Regional development focuses on the improvement of economic performance in specific regions, such as through the promotion of clean energy sources and job creation. It also addresses problems affecting local communities, such as food insecurity and housing affordability. The aim of regional development is to achieve a balance between efficiency and equity, which can be achieved through a series of planning efforts.
Regional developments often rely on upgrading regional industries’ positions in global production networks (Gereffi 2014). Such trajectories are typically shaped by the life cycles of particular industries, i.e., by windows of locational opportunity that open up for regions to attract the industries and change their status within the value chain. This is a typical feature of the evolutionist metaphor in various disciplines, including economic geography, where it is suggested that the most competitive and innovative firms emerge over time through the ‘survival of the fittest’ logic.
While the most influential strands of regional development theory attribute a dominant role to the role of firms, the power relations of individual agents may not be addressed adequately in these theories. This is especially true for evolutionary economic geography (EEG) and regional innovation systems (RISs), where a strong focus on the behaviour of single firms and their ability to diversify in other sectors are central tenets. Moreover, these theories neglect the way that these dynamics are shaped by noneconomic factors, such as the political context and the dialectical confrontation of different views on regional development, which can reveal skewness or imbalance in the development of a region.