The grand societal challenges of our era call for rethinking regional development, imagining regional futures that are green, just, and more inclusive, and enacting them through regional socio-economic transformation.
Research interests
- Geography of emission-intensive industries (e.g., chemical regions)
- Just transitions and their place-based political, economic, institutional, and power-related foundations
- Ideational and discursive foundations of regional sustainability transformations
Short bio
Maximilian Benner is an economist and economic geographer with a habilitation degree (venia docendi) in human geography. As senior scientist and senior lecturer at the University of Vienna and non-tenured associate professor (“Privatdozent”) at the University of Klagenfurt, he focuses on the geography of emission-intensive industries (e.g., chemical regions), just transitions and their place-based political, economic, institutional, and power-related foundations, as well as the ideational and discursive foundations of regional sustainability transformations. His conceptual perspectives include institutional, evolutionary, and ideational economic geography and the geography of sustainability transitions, and specifically the interplay between agency, institutional context, ideational and discursive processes, power, and policies.
Prior to joining the University of Vienna, Maximilian Benner worked at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center in Seville and at Heidelberg University. In addition, he gained extensive consulting experience on topics such as cluster promotion and agricultural innovation support in rural regions in Tunisia or export promotion in Cyprus.
Maximilian Benner sits on the editorial board of “European Planning Studies” and has served as reviewer for a number of journals including “Economic Geography”, “Journal of Economic Geography”, “Environment and Planning A”, “Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society”, “Progress in Economic Geography”, “Regional Studies”, “Geoforum”, “Industry and Innovation”, “European Urban and Regional Studies”, “Annals of Regional Science”, “Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers”, “Energy Research & Social Science”, “World Development”, “Current Issues in Tourism”, “Tourism Geographies”, and “Science and Public Policy”.