Governing Sustainable Transitions under Coopetition: A Contingency Framework for Territorial Decarbonization
Territorial industrial decarbonization is a governance problem before it is a technology problem. This report asks what governance form coordinates a territory-scale industrial transition among legally autonomous, partly competing institutions, and answers it by building and applying a contingency framework. The framework chains three 2×2 quadrants (Challenge Positioning, Actor Constellation and Collaboration Governance) through one matching logic that yields eight propositions. It is applied twice: to the Energypolis campus in Sion, read flow by flow across six collaboration flows and six autonomous entities, and to the Rhone Valley territory and its industrial-energy system composed of about ten large emitters and around twenty-five surrounding energy service providers and system actors (Appendix B). The method is a single-case, design-oriented study with a canton-scale extension, abductive in inference (drawing best-fit explanations from empirical patterns rather than deducing from axioms or generalizing from samples), evidenced by eighteen semi-structured interviews and discussions documented in personal notes, and collaboration records for 2020 to 2024, a dependency map of 35 actors, public documents, workshops and participant observation (§4.2), with every forward-looking claim graded A, B or C for certainty. The diagnosis finds that the campus is well governed exactly where the framework prescribes light forms and under-governed exactly where it prescribes heavier ones, and that the largest gap (multi-flow coordination (energy, materials and CO₂) at the Rhone Valley industrial scale rather than at the campus scale alone) cannot be closed at campus scale. The design response is a Network Administrative Organization constituted as a Swiss association under art. 60 ss CC, with HES-SO Valais-Wallis and EPFL Valais-Wallis as co-founders on equal terms who share the direction, five organs carrying legitimacy and four contingency-routed structures carrying the work, funded by base contributions, Partner Specific Projects and Bronze, Silver and Gold partnership levels, with the State of Valais as founding member and funder. The report sequences a 2026–29 trajectory across pillars that start in sequence and continue, states three dated falsifiable predictions, and argues the investment case at cantonal, national and European scale. Its central claim is that whether Rhone Valley reaches its 2030 industrial-emissions trajectory will be decided more by what is constituted in 2026 than by what is invented thereafter.
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Schnidrig, J. (2026). Governing Sustainable Transitions under Coopetition: A Contingency Framework for Territorial Decarbonization [Master thesis, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; Supervised by M. Aklin]. https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/268610
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