Forging new pathways of sustainable development in resource-dependent global south regions. A discussion of related and unrelated variety

This thesis investigates how economic diversification takes place where significant regional disparities exist and there is a strong dependence on extractive industries. The context of the study will be Colombia, but this regional description is a feature of many Global South regions and therefore the framework, findings and contribution of the study will be relevant to many Global South areas beyond Colombia. A central thread of the thesis will be the global pressures for sustainable development, which render the question of how regions diversify their economies through technological innovation highly pertinent. Diversification efforts need to consider the social and environmental challenges and pressures driving new development dynamics and the views of a broad range of protagonists, in particular civil society, who are helping to shape these development pathways. The thesis draws insights from the approach to regional diversification taken by the Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) literature. Traditionally, diversification has been seen as mainly driven by related variety, embodied in economic sectors, the technologies of which are closely related. This thesis argues that in the context of mining regions, diversification driven by related variety may continue to reproduce this highly polluting industry through unsustainable processes of technological change. Recently, in response to new environmental sustainability agendas, EEG literature has embraced unrelated diversification, using insights from transitions literature, as another route for diversification. This thesis argues that unrelated diversification opens a space for looking at other types of innovation and processes of regional diversification that may be relevant for cases of lagged regions with low levels of related variety or based on extractive industries. Related and unrelated forms of diversification are examined through a mixed-method approach to assess the opportunities for diversification in twenty-eight regions in Colombia. The conditions under which unrelated diversification emerges are examined by looking at the case of Boyacá, a resource-based region where the interaction between place-based social movements and the mining industry create forces that imprint a new direction for regional policy and create alternative strategies of economic diversification. This methodological appraoch and the extension of the EEG framework make it possible to identify important new and under-theorised trends and processes of regional economic diversification that would otherwise remain under the radar and under-conceptualised. The contribution of this research lies in the understanding of unrelated diversification in resource-based regions as a constructed process that requires key drivers, actors, and learning dynamics. The thesis pins down some of the key elements of the interface between related diversification, unrelated diversification and sustainable development, and the types of new industry pathways that can be forged by these forms of diversification in Colombia. Finally, the results of this research advance the understanding of concepts in the literature of geography of transitions around path creation and bricolage in this context. Following the introduction, chapter 2 provides a literature review, chapter 3 describes the methodology and chapter 4 subsequently presents a typology of regional diversification in Colombia based on a quantitative analysis. Chapter 5 develops the case study and chapter 6 discusses the contribution of the thesis. Conclusions are drawn in chapter 7.