Regional resilience: the critique revisited

One of the most intriguing questions in economic geography is why it is that some regional economies manage to renew themselves, whereas others remain locked in decline. In addition to evolutionary concepts, the idea of resilience is derived from ecology, psychology and disaster studies to tackle this question. After a strong critique of the regional resilience concept in 2010 pointing at three fundamental shortcomings, namely the focus on equilibrium and multi-equilibriums, the neglect of state, institutions and policy at several spatial levels and, the neglect of culture and social factors affecting adaptability, a burgeoning conceptual and empirical literature on regional resilience has emerged. This chapter therefore aims at revisiting the early critique on the basis of a review of this recent literature. It concludes that although most critique has been taken seriously, other, new challenges have recently emerged, such as the fuzziness of the concept, both among academic researchers and policy-makers, the way how to measure resilience and the way how evolutionary analysis should be carried out.