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Professor Ron Boschma is the first Dutch person to receive the Prix Vautrin Lud, the highest academic award within the field of geography. The award will be presented in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France on 6 October. Prior to the award ceremony, Prof. Boschma will give an invited lecture at the Sorbonne ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� in Paris on 4 October. Boschma was nominated for the award in recognition of his scientific contributions to the field of economic geography, especially for laying the foundations of evolutionary economic geography and his research into regional diversification and innovation policy. The European Union’s regional policy is based in part on his research.

The award was created in 1991, and is presented every year at the Festival International de Géographie in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France. The festival organisers created the award due to the lack of a Nobel Prize for Geography. Nominations for the Prix Vautrin Lud go through the same procedure as the Nobel Prize: around 500 experts from around the world can submit nominations, and an international committee chooses the winner.

Calculating plans

Regional governments each have their own priorities, but not all of them find a realistic way to achieve their goals. Boschma is able to calculate whether the choices made by European regions are feasible or not. “For example, the Netherlands wants to play a leading role in the field of cybersecurity, but it’s not clear that we have the necessary competencies to do that”, cautions the researcher. “On the other hand, we’ve seen that the north of the country has wisely chosen to develop  hydrogen , and that the province of North Brabant has had success in developing imaging technologies.”

The Netherlands is generally a very centralistic country. The national government really has no idea what’s going on at the regional level.

Industrial policy

The importance of regional policy in the European Union is reflected by the fact that it spends almost 100 billion euros on the regions on a yearly basis. “You could see it as the EU’s biggest policy intervention, with the goal of reducing income disparities between countries and regions. Regional policy should pursue an active industrial policy that sets the right priorities. Industrial policy used to be a dirty word, but now governments actively promote the development of certain sectors.”

ASML

Boschma does have some words of caution, however. “The Netherlands is generally a very ‘centralistic’ country. The national government really has no idea what’s going on at the regional level. It took a very long time before national policymakers realised that our country had a ‘brainport’ in the region around Eindhoven, alongside the two ‘mainports’ Amsterdam and Rotterdam. ASML is a major international player there. But if we don’t watch out, the company will start to play an overly dominant role, and will draw all of the dynamism from other activities in the region. That will require some carefully thought-out policy.”

Economics

Ron Boschma studied Human Geography at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Amsterdam, and earned his PhD at Erasmus ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� Rotterdam’s Tinbergen Institute in 1994. His appointment as a Professor at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��’s Faculty of Geosciences followed 10 years later. Before that, he served as Professor of Innovation Studies at Lund ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� in Sweden, which made him eligible to submit nominations for the Nobel Prize in Economics..

Capital of Geography

The idea for the award was born in 1990, during the first edition of the Festival International de Géographie, a three-day event for scientists and the interested public. The programme includes symposia and academic presentations by geographers, but also films and exhibitions. The festival has put Saint-Dié-des-Vosges on the map as the ‘international capital of geography’. The award was named after Vautrin Lud, who was born in the city in the east of France. It was under his auspices that the first map was published bearing the name ‘America’ in 1507.