Regional resilience: a stretched concept?^*

* Paper prepared for the EPS 25th Anniversary Special Issue

ABSTRACT

Regional resilience has been criticized in the literature for being fuzzy. Based on that criticism one could expect it to suffer from conceptual stretching, that is that authors mean different things when they write about regional resilience. In this paper for the first time, a bibliometric analysis is presented to tackle the issue of fuzziness and stretching concerning regional resilience. With the help of that analysis, we identified three groups of research on regional resilience, urban ecology and policies (red), economic dynamics and regional evolutionary perspectives (green) and crisis management and engineering/modelling (blue). We also identified the key papers cited in these groups. In a second step, our qualitative analysis reveals that the divide between the red and green groups is not large and that the blue group is relatively isolated. Overall, the concept of regional resilience seems to be less stretched than we expected on the basis of the criticism expressed in the literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional resilience
• resilience
• conceptual stretching
• bibliometric analysis

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ate Poorthuis and Michiel van Meeteren for giving us useful advice in conducting the bibliometric analysis. We also thank participants of the session ‘Regionale Resilienz’ at the German Congress of Geography in Tübingen in 2017 for giving feedback on a presentation based on an earlier version of this paper. The usual disclaimer applies, however.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Robert Hassink http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7524-4577

Notes

* Paper prepared for the EPS 25th Anniversary Special Issue