Regional development is the process by which governments and businesses create economic opportunities to improve people’s lives in targeted regions. Regional development strategies use financial incentives and infrastructure investments to attract businesses and stimulate economic growth. While regional development policies are designed to increase economic efficiency and reduce inequality, balancing equity with productivity remains challenging.
The emergence of economic globalization has reshaped our understanding of regional development. Today, international trade is organized through global production networks spearheaded and governed by lead firms. These new organizational backbones have created a new reality of cross-border production activities, leading to an unprecedented degree of strategic coupling among local economies.
These changes require us to rethink the foundations of regional development research. To do so, we need to shift from a self-contained and endogenous view of the region to one that sees it as constituted from spatialized social relations stretched across space and manifested in different ways. To develop this relational perspective, we need to examine the language of regional development and consider the role of metaphors in constructing, shaping or reinforcing power relations.
A powerful tool for analyzing these relations is narrative analysis, a method that uses story-like vignettes to investigate contested regional development processes. Narratives can help reveal skewness and imbalances in the convergence mechanisms of regional development, as well as the underlying causes and improvement directions. They can also shed light on the ambiguous nature of regional development, where competing views of the future shape different perspectives on what should be done and how it should be done.