Regional Resilience
The chapter focuses on the capacity of regions to learn from and adapt to challenging conditions. The theoretical perspective, which has guided the study combines earlier work on historical evolution and geographical location of regions. The empirical dat
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Regional Resilience Anders Edström, Margareta Oudhuis, Torbjörn Ljungkvist and Björn Brorström
Abstract The chapter focuses on the capacity of regions to learn from and adapt to challenging conditions. The theoretical perspective, which has guided the study combines earlier work on historical evolution and geographical location of regions. The empirical data is derived from three case studies set in Sweden, the United States and Canada. Among those, the Borås region in Sweden is the main case. The analysis shows that an increased capacity to adapt is the result of a combination of regional spirit and interacting actions of industry customization, mobilization of resources and public investments. The parallel evolution of these resources has contributed the most to the favourable results. Key messages of the study are the importance of undertaking multiple case studies and the role of knowledge networks which can initiate and coordinate the crucial development processes. Keywords Regional resilience tures Entrepreneurship
Community spirit
Joint public–private ven-
The chapter concerns regional resilience—defined as a region’s capacity to learn from and adapt to changing and challenging conditions—and the theories behind the concept. Lessons are drawn from the management of such conditions in three case studies set in Sweden, the United States, and Canada. The analysis is based on the theoretical framework presented and developed in Chaps. 2 and 3. The main case in the chapter, the Borås region in Sweden, is compared and contrasted with the other two cases.
A. Edström (&) M. Oudhuis B. Brorström University of Borås, Borås, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] M. Oudhuis e-mail: [email protected] T. Ljungkvist University of Skövde, Skövde, Sweden © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 S. Tengblad and M. Oudhuis (eds.), The Resilience Framework, Work, Organization, and Employment, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-5314-6_13
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Studying Regional Resilience
There are different perspectives on regional resilience in the resiliency research, the engineering-based resilience perspective that contrasts with the ecological resilience perspective, the evolutionary economic geography (EEG) perspective, and the evolutionary resilience perspective. The engineering-based perspective assumes a system can return to the state of equilibrium that existed prior to an external shock (see, e.g. Fingleton et al. 2012; Hill et al. 2011; Rose 2004). According to Holling (1996), the faster a system returns to equilibrium, the greater its resilience. In contrasting the engineering-based perspective on resilience with the ecological perspective, Holling points to the difference in assumptions about whether ‘multiple equilibria’ exist. If the assumption is that an ecosystem has only ‘single equilibria’, or can be so designed, ‘then the only possible definitions for, and measures of, resilience are the near-equilibrium ones, such as characteristic return time’ (p. 38). This conclusion agrees wi
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