Place, Power, and Policy in the ‘Nuclear North’: A Critical Comparative Analysis of Policy Narratives about Rural Innovation Systems Anchored by the Nuclear Energy Sector in Scotland and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Innovation has become a central public policy concern, as evidenced by the proliferation of ‘innovation agendas’ across all jurisdictions around the world. While some research on innovation in rural regions exists, it often encounters difficulties in applying generally accepted, urban-centered concepts from Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) theory, indicating opportunities for reconsidering RIS using an explicitly rural, place-based approach. Using the Narrative Policy Framework and Critical Systems Heuristics reveals important differences between what is promised by RIS literature and what is observed through interpretivist consideration of lived experiences in rural settings. This framework has been applied to two case study regions anchored by the nuclear energy sector: Huron-Bruce (Ontario, Canada) and Caithness, Sutherland and Ross (Highlands, Scotland). Primary data collected from key informant interviews and policy agendas in each case study has been analyzed through the NPF and compared against each other as well as against the narratives revealed in RIS literature. Doing so brings innovation systems research back to its roots in systems theory by considering the full breadth of factors involved in rural innovation systems through reflective and reflexive qualitative analysis. The resulting findings emphasize that RIS theory can be understood as a policy narrative that struggles to integrate place in its promotion of particular story about innovation as being for the purpose of economic development and competitiveness; that policy agendas regarding rural innovation can be understood as policy narratives that wrestle with scale, capacity, and self-determinism in rural regions; and that key informant interviews present policy narratives that reflect the way key actors in rural innovation systems address the ongoing tension between urban-based notions of innovation, policy incoherence, and their own insights into the dynamics at play in their local settings. The results suggest that researchers, policymakers, and rural development practitioners must begin to fully engage with place in explicit and direct terms in order to address the hegemonic urban that has become embedded in ideas about innovation systems and that the process of meaning-making by local actors is as important to the development of innovation systems as sectoral development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".