Regional resilience: theoretical and empirical perspectives

Abstract

This edition of Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society is devoted to examining regional resilience and assessing its underlying theoretical foundations, the empirical evidence that may lie behind it and importantly what it may have to offer the formulation of policy. The articles in this issue explore the concept from a variety of angles and demonstrate why it has emerged as a popular, albeit contested, concept in environmental studies and the social sciences. We acknowledge that one reason for the popularity of the term ‘regional resilience’ is its malleability; it can mean different things to different people. As the term originated in environmental studies, it described biological capacity to adapt and thrive under adverse environmental conditions. At the other end of the spectrum, in economics, resilience has been defined in terms of return to a fixed and narrowly defined equilibrium (as measured by employment, for example) or, in the more liberal version, multiple equilibria. In the social sciences, more generally, however, the term regional resilience has become popular because of its association with regional adaptation and so has strong connections with evolutionary economics and evolutionary economic geography.1 One obvious question is why the concept has become so popular at this historical moment. The processes it encompasses (rebound, adaptation and recovery) certainly are not new in any fundamental sense. The attention to resilience may be, however, a response to a generalized contemporary sense of uncertainty and insecurity and a search for formulas for adaptation and survival. In this respect, the fashionable use of the concept may originate both from an increased sense of risk (economic and political as well as environmental) and from the perception that processes associated with globalization have made places and regions more permeable to the effects of what were once thought to be external processes. The intersection of an economic crisis and an environmental crisis has enhanced the perceived sense of vulnerability and, hence, stimulated the search for new paths to ‘resilience’ (Hudson, 2010; Pike et al., 2010). Despite its currency, however, the question of ‘regional resilience’ is, at base, a very old and enduring question: why do some regions manage to overcome short-term or long-term economic adversity to maintain a high quality of life for regional residents while others fail. As Hassink (2010) describes, this question is fraught with both methodological and philosophical difficulties but remains a subject of interest because of its significance and because of the multiple variables at play in the region. For some, the idea of ‘resilience’ should be thrown out in favour of concepts that are more meaningful within disciplinary contexts. For others, however, regional resilience provides an umbrella under which to explore multiple disciplinary perspectives on critical and disputed concepts. This discussion is useful in and of itself because it serves to clarify differences in broader conceptual frameworks, especially as they treat time, space, institutions and agency. In other words, an interdisciplinary discussion helps clarify the assumptions underlying different perspectives on regional change and how to measure it. In addition, as people from different disciplinary perspectives present their ideas on how to measure resilience and what a resilient region looks like, we also get a much clearer picture of what ‘the region’ means in different fields and which of the numerous variables affecting regional paths are considered significant. Rather than being taken for granted, what we mean by ‘region’ also has to be interrogated. The papers in this issue demonstrate that regional resilience can provoke a debate among economists, political scientists, planners and geographers in a way that concepts closely tied to a disciplinary discourse (such as governance for political scientists, equilibrium for economists or lock-in or path dependency for economic geographers) cannot. It also suggests ways in which historical events—environmental disasters and the financial crisis—can shake up our thinking and make us question some of our basic assumptions and measures of success and failure. We hope that this issue on regional resilience illuminates the diversity of our understanding and denies us the convenient notion that we are ever talking about the same thing. At the same time, this kind of multidisciplinary conversation sparks new ideas and connections and produces, if not agreement, then a richer conceptual terrain all around. One critical divide among the authors writing about regional resilience can be traced to how they treat time and space. In equilibrium approaches, time is measured in moments (pre-shock, shock and post-shock) and the region is an action ‘container’ that bumps up against other regions but is on its own course for good or ill. Most of the authors contributing to th