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Human agency has become a core topic in economic geography complementing traditional, structural approaches to explain regional development. This paper contributes firstly with a discussion of the theoretical and conceptual relationships between the agency of individuals, organizations, and systems. Secondly, it proposes a novel analytical framework for studying how human agency, combined with external changes affects regional economic development, and how regional structural preconditions and external changes explain the activation of change agency. Thirdly, the relevance of the framework is examined through comparative studies of about 20 years of industrial development in three Norwegian regions. This illuminates the importance of human agency in regional transformation processes, how regional preconditions influence but not determine the activation of change agency, as well as why and how regional policy plays a role in the emergence of change agency. Yet, future research needs to investigate the context conditions, which promote or hinder the activation of change agency, to trace change in economic activities over time and link it to causal mechanisms, and to pay attention to the unintended consequences of change agency in the longer‐term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing countries, including Nigeria, aim to achieve industrialisation and sustainable development. However, there are few empirical studies that examined the impact of industrialisation-led economic transformation on carbon emissions in developing countries. This is the focus of this study. The paper investigates the impact of industrial value-added on CO 2 emissions in Nigeria using the Kaya Identity framework and Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF), Johansen׳s cointegration technique and vector error correction model (VECM). The data spans from 1980 to 2011. The result of the ADF test indicates that continual long term policies that exert permanent shocks on the variables are required to achieve economic development, industrialisation and CO 2 reduction. The result of the analysis shows that industrial value-added has an inverse and significant relationship with CO 2 emissions, which suggests that there is no evidence that industrialisation increases carbon emissions in Nigeria. GDP per capita and population has positive and significant impacts on CO 2 emission. Energy intensity and carbon intensity has positive but very weak significant impact (at 10% level) on CO 2 emission. The paper recommends that policy makers in Nigeria should pursue pragmatic industrialisation policies coupled with modest decarbonisation and energy-efficiency measures in order to ensure long term industrial, economic and sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]