Regional Path Dependence Research Articles

Mining tourism in abandoned and existing mines in the Swedish Far North

Abstract The Swedish North is sometimes described as a resource periphery, while others choose to label it a pleasure periphery. Regardless of the terms used, the region is characterised by problems such as out-migration and demographic issues. This study investigates why there are such different perceptions of the same area, and whether there is any contradiction between extractive resource industries and the tourism industry. This is done by collecting visitor data from mining companies and conducting interviews with a variety of respondents in three mining communities in northern Sweden. Mining tourism is a phenomenon occurring in this region and can be regarded as a context in which the two main narratives meet while being a rather overlooked form of tourism. This is partly due to the low level of knowledge regarding its impacts, but also to a somewhat established idea of mining tourism as a “bad” form of tourism. Individuals’ perceptions of mining tourism as a phenomenon seem to be highly value-related and influenced by both location and occupation. As such, various opinions can be explained by social exchange theory, which proposes that attitudes will be influenced by individuals’ evaluation of outcomes for themselves and their community. In this paper, the emergence of mining tourism is understood as knowledge creation rooted in a regional path dependency on mining and tourism. Hence, mining tourism becomes a new regional tourism product that contributes to tourism, at least in terms of standard technical visits and, at best, a well-developed tourist attraction that appeals to visitors in quantities similar to iconic regional attractions such as the Icehotel. Then again, a tourism industry selling dreams of “untouched nature” argues that this tourism product produces “bad imaging”.

Regional Path Breaking: The Role of Industry Switching, Industry Diversity, and New Knowledge in New Venture Exit

Regions with spatial concentrations of businesses create conditions that spawn new firms, but also undercut new venture survival. Localized competition puts pressure on new firms to exit. Adding to this pressure to exit is regional path dependence, which limits the ability of firms to respond strategically to hostile local conditions. We investigate the extent to which the pressure to exit created by localized competition is moderated by three “path breaking” factors—new knowledge, industry diversity, and industry switching. We test and find broad support for our hypotheses using data from 355 metropolitan statistical areas in the United States spanning 2002 to 2010.

Patterns and determinants of the horizontal and vertical intra-industry trade of regions: panel analysis for Spain & Poland

ABSTRACTMost of the empirical studies in the literature on intra-industry trade are conducted at the country level. Countries, however, differ in terms of granularity and internal heterogeneity. In the present study we empirically identify the determinants of the overall IIT as well as its horizontal and vertical components in the trade of Spanish and Polish NUTS-2 regions with all existing trade partners over the period 2005–2014. In order to obtain unbiased results, we utilize a semi-mixed effect model, estimated with the PPML method. We estimate the models jointly for all Spanish and Polish regions and then disjointly in a comparative manner – in order to identify incongruities of reaction to the various factors investigated. These include both traditional factors and a number of unorthodox factors such as regional path dependence, quality of regional institutions, the core or peripheral status of the reporting region.

Regional economic transformation: Changing land and resource access on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island

The West Coast region of New Zealand has experienced significant structural economic changes since the 1980s. These changes have been a result of state imposed land use restrictions that limited productivist activities such as logging and mining, which in turn have been overlain by the effects of changes in national and global resource demand. This has led to both job loss and local resentment to what is seen to be external political and environmental interference in the region. Such changes overlay on-going boom-and-bust cycles experienced in the region’s resource dependent communities and the state’s pursuit of neo-liberalism from the 1980s, leading to the loss of state support and employment in the region. Regional path-dependence and ‘lock-in’ centred on productivist activities and the slow realisation of the need to diversify the economy have not helped. The region has under-performed in comparison with national trends economically and demographically reflecting and reinforcing local path dependence. The gradual growth of the service and tourism economies marks a new use for land resources and slow structural economic change. However, in the absence of governance processes that allow for collaborative planning to resolve conflicts over future trajectories for the region, conflicts over land uses, resources and access are likely to persist.

