Regional Economic Resilience: Policy Experiences and Issues in Europe

Excerpt

Crises seem to be a familiar phenomenon nowadays. Terror attacks, natural catastrophes like floods, thunderstorms, tsunamis or landslides, technological breakdowns like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster or increased awareness of the negative impact on human physical and mental health of various stress factors of modern life – in all cases, resilience as the capacity to avoid, withstand or adapt to crises has become a catchword to describe the capabilities to cope with negative shocks and adverse conditions. It comes as no surprise that resilience has also found its way into the discourse on regional economic development. The increased number of macroeconomic crises in many developed and emerging regions during the last two decades and, in particular, the “great recession” with its origin in banking failures and financial crisis has caused increasing interest in the potential causes of disparities in regions’ capacities to cope with these shocks. In 2010, the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economies and Society published a special issue on “The Resilient Region” to discuss the state of research on regional economic resilience. In 2013, Ron Martin and Peter Sunley, however, still stated in a discussion paper, which was also submitted to the Journal of Economic Geography (Martin/Sunley 2013: 3): …