Regional economic resilience: towards a system approach

Abstract

This paper proposes a system approach to regional economic resilience. This approach argues that regional economies undergo, to varying degrees, changes to their economic system that result from the collective but uncoordinated action of economic actors in an attempt to be resilient to shocks. The system change, particularly focusing on changes to economies’ structure and function, which occurs during and following a shock, determines the type of resilience (i.e., engineering, ecological, evolutionary and transformative) employed by regions. The type of resilience employed can influence regions’ long-term growth trajectory and resilience to future shocks. This approach advances the examination of regions’ resilience capacity, which has largely been ignored in empirical studies of resilience. In doing so, the approach developed in this paper is heuristic rather than deterministic, with the latter characterizing the bulk of the literature. A greater investigation into system change can provide a holistic understanding of resilience. This approach has many advantages, such as developing greater insight into resilience, applying a heuristic method rather than deterministic and examining regions’ adaptive capacity. To advance the system approach, this paper provides greater conceptual clarity of resilience, highlighting the notions conceptual parameters and rethinking the oppositional context in which the four main types of resilience are commonly discussed. Specifically, it conceptualizes the main types of resilience as complementary rather than oppositional. The overall contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it establishes a greater conceptual framework of resilience. Second, it develops an approach in which regions’ adaptive capacity can be investigated.