Regional path dependence and climate change adaptation: A case study from the McLaren Vale, South Australia

The adaptation of agricultural systems to climate change remains one of humanity's greatest challenges. Regions with complex, knowledge-intensive farming practices have many components that can be adjusted to increase systemic resilience. An argument for the importance of evolutionary adaptation pathways is developed with a case-study of the viticultural region of the McLaren Vale in South Australia. In a series of walk-and-talk interviews, farmers describe their business risks and the opportunities to adapt. Their responses suggest a sophisticated ecological understanding facilitated by their life-experiences, learning networks and relationships with governance, research and marketing organisations. In particular, a new exploitation of agrobiodiversity is generating on-farm resilience by spreading the risks of production and providing opportunities for the region to better respond to changing environmental and market conditions. Individual farmers have developed unique climate change adaptation pathways, but effective cooperation has also enabled the evolution of a regional adaptation cluster. Regions such as the McLaren Vale with a path dependence of innovation could have a cultural heritage that supports attempts at adaptation, which will in turn make them vital first-movers in the search for effective responses to climate change risk.

Agency and forms of path development along transformation processes in German cities

The article provides elements of a theoretical framework to embed the discussion of regional path dependence and transformation into evolutionary approaches of complex adaptive systems. The evolutionary perspective avoids the focus on lock-in as a major challenge of path dependence, while allowing for more options along path-dependent processes including path plasticity and path creation. The empirical part is based on a qualitative study of transformation processes in three German cities, Stuttgart, Dortmund and Chemnitz, during the last 25 years, showing the variety of combinations between micro, meso and macro interactions as well as the diversity of relevant policies to gain influence on local transformation processes.

Regionalization in the Yangtze River Delta, China, from the perspective of inter-city daily mobility

ABSTRACTRegionalization in the Yangtze River Delta, China, from the perspective of inter-city daily mobility. Regional Studies. This paper applies a community detection algorithm to the Yangtze River Delta’s (YRD) daily inter-city mobility network to produce an interaction-based regionalization, and then explores the processes underlying this regional (re-)production by comparing it with attribute-based regionalization. The results show that political boundaries and historical patterns of socio-economic integration are strikingly visible, and the effects of overlapping physical, economic, cultural and administrative spaces on regional integration are apparent. The authors conclude that both notions of ‘territory’ and ‘network’ come together as the YRD region is spatially configured, while ‘regional path dependence’ also seems to be relevant for understanding its relational formation.

Spatial Trends of Towns in Europe: The Performance of Regions with Low Degree of Urbanisation

AbstractThe paper contributes to the understanding of socio‐spatial trends and urban systems in Europe, with a specific focus on smaller settlements. First, a morphological delimitation of urban settlements as geographical base is used to identify the different settlement structures that characterise regions across Europe. Secondly, an analysis of population and GDP performances of NUTS 3 regions for the 29 countries of the European space (growth rates in 2001–2011) provides evidence of the variety of territorial phenomena that characterise smaller‐settlement regions across Europe. Finally, the paper highlights the diversity and complexity of urbanisation structures in Europe and how general trends observed at larger scale are articulated locally according to prevailing structures of urbanisation. It shows the character of ‘embeddedness’ of smaller settlements within urban systems and territorial structures and how the socio‐economic performances of smaller‐settlement regions are defined by a combination of macro trends, national contextualisation, local dynamics and regional path dependency.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies César Hidalgo, New York 2015: Basic Books, 256 pp. $ 26.99. ISBN: 0141978031, 9780141978031

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies César Hidalgo, New York 2015: Basic Books, 256 pp. $ 26.99. ISBN: 0141978031, 9780141978031

The role of elites in the co-evolution of international financial markets and financial centres: The case of Luxembourg

