Regional development is a complex and highly heterogeneous process. It is shaped by a wide range of interrelated and dynamic social, economic, and political phenomena. Nevertheless, the majority of current work on regional development remains focused on two dominant issues: how to create and maintain regional welfare; and how to cope with undesirable interregional welfare disparities. The latter question tends to focus on the role of policies that may contribute to reducing those disparities, while the former is typically seen as an economic issue rooted in the inability of economies and regions to efficiently allocate scarce resources (i.e., labor, capital, physical and virtual infrastructures, and knowledge) to generate the highest value of output.
While these two questions are legitimate, they also miss important aspects of the complexity of regional development. This article argues that, by neglecting the fact that regional development processes are influenced by events and processes that are not temporally or geographically regular, they often fail to consider why certain regions show idiosyncratic growth paths. These idiosyncratic paths can be explained by both stochastic disturbances as well as by more systematic deviations from the general structural conditions that characterize a region’s economy (e.g., the prevalence of single dominant firms in less developed RISs; Todtling et al., 2018).
Furthermore, the article demonstrates how the study of power relations and dynamics can provide an important analytical tool for understanding these discrepancies. In particular, it discusses how the analysis of language and narratives can be used to uncover different stories about the occurrence of dominant and marginalised events.