Resilient regions: re-'place'ing regional competitiveness

Abstract

Resilience is attracting increasing interest in the thinking and policy discourses around regional development. However, regional development policy remains dominated by a narrow discourse of competitiveness that appears to have negative implications for resilience and is subject to increasing and widespread challenge and critique. Using the Cultural Political Economy approach, this paper explores the complex relationships that exist between competitiveness and resilience and argues that de-contextualised, placeless competitiveness strategies lead to problems of resilience that can be at least partly overcome with respect to more contextualised approaches.