This article investigates the co-evolution of Luxembourg’s financial centre with influential developments on a macro scale since the late 1950s and employs insights from the evolutionary approaches of regional path creation and dependence. Framing the narrative from a historical perspective, this case study illustrates how a unique conjuncture of local conditions and intentional decision making by a small group of influential individuals in Luxembourg embraced and exploited the new opportunities of the internationalizing financial markets, thus forming the birth of Luxembourg’s financial economy. The article argues that only the role of the elite during this time makes the creation of Luxembourg’s financial centre plausible, whilst Luxembourg’s continuing financial path has been accompanied by a changing composition of previously local and often individualistic elite. The changing conditions of globalization have brought a new type of elite to the fore, in particular the organized power of large banks, which continue to reshape Luxembourg’s institutional environment in different ways. The fundamental shift in power between Luxembourg’s financial and political interest groups has also spawned increasingly complex interlinkages between institutional architectures across different geographical scales. By strengthening the conceptualization of the particular role of agency, this article adds knowledge to the prevailing concepts of (regional) path dependence in general and to the contingent development in financial centres in particular.

(Re)Placing Path Dependence: A Response to the Debate

AbstractMy aim in this contribution is to respond to the three preceding critiques of my Roepke Lecture on ‘Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock‐in to Evolution’. Each critique raises some pertinent and challenging issues: specifically that Marxist regional political economy is a more powerful perspective with which to ‘take history seriously’; that I should have given due recognition to the idea of ‘punctuated evolution’; and that my attempt to revise and extend the concept of path dependence has ontological problems. I welcome these commentaries, as they contribute to the very debate that my Roepke Lecture was intended to initiate. But I argue that these critiques are themselves contestable, and that none of them undermines the main thrust of that lecture. My aim in the latter was to suggest that we need to widen and revise the concept of path dependence if it is to function as a an evolutionary concept, to set it free from the overly restrictive and conservative interpretation (of ‘lock‐in’) that it has all too often been given in economic‐geographic applications. I defend that aim here.RésuméCette contribution répond aux trois critiques présentées précédemment sur ma ‘Roepke Lecture’ intitulée ‘Rethinking regional path dependence: Beyond lock‐in to evolution’. Chacune soulève des questions pertinentes et passionnantes, à savoir: l’économie politique régionale marxiste offre une perspective plus efficace pour ‘prendre l’histoire au sérieux’; j’aurais dû donner une place à la notion d’‘évolution ponctuelle’; ma tentative de réexamen et d’extension du concept de sentier de dépendance présente des problèmes ontologiques. Ces commentaires sont bienvenus car ils nourrissent le débat que cette intervention cherchait à susciter. Toutefois, selon moi, ces critiques sont elles‐mêmes contestables et aucune ne compromet les idées‐forces de mon propos. Le but de celui‐ci était de proposer d’élargir et de corriger le concept de sentier de dépendance pour qu’il puisse opérer en tant que concept évolutionniste et pour qu’il s’affranchisse de l’interprétation conventionnelle et trop restrictive (de ‘blocage’) qui lui a trop souvent été attribuée dans les applications de géographie économique. C’est cet objectif qui est défendu ici.

Beyond Lock‐in versus Evolution, towards Punctuated Co‐evolution: On Ron Martin's ‘Rethinking Regional Path Dependence’

AbstractThis contribution discusses Ron Martin's Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography, ‘Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock‐in to Evolution’. The lecture offered original ideas on how to avoid some of the pitfalls associated with path dependence theories and the equilibristic understanding of the temporality of economic change. This contribution addresses the question of co‐evolution of the economic and the political in regional and local industrial evolution. It questions the conception of temporality that seems implicit in the framework. It is suggested that the notion of punctuated co‐evolution may be a way forwards, avoiding some of the difficulties in Martin's model. The contribution concludes by discussing the analytical limits of path dependence models.RésuméDans sa ‘Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography’, Ron Martin a présenté une nouvelle réflexion sur les sentiers de dépendance régionaux, écartant l’idée de ‘blocage’ pour s’attacher à celle d’une évolution. Les idées originales qui sont avancées permettent d’éviter certains des pièges liés aux théories du sentier de dépendance, ainsi qu’à l’approche équilibriste de la temporalité du changement économique. Tout en s’intéressant à la coévolution de l’économique et du politique dans les transformations industrielles locales et régionales, la présente contribution interroge la conception de la temporalité, apparemment implicite dans le cadre d’analyse. La notion de coévolution ponctuelle est proposée comme piste de progression pour échapper à certaines difficultés relevées dans le modèle de Martin. La conclusion examine les limites analytiques des modèles de dépendance de sentier.

