The Resource Infrastructure Economy: A Systematic Review on Regime Coupling and Infrastructural Integration in European Sustainability Transitions

European sustainability transitions are increasingly defined by the convergence of blue, green, and circular economy agendas. Traditionally analysed and governed in isolation, these domains generate important interdependencies, trade-offs, and coordination challenges that remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on the multi-level perspective (MLP) and recent advances in multi-system dynamics, this article introduces the Resource Infrastructure Economy (RIE) as a novel integrative framework. The RIE differs from existing multi-system frameworks by explicitly integrating marine governance as a full socio-technical regime, theorising regulatory-driven regime coupling as a distinct transition pathway, and foregrounding the constitutive role of shared physical and digital infrastructures in shaping value creation, path dependencies, and distributional outcomes. The RIE conceptualises contemporary European transitions as processes of deep regime coupling and infrastructural integration, whereby energy, marine, and material regimes become tightly coordinated through shared physical and digital infrastructures and assertive regulatory steering. Through a systematic integrative literature review (58 core publications selected from over 450 records following PRISMA guidelines, analysed using abductive thematic analysis with MAXQDA 26 software) and comparative analysis of six countries—Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway—the study reveals persistent structural gaps between the three agendas alongside emerging patterns of pairwise and triadic regime coupling. While Northern and Central European frontrunners demonstrate more advanced infrastructural coordination, Southern peripheral regions face greater difficulties in governance integration and just transition outcomes. The RIE framework advances sustainability transitions theory in three ways: (1) systematically integrating blue economy scholarship into multi-system analysis; (2) theorising regulatory-driven regime coupling as a distinct transition pathway; and (3) foregrounding the constitutive role of physical and digital infrastructures and environmental data systems in shaping value creation, path dependencies, and distributional outcomes. By reframing European sustainability transitions through the lens of the Resource Infrastructure Economy, this article provides a new conceptual lens to understand uneven transition geographies and offers actionable insights for more integrated and just policy coordination across the European Green Deal.