年发展的分析，揭示了政策干预如何影响边缘地区增长路径的形成与演变。
Abstract This article extends economic geography research on path creation by developing a conceptual framework that moves beyond existing firm‐centric accounts and connects to a wider array of actors and multiscalar institutional contexts that mediate the emergence and development of growth paths. As part of a broader understanding of social and institutional agency, the approach specifically redresses the apparent neglect of the multiple roles of the state and public policy interventions in research on path creation. The framework is used to interpret more than 30 years of path‐creation activities that have placed the peripheral region of N orth E ast E ngland at the forefront of the U nited K ingdom's burgeoning offshore wind sector. The empirical findings reveal how a variety of path‐creation mechanisms have served to shape, and be shaped by, successive causal episodes of complex and geographically situated social agency. Emerging from an episode of entrepreneurial activity, the path's creation was subsequently catalyzed by a decade of strategic and contextual regional policy intervention before a radical restructuring of economic development governance in the U nited K ingdom created a policy vacuum for the path's development. The analysis of the policy‐on, policy‐off episodes illustrates the potential agency of evolutionary inspired policy interventions in supporting mechanisms of path creation and reveals a varied set of implications for the cohesion and embeddedness of the path's development.