ABSTRACT

Introduction Explaining the causes and consequences of uneven economic development within and between regions is a core theme in economic geography. The research focus and conceptual frameworks related to this theme have been affected by several meta-theoretical paradigm turns in the discipline, shifting from a material-centric and equilibrium way of thinking to a non-material cultural and institutional-evolutionary perspective (Scott 2000). In recent years, one of the most frequently asked questions in the discipline is why it is that some regional economies are able to adapt more positively and move onto new developmental trajectories, whereas others remain locked in decline over time. This question simultaneously mirrors the reality of increasing crossregion/border interactions and unpredictable crises in a globalizing economy, which raises a new topic of conceptualizing the nature of geographically uneven economic adaptability (Martin and Sunley 2006; MacKinnon et al. 2009; Hassink 2010a; Martin 2010; Cooke 2012). It has been shown that not only many modern theoretical concepts, such as path dependence and lock-in, are applied to help to understand long-term regional evolution, but also several newly imported notions (e.g. regional resilience) are adopted to assess short-lived mutation and adaptation (Pike et al. 2010). This body of work tries to provide a much broader view by combining useful concepts from evolutionary economic geography and other related social sciences, in which not only the micro-level norms, routines and practices within firms and organizations are closely focused, but also multi-actors interactively involved in networks, systems, institutions, power and politics beyond the narrow firm-based scale are taken into account in contributing to a better understanding of the spatial patterns of economic landscape evolution.