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ABSTRACTCurrent evolutions of the relationships between industry and the state associate explicit objectives of industrial transformations for ecological reasons, a growing interest in sovereignty-driven interventions in industry, and the linkage of industrial development to social concerns. This paper examines these evolutions by analysing the territorial inscription of industry, its practical manifestation and its consequences. We speak of styles of territorialisation of industry to characterise the articulation of three components: the construction of an industrial sector, the design and use of policy instruments, and the material consequences of spatial interventions. Using the example of the nascent green hydrogen sector in France, we contrast three styles of territorialisation, which we label ‘ecosystems’, ‘planned infrastructures’, and ‘hubs’. Each of them encompasses visions of the relationships between public and private actors, faces tensions and frictions, and has inevitable exclusion effects. We contend that the study of styles of territorialisation is a productive analytical entry point for understanding the politics of transition.

AbstractRecent technological advances, from artificial intelligence to genome editing, are made into innovation monsters, that is, demonstrable objects of public admiration or public fear, which do not exist without being displayed, are connected with anticipations of progress or catastrophe, and cause pervasive uncertainties about their future evolutions. In this paper, I investigate the politics of innovation monsters by analyzing recent manifestations of the regulatory sandbox. Heralded by innovation enthusiasts across the globe, many regulatory sandboxes aim to tame innovation monsters. In doing so, they also trust innovation to provide relevant answers to public problems. Other regulatory sandboxes illustrate a shift from a concern with containing risks to the imperative to realize the potential of innovation by suspending the rules suspected to restrain its progress. It feeds an understanding of policy as innovation-based. This innovation-based policy makes innovators central political actors and innovation the engine of permanently destabilized policy action.