Unraveling the Driving Forces of Networks on Regional Resilience Capabilities
Regional resilience became a highly disputed topic in the community of economic geographers in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and the rising challenges related to the reduction of the environmental footprint. In this contribution, we will limit to a clear cut definition of regional resilience and make a general assumption allowing going deep into the mechanisms underlying this process. First, we consider "regional resilience" as the process through which a regional system of innovation (RSI) succeeds in maintaining or at least rapidly recovering a growth path after changes on industry and market conditions. This definition directly refers to the adaptive capabilities of regional systems facing external changes, without disregarding the internal abilities of these systems to be themselves at the origin of these changes. Second, we make the basic assumption according to which regional resilience capabilities depend on the topological configurations of network structures in RSIs. After coming back to the basics of network theories, we search for the topological and structural properties of regional systems that favor regional resilience, relating these properties to human agency and geographical and technological contexts. The findings are discussed in the light of former empirical analysis in order to draw general patterns of networks that meet the resilience challenges regions are facing. Then we show how these findings offers new avenues for regional policy based on collaborative and network incentives, in a context in which fostering regional resilience capabilities requires fixing network failures as well as government ones.