Twin transition —integrating digitalisation and ecological sustainability— has become a structural priority for European regional development, as reflected in major frameworks such as NextGenerationEU and the 2021–2027 Cohesion Policy. These programmes aim not only to support recovery but also to reshape the technological and institutional foundations of regional economies. However, a significant knowledge gap remains: while the twin transition requires coordinated and systemic change, we still lack a clear understanding of how it unfolds across different regional contexts —particularly given persistent disparities in structural capacity and institutional agency. This paper addresses that gap by investigating the relationship between regional industrial path development and the capacity of regions to engage in twin transitions. Drawing on an established typology of development paths —including extension, upgrading, branching, diversification, creation and importation—and on a review of regional case studies, we develop a configurational framework that links these development paths to a set of structural and institutional causal conditions. These conditions are operationalised into indicators grounded in the literature, and applied to the Italian regional context through a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis covering the period 2007–2017. The findings show that regional engagement in twin transitions could result from distinct combinations of development paths and enabling conditions. Extension, upgrading, and importation path —when coupled with enabling regional conditions— are the most conducive to twin specialisation.
The study contributes to debates on bridging evolutionary economic geography and transition-oriented policy, and provides a scalable diagnostic tool to inform place-based strategies tailored to structurally diverse regional contexts.