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The rise of knowledge-based territorial development has been fuelled primarily by aspirations of competitiveness and wealth creation. Another upcoming ambition is that of sustainability, not only as an accompanying goal but as a core mission driving territorial initiatives such as clusters development. This paper explores mission-driven territorial development along theoretical and empirical lines. The paper starts by discussing a basic heuristic model intersecting the three concepts of ‘mission’, ‘knowledge’ (distinguishing ‘substantive’ and ‘significant’ knowledge) and ‘governance’. This leads to an analytical framework for territorial development focusing on (1) mission formulation, (2) production and exchange of knowledge in supportive milieus, (3) embedding of substantive knowledge, (4) anchoring of significant knowledge, and (5) feeding of significant knowledge into the (re) design of institutions and strategies of policy design and implementation. This framework is applied to three cases of ‘Metropolitan Food Clusters’ to illustrate and test the framework. The paper shows how especially the continuous anchoring of significant knowledge poses major challenges to knowledge-based territorial development and should be a central issue in future research and policy.

How new regional growth paths emerge and what policy concepts are most adequate for nurturing their evolution constitute recurring themes in regional innovation and development studies. New industrial paths are often portrayed as the result of market-driven processes and Schumpeterian entrepreneurial efforts. This view goes along with a neoliberal policy approach that restricts the role of public interventions to the setting up a suitable regulatory frame and supporting an entrepreneurial climate. The theoretical underpinnings and policy perspectives of this approach have been challenged by the innovation system literature, which offers a systemic view on the rise of new growth paths and advocates a more proactive role of public policy. This paper investigates the role of policy models beyond these traditional ones. We contrast different variants of systemic and multi-scalar policy concepts for new regional industrial path development. Our literature-based study shows that more recent models go beyond new path development and growth per se, paying more attention to the direction of innovation and change, and to policy approaches for achieving more sustainable forms of development. We scrutinise the theoretical and empirical bases of these new policy models and discuss why they are superior to neoliberal and older systemic ones.

Sustainable development policies are on the move. Cities the world over are reposition-ing, repackaging and remarketing themselves as green and sustainable, and sustainable development is the moniker imported to spark the process. At the same time, sustainable development, as a normative point of departure, is itself going through cycles of reinterpretation and re-composition. The research in this paper aims to understand this process by mapping the trajectories of sustainable development policies, and understanding sustainable development as a contextually grounded policy in motion. In Luxembourg, as planners are confronted with finding ways to manage growth, sustainable development has come to permeate all levels of the planning system. To understand how this came into being, research methods were employed that include document screening and a series of conversational interviews that were later transcribed and coded. In so doing, the discourse around sustainable development policy could be reconstructed and analysed. The results showed that the multi-scalar, cross-national, and simultaneously micro-level governance structures pose many obstructions to the implementation of sustainable development policies that are imported from abroad. Thus, policy is ultimately immobile, and a policy paralysis can be spoken of.