Regional Incentives to Increase the Competitiveness of a Renewable Energy Business Cluster in a Small Island Like Corsica （France）

Renewable energy （RE） 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 RE as a vector of local generation. The past decade has seen the RE sector really take off, driven by now well-structured industries starting to mobilize now-mature technologies. This developmental shift towards RE 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 plan for the regional and sustainable development of Corsica （French decentralization policy on Corsica under the law dated 22 January 2002） and the CAPENERGIES business cluster a key l