Regional development is not a dinner party: a research agenda on power relations and the use of language in regional development studies

Abstract

Regional development is not a dinner party, but rather a largely contested matter in which its political dimension and power relations play key roles. This paper calls for a research agenda to understand more about how power relations and the use of language—specifically, metaphors—can be integrated into regional development studies. In contrast to major strands of the regional development literature, an important contribution of this paper is that we treat regional development processes not as a purely economistic process, but rather as a conflictual process in which different opinions or even divergent views emerge and compete through different language relationships. This occurs on a multitude of occasions, such as when there is a discussion about building new infrastructure and its related socio-economic and environmental impacts, when people have different views on possible regional futures or when certain regional economic sectors are prioritised by politicians and policymakers. We address three main research questions. (1) What can scholars in the field of regional development learn from previous studies of power relations in the fields of economic geography and political science? (2) What are the most promising research tendencies in which the study of politics and power relations can be embedded? (3) Through which original lens (i.e., language) and methodology (i.e., narratives) might empirical analyses best be conducted on the topics we illustrate?