Options for Moving beyond the Canonical Model of Regional Path Dependence

AbstractRon Martin's recent critique of the canonical model of regional path dependence constitutes a significant original contribution to evolutionary economic geography, and is likely to open up a whole new range of promising directions of theoretical debate and empirical research. In the first part of my commentary, I highlight and discuss the following two assumptions implicit in his work: (1) broader and less restrictive models are better than narrow and restrictive ones; and (2) economic geographers are better served by a model that emphasizes change than by one that emphasizes continuity. In the second part of my commentary, I suggest that Martin's own alternative model could be further developed by: (1) replacing the binary distinction between ‘path as movement to stable state’ and ‘path as dynamic process’ with a continuum; (2) avoiding, with the help of mereology, the hasty generalization to regional economies of processes of change originally theorized in the context of institutions; and (3) tracing the implications for evolutionary economic geography of the recent analytical work on contingency — a hitherto under‐theorized concept that has been central to evolutionary reasoning in general, and to the problematic of lock‐ins in particular.RésuméLa récente critique du modèle canonique des sentiers de dépendance régionaux qu’a présentée Ron Martin constitue un apport original important pour la géographie économique évolutionniste, laissant présager de nouvelles orientations prometteuses pour le débat théorique et la recherche empirique. La première partie de ce commentaire souligne et analyse deux hypothèses implicites dans son travail: les modèles généraux et peu contraignants sont meilleurs que les modèles limités et restrictifs; les géographes économiques ont intérêt à utiliser un modèle qui s’attache au changement plutôt qu’à la continuité. Dans la seconde partie, il est suggéré que le modèle de Martin pourrait lui‐même être développé selon trois axes: remplacer par un phénomène continu la perspective binaire du sentier vu soit ‘comme un mouvement vers un état stable’, soit ‘comme un processus dynamique’; en s’appuyant sur la méréologie, éviter de généraliser hâtivement aux économies régionales les processus de changement conçus à l’origine dans le cadre d’institutions; repérer comment la géographie économique évolutionniste peut être affectée par les récents travaux analytiques sur la contingence — notion peu théorisée jusqu’ici, mais centrale pour la logique évolutionniste en général, et la problématique des blocages (lock‐ins) en particulier.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock-in to Evolution

This article argues that in its “canonical” form, the path dependence model, with its core concept of lock-in, affords a restrictive and narrowly applicable account of regional and local industrial evolution, an account moreover that is tied to problematic underpinnings based on equilibrist thinking. As such, the canonical path dependence model actually stresses continuity rather than change. The article explores recent developments in political science, in which there have been active attempts to rethink the application of path dependence to the evolution of institutions so as to emphasize change rather than continuity. These developments are used to argue for a rethinking of path dependence ideas in economic geography.

Europeanization through Regionalization? Reforming the French Railways

This article analyses the interaction between Europeanization and regionalization in France, as reflected in recent rail transport reform, through which responsibility for the organization and funding of regional rail passenger services, hitherto exercised on behalf and under the authority of the central state by the national rail company, has been transferred to regional councils. The evidence presented here suggests that the underlying logic of policy change has been provided by regional input into norms and substance, generating a highly pluralistic pattern of Europeanization from below. Significant convergence may nonetheless be observed in the regions' commitment to the regional rail system as a public service and their resistance to pressures in the direction of economic neo-liberalism. Core residual features of the traditional French rail service ideology have been incorporated into distinctive regional strategies, bringing together elements of regional and national path dependency in a selective process of Europeanization through regionalization.