Agency, Institutions and Regional Resilience: An Approach from the Basque Region

Abstract

AbstractRegional resilience, understood as the regional ability to resist, adapt to, and create new regional paths from external shocks, is one of the most explored issues in the last years in the literature of evolutionary economic geography. However, most of the literature has focused on analysing the regional responses in terms of structural economic change, underplaying the role that institutions and agency play. This chapter will deepen into the role that policy and agency play in two different types of regional resilience, namely resilience to macroeconomic fluctuations and resilience to structural changes. Specifically, it focuses on the role of institutional entrepreneurs and collective agency as mechanisms of change. This means adopting a systemic understanding of regional resilience. The chapter contributes with an historical analysis of the Basque Country region, an old industrial region that has been able to resist, recover and renew after different shocks (economic and financial crisis and structural changes) in the last forty years. The case will shed light into the different institutional and agency factors that shape different types of resilience (adaptation and adaptability capacities), which are intrinsically linked to exploration and exploitation capabilities. Indeed, the chapter focuses on the different policy responses and on the role of agency in shaping resilience, both from an ex-ante and an ex-post perspective. Even though policy denotes a high degree of publicness, the chapter highlights the role of other actors (i.e. private actors, individuals and KIOs) in regional resilience.