7th Summer School AISRe 2026, Salerno
Download 2026 Aisre Summer School Call
Green Transformation and Inequalities:
New Challenges for Regional Policies
25-29 May 2026
Complesso San Michele, Salerno
AISRe is pleased to announce a new Summer School on Green Transformation and Inequalities: New Challenges for Regional Policies, promoted by the UniSa research group in collaboration with AISRe. From a regional science perspective, the green transformation constitutes a major structural shift, reshaping the spatial organisation of economic activities, regional development paths, and multi-level policy frameworks. While the transition towards environmental sustainability is a key response to climate change and ecological pressures, it also poses crucial challenges in terms of territorial cohesion, spatial inequalities, and differentiated regional impacts.
Regions differ markedly in their productive structures, innovation capacity, energy systems, and institutional quality, resulting in deeply uneven abilities to adapt to and benefit from the green transition. Structurally weaker regions, often characterised by low productivity, limited diversification, fragile labour markets, and constrained policy capacity, face particularly severe adjustment costs. In these contexts, the green transformation may not act as a driver of convergence, but rather as a mechanism reinforcing long-standing development traps and path dependencies. Furthermore, for inner and peripheral areas already exposed to processes of depopulation, deindustrialisation, and declining accessibility, the green transition may represent a critical turning point. If poorly designed or weakly embedded in local territorial specificities, environmental and climate policies risk becoming a final blow, further eroding economic viability, social resilience, and development prospects. Conversely, when framed through a place-based and spatially informed perspective, the green transition may open new opportunities for endogenous development, sustainable tourism, and green innovation.
Understanding these contrasting dynamics is a key challenge for contemporary regional science. The Summer School aims to engage PhD students and early-career researchers in this debate by providing advanced theoretical and empirical tools to analyze how green transformation interacts with regional inequalities and regional policy. By combining conceptual frameworks with applied quantitative and spatial methods, the School seeks to stimulate critical research on the conditions under which sustainability transitions can either deepen territorial divides or foster more inclusive and resilient regional development paths.
Organisation of the school
The school is articulated into 5 days from 25 to 29 May 2026 and will be taught in English. Each day will include lecture sessions by expert scholars in the field and paper development sessions, with the following daily timetable:
Monday
15:00 to 18:30, Lectures.
Tuesday to Thursday
9:00 to 13:00, Lectures.
14:30 to 18:30, Lectures and students’ presentations.
Friday
9:00 to 13:00, Lectures
A Meet the Editors section will be organized with the participation of:
- Ugo Fratesi, Spatial Economic Analysis;
- Alessandro Sapio, Italian Economic Journal;
- Maria Giovanna Brandano, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications;
- Laura Resmini, Scienze Regionali
Lecturers
Jeroen van den Bergh (Universitat Autònoma Barcelona and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); Arnab Bhattacharjee (Heriot-Watt University); Maria Giovanna Brandano (Gran Sasso Science Institute – GSSI); Raffaello Bronzini (Banca d’Italia); Sergiu Constantin Burlacu (Fondazione Bruno Kessler – FBK-IRVAPP); Sergio Pietro Destefanis (Università di Salerno); Ugo Fratesi (Politecnico di Milano); Claudia Ghisetti (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca); Giuseppe Giordano (Università di Salerno); Michele Raitano (Università La Sapienza di Roma); Alessandro Sapio (Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope); Maria Prosperina Vitale (Università di Salerno).
Local scientific and organizing committee
Fabio Carlucci, Gianluigi Coppola, Sergio Pietro Destefanis; Anna Maria Ferragina, Fernanda Mazzotta, Lavinia Parisi (Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Statistiche, Università di Salerno)
How to apply
The call is open to PhD students and early career researchers interested in regional science. Applications must be submitted filling out the application form at the link:
https://forms.gle/Q69U6pBoNcsUGYsQ9
Candidates must send their application by February 28, 2026:
- An updated Curriculum Vitae specifying the candidate’s research experience (Europass format, max. 5 page);
- an extended abstract of their research project, thesis proposal or working paper, including:
- a) state of the art of the literature on the topic;
- b) research questions and expected contribution of the work;
- c) methods and data used or foreseen;
- d) expected or preliminary results (max. 1000 words);
- a motivation letter detailing the reason for application and the candidate’s expectations regarding the school.
- ID card and copy of your AISRe membership or RSAI membership.
All files (pdf format) can be upload in the application form. The selection committee will evaluate the applications based on the documentation submitted.
For further information, please write to summerschool@aisre.it or contact the local committee mazzotta@unisa.it.
A maximum of 30 candidates will be selected for participation, and they will receive an email notification by 31 March 2026.
Registration
The participation fee will be 135 euros. Coffee breaks, lunches, and the social dinner are included in the participation fee. Participants are required to be individual members of AISRe. Individual membership has a cost of 130 Euros, reduced to 65 Euros for young researchers (younger than 35, doctoral students and post-doc researchers). For school registration, you must register on the AISRe website (www.aisre.it) by creating your own user profile. You will find instructions for payment in your personal area. For further information, you may contact AISRe secretariat Diana Sarmiento at segreteria.tecnica@aisre.it.
Venue
The 7th AISRe Summer School will take place at the Complesso San Michele (Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio Salernitana) – Via Bastioni, 14 / Via San Michele, 10 – 84122, Salerno.