Economic and financial crises have brought the rise of unemployment, reduction of economic growth and emergence of global imbalances and tensions as countries and regions have suffered the effects of a variety of internal and external shocks. In this context of constant disruption, the scientific community has struggled to provide satisfactory answers to current economic challenges within standard frameworks. Focusing on the interconnections between innovation and resilience, this edited book contributes to a better understanding of how the crisis affects innovation and the capacity of territories to adapt and evolve. It offers both theoretical and empirical contributions that debate the notions of resilience in regional and urban contexts and serve as case studies related to innovation strategies and territorial clusters.

Resilience has emerged as a recurrent notion to explain how territorial socio-economic systems adapt successfully (or not) to negative events. In this book, the authors use resilience as a bridging notion to connect different types of theoretical and empirical approaches to help understand the impacts of economic turbulence at the system and actor levels. The book provides a unique overview of the financial crisis and the important dimension of innovation dynamics for regional resilience. It also offers an engaging debate as to how regional resilience can be improved and explores the social aspects of vulnerability, resilience and innovation.

Interdisciplinary in its approach, with expert contributors from diverse backgrounds, Resilience and Regional Development brings to light the significance of multiple dimensions of resilience and its implications for the economy.

There has been a great deal of restructuring of rural places and communities under globalisation, highlighting the interaction of local and global actors to produce new hybrid socio-economic relations. Recent research highlights the heterogeneity of globalisation in which rural places are different to each other, but also different to how they were in the past. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of academics, and comparative case studies from Europe (West and East) and Asia, this book explores and discusses opportunities and challenges associated with globalising rural places, and identifies possibilities for policy and practical intervention by rural development actors. Special attention is paid to multi-scalar processes through which rural places are reshaped through globalisation. Taking a geographical approach, the book produces new critical work on the interdependence between globalisation and rural spaces. It is organised into five sections: Part I focuses on ‘Global-Rural Linkages’ showing the multifaceted interrelation between actors at different geographical scale and demonstrating that globalisation is not only external to rural spaces. Part II on ‘Rural Entrepreneurship and Labour Markets’ explores the potential of business start-ups in rural spaces which are not only necessity driven. Part III ‘Rural Innovation and Learning’ shows that rural places are also places for innovation and learning. Part IV on ‘Rural Policies and Governance’ argues that regional policies for rural places should promote side activities to maintain social capital and that regional policy should take a more integrative perspective between urban and rural spaces in order to explore complementary development paths. The concluding chapter ‘New Approaches to Rural Spaces’ discusses new approaches to globalising rural places in relation to the preceding chapters published in this book.

The capacity to adapt to external shocks, to resist negative impacts and to evolve to new socio-technical regimes has been increasingly studied in recent years by regional scientists in order to understand the dynamic conditions that create a “resilient territory”. Resilience is a notion imported from the study of ecological systems and other fields of science to the understanding of geographically embedded socio-economic systems. It is a characteristic often connected to a threshold of the socio-economic variety and specialization that facilitates the smooth adaptation to challenges in particular territories. As a result of recent crises, a number of regions are now further investigating this concept, trying to guarantee by planning the adequate conditions for resilience. Resilient Territories: Innovation and Creativity for New Modes of Regional Development contributes to the definition and advancement of the scientific agenda in the topics of regional resilience, innovation and creativity. The stabilization of this research agenda and an informed discussion of different definitions of resilience are crucial for the alignment and engagement of the scientific community in the study of these essential topics. This volume also focuses on informing policy and decision-makers, in various different levels of action, about the advancements of conceptualization in these domains.

This Handbook provides a collection of high quality contributions on the state of the art in current debates around the concept of regional economic resilience. It provides critical contributions from leading authors in the field, and captures both key theoretical debates around the meaning of resilience, its conceptual framing and utility, as well as empirical interrogation of its key determinants in different international contexts.