Regions and Economic Resilience: New Perspectives

Abstract

The term “resilience” originated in environmental studies and describes the biological capacity to adapt and thrive under adverse environmental conditions. Regional economic resilience is defined as the capacity of a territory’s economy to resist and/or recover quickly from external shocks, even improving its situation from the pre-shock status. This editorial introduction provides a summary of the eleven contributions included in the special issue on regions and economic resilience. These eleven articles focus on different channels related to processes of mitigation (resistance-recovery) and adaptive resilience (reorientation-renewal) in a wide variety of geographical settings and scales. They include methodological advances and also relevant results from a policy perspective. The editorial concludes by providing some directions for future research.