Firm-driven path creation in arctic peripheries

Abstract

In this paper, the author argues that path creation in regions could be connected to extra-regional firms, networks, and knowledge. However, since the 1990s, the field of evolutionary economic geography has emphasized the importance of endogenous factors in explaining mechanisms of growth and decline. In the debate on path development, there has been strong trust in internal regional processes, where regional innovation systems, related variety, and regional branching have been important sources of new growth patterns. Consequently, the anchoring of multinational corporations in regions as new sources of regional growth and firms’ strategic behavior has received less attention in the evolutionary economic geography discourse. There is less understanding of path creation as “outside-in” transplantation and of the role of extra-regional sources of knowledge and new path development. Accordingly, as peripheral regions often lack notions of relatedness within economic sectors, they depend on exogenous sources of new path development. By applying a set of quantitative and qualitative data from the buildup of a new offshore cluster in the petroleum sector off the coast of Finnmark in Northern Norway, the author suggests that firm behavior within a multiscalar network of actors plays a dominant strategic role in the development of new paths in the periphery. He argues that exogenous development impulses in the form of a combination of multinational corporations, state policies of local content, and the inflow of new knowledge through the inward transplantation of firms from outside can initiate new industrial paths. Thus, the author raises fundamental questions about the applicability of models of endogenous path creation in peripheral regions and suggests a new analytical framework for understanding how the entry of strategic firms connects with different regional paths.