From the Old Path of Shipbuilding onto the New Path of Offshore Wind Energy? The Case of Northern Germany

Dirk Fornahl (), Robert Hassink, Claudia Klaerding, Ivo Mossig and Heike Schröder

European Planning Studies, 2011, vol. 20, issue 5, 835-855

Abstract: Wind energy-related employment has been surging recently in Germany: it rose from 9200 in 1997 to 90,000 in 2007 and is estimated to be 112,000 in 2020. The industry particularly emerged in coastal, Northern Germany. Recently, big hopes have been particularly set on the offshore wind energy industry. Two recently discussed evolutionary concepts explain the emergence of new industries, such as wind energy, in space: the windows of locational opportunity concept stresses the locational freedom in the earliest stages of industrial development, whereas path creation emphasizes the role of existing industrial development paths, such as shipbuilding, from which new industrial paths, such as wind energy, emerge. This paper aims at analysing whether the new industrial path of offshore wind energy emerged out of existing paths, mainly shipbuilding, in the five states of coastal Germany, namely Bremen, Lower Saxony, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It concludes that shipbuilding only indirectly affected the emergence of the new industrial development path of the offshore wind energy industry in Northern Germany.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09654313.2012.667928 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eurpls:v:20:y:2011:i:5:p:835-855

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CEPS20

DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2012.667928

Access Statistics for this article

European Planning Studies is currently edited by Philip Cooke and Louis Albrechts

More articles in European Planning Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().