On the notion of regional economic resilience: conceptualization and explanation

Over the past few years a new buzzword has entered academic, political and publicdiscourse: the notion of resilience, a term invoked to describe how an entity or systemresponds to shocks and disturbances. Although the concept has been used for sometime in ecology and psychology, it is now invoked in diverse contexts, both as aperceived (and typically positive) attribute of an object, entity or system and, morenormatively, as a desired feature that should somehow be promoted or fostered. Aspart of this development, the notion of resilience is rapidly becoming part of theconceptual and analytical lexicon of regional and local economic studies: there isincreasing interest in the resilience of regional, local and urban economies. Further,resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea ‘whose time has come’ in policy debates: anew imperative of ‘constructing’ or ‘building’ regional and urban economic resilience isgaining currency. However, this rush to use the idea of regional and local economicresilience in policy circles has arguably run somewhat ahead of our understanding ofthe concept. There is still considerable ambiguity about what, precisely, is meant bythe notion of regional economic resilience, about how it should be conceptualized andmeasured, what its determinants are, and how it links to patterns of long-run regionalgrowth. The aim of this article is to address these and related questions on themeaning and explanation of regional economic resilience and thereby to outline thedirections of a research agenda.