21st Annual Gregory Lecture Event

Over the past few years a new buzzword has entered academic, political and public discourse: the notion of resilience. We live, we are told, in an increasingly uncertain, volatile, and risk-prone world, one that is subject to seemingly ever more pronounced disruptions, and the success with which we negotiate these will “depend on how resilient we are” (Zolli and Healey, 2013). As part of this new imperative, the issue of how regional economies react to and recover from shocks is rapidly becoming part of the conceptual and analytical lexicon of regional economic studies. Further, as is often the case with new ideas, the concept of regional economic resilience is already finding currency among those interested in policy, and there is increasing interest in ‘constructing’ or ‘building’ regional and urban economic resilience. But the rush to use the idea of regional economic resilience in policy circles has arguably run somewhat ahead of our understanding of the concept. The term may be gaining common currency, but mere popularity is no guarantee of profundity. If we are to put the notion of resilience meaningfully to work in policy agendas and programmes, then we need to have a clear definition, conceptualization and understanding of precisely what it is that we are trying to foster. How should we define regional economic resilience? How do we operationalise the concept empirically? What makes one regional economy more resilient than another? Does a region’s resilience influence its long-run growth, and vice versa? Drawing on cognate ideas from ecology, complex systems theory, evolutionary biology, and economics, and using analyses of how the British regions have reacted to major recessionary shock over the past forty years, the paper illustrates some of the difficulties involved in using the idea of regional economic resilience and tries to move us closer to a clearer conception of the notion, thereby setting out an agenda that might inform future research on the topic.