Regional Resilience: An Agency Perspective

Bristow G. and Healy A. Regional resilience: an agency perspective, Regional Studies. This paper argues that in the nascent theorizing and empirical study of regional economic resilience, the role of human agency has been under-explored to date. In seeking to address this gap, the paper focuses on three key questions: why agency is important in resilience; how agents are organized in complex, regional economies and how they might act; and finally, what an agency perspective means for how resilience might be conceptualized and analysed empirically. It is argued that including the human factor in resilience thinking ultimately means that the role of place and context must assume greater significance.