Context as ontology and epistemic infrastructure: Rethinking explanation in economic geography

This paper clarifies how mechanism-based explanation can work in economic geography when digital spatial methods are routine. We outline a critical realist orientation that treats socio-spatial context in two linked ways: as an ontological condition that enables or constrains causal powers, and as an epistemic infrastructure that organises the categories through which mechanisms become visible. On this basis, explanation involves specifying mechanisms, scope conditions, and likely empirical traces, while attending to how data systems shape what can be observed. We illustrate the approach with two short cases from Romania. First, spatial models of COVID-19 vaccine uptake identify clustering and diffusion, but explanation arises only when these patterns are situated within a layered health regime shaped by socialist legacies, market reforms, and transnational guidance. Second, typologies of peri-urban change derived from demographic and satellite data are read as traces of spatial figurations generated by property restitution, fragmented planning, and capital flows. In both cases, the same variables can sustain divergent ontological commitments: mechanisms treated as regularities, or mechanisms identified as generative structures with stated conditions of activation. The paper’s contribution is practical. It offers a clear statement of the framework, two heuristic illustrations that connect patterns to mechanisms, and a set of design suggestions: state mechanisms and scope before methods; use digital tools to locate and evaluate traces rather than to stand in for mechanisms; combine quantitative outputs with institutional and historical evidence; and document the fit of travelling categories to regional ontologies. We do not claim to settle the debate. Our aim is to show how explanation can proceed in a way that is transparent about assumptions and proportional in its claims. Viewed this way, the paper provides a tractable starting point for cumulative, comparative, theory-building research in and beyond Central and Eastern Europe.