Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, grade: 1,0, Stockholm University, language: English, abstract: The presented study examines the energy sector in the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region, located in south-western Germany. Due to its location within the corridor of the European Backbone, it was chosen as a region of global and especially European interest. Global players such as Daimler, John Deere or BASF SE are located within the region as well as several innovative SMEs. The current political agenda aims "to make the MRN known and recognized as one of Europe's most attractive and competitive regions by 2025" (MRN 2015b). To reach this goal, regional development strategies focus on strengthening the regional energy sector, because it "represents one of the most important industrial sectors worldwide [...] and Baden-Württemberg is considered Germanys' pioneer in the field of fuel technology" (Ministry of Finance and Economics - Clusterportal Baden-Württemberg 2014). The regional mission statement on energy policy therefore defines the goal of strengthening local and regional interactions within the Energy & Environment Cluster. Reflecting the global importance and the outstanding position the study region holds in this particular field, this sector will be analyzed in the present paper. It will explore whether the common development plan is suitable to fulfill the regions goal for 2025 and discuss potential changes to improve its success. Problems resulting from energy-related strategies in regional development will be presented and analyzed. Following that, the paper aims to build on existing strategies and attempts to develop them further. For this purpose the study focuses on the application of a knowledge-based agglomeration theory (chapter 2) as introduced by researchers such as Bathelt et al. (2004), Malmberg and Maskell (2002) or Storper and Venables (2004). It is applied to the MRN by determining the Energy & Environment Cluster. After introducing the region (chapter 3), its energy-based strategies, strengths and resulting problems are analyzed in chapter 4. Based on that, the approach of focusing global pipelines to strengthen the regional development is applied to the MRN (chapter 5). The paper concludes by discussing the proposed strategic reorientation regarding possible strengths and weaknesses and stating the most important findings