Regional Policy to Increase the Local Brand Attractiveness-The Case of Cap Energies-Corsica Business Cluster in Renewable Energy Field

Renewable Energy has grown to become part of mainstream economics, industry and energy. The process started in the wake of oil shortages amid the 1970s energy crisis, when the major industrial countries of the world sought out an array of energy security strategies. Diversifying energy import–export trade, restructuring GDP, and increasing and backing home-sourced offers are all basic essential measures that different countries have adopted to different degrees in an effort to reduce dependency on imported oil. The last of these measures counts renewable energy as a vector of local generation. The past decade has seen the renewable energy sector really take off, driven by now well-structured industries starting to mobilize now-mature technologies. This developmental shift towards renewable energy has been framed by different policy measures that nevertheless share the same core rationale climate change. Among the pro-renewables policies adopted by France, the deployment of competitive clusters has proved an effective tool for leveraging the growth of renewables.Business clusters are geographically-concentrated economic structures assuring the often tenuous link between efficient national industrial policy efforts and regional planning and branding issues. From this perspective, the logic of synergy by connecting global to local issues remains to be created around a new paradigm: regional attractiveness/place branding. In today’s fast-globalizing world, the much-hyped concept of place branding has become critical for regions in fierce global competition to capture and secure geographically-mobile investment. In this context, promoting and attracting inward investment is a multidimensional challenge where business clusters have a pivotal role to play. Corsica, a small island economy, represents a case-in-point target of analysis through its long-standing PADDUC project (French decentralization policy on Corsica under the law dated 22 January 2002) and the CAPENERGIES business cluster a key link in the technological research strand, entrusted with the overriding role of leading the island’s transition toward decentralized energy independency. After highlighting the innovative technological approach of promoting socio-economic fabric as one of the key foundations to structured economic development and regional branding, this paper goes on to outline the joint-effect impacts of development of the CAPENERGIES competitive cluster in tandem with the process to find technology-centred solutions to drive development of the “renewable energy” industry in an island economy like Corsica.