The varying rates of recovery of European regional economies from the 2007 to 2008 economic crisis have raised interesting questions about the sources of economic resilience. Policy discourse has increasingly asserted the role played by innovation in facilitating rapid recovery from economic shocks, whilst evolutionary thinking has highlighted the specific importance of innovation capacity. However, empirical evidence on this is lacking. This paper addresses this gap by providing new empirical analysis of the relationship between regional innovation capacity and the resilience of European regions to the crisis. It finds that regions identified as Innovation Leaders at the time of the crisis were significantly more likely to have either resisted the crisis or recovered quickly from it (i.e. within 3 years). This provides important insights for evolutionary approaches theorising the relationship between innovation and resilience.

This paper examines the ways by which organizational and institutional features of regional innovation systems shape smart specialization practices in less-developed, intermediate and advanced regions. Drawing on research from 15 European regions, it shows that the implantation of smart specialization creates challenges in all three types of regions. At the same time, there is evidence that smart specialization supports policy-learning and system-building efforts in less-developed regions and facilitates policy reorientation and system transformation in more advanced regions.

Research highlighting the differential resilience of economies to shocks opens up the possibility that long-run growth paths are associated with how regions cope with and recover from such shocks. To date, however, there has been limited exploration into whether long-run evolutionary growth paths or trajectories influence regional economic resilience and what types of trajectories might be more associated with resilience. This article explores the connections between regional economic resilience and regional and national growth trajectories by utilizing a novel set of methods to group regions according to the similarity of their growth paths, identifying the relative importance of national growth for regional growth, and categorizing regions according to their resilience to the 2007–2008 economic crisis. The results suggest that regions have empirically identifiable long-run and path-dependent development trajectories that are significantly associated with industrial employment shares and observed resilience outcomes. Critically, however, these regional growth paths are significantly shaped by national trajectories. Furthermore, regions with greater employment shares in sectors that are less susceptible to demand fluctuations are likely to experience more stable growth rates and be more resilient to economic downturns. This has implications for understanding the importance of evolutionary trends and specifically the role of national contexts and industrial legacies in shaping regional resilience.

The recent global economic crisis has illuminated the need to open up the ‘black box’ which surrounds our understanding of the adaptive capacities of regional actors in the face of recessionary crises and how these relate to economic resilience. This paper contributes to this endeavour by developing a complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework for understanding who has agency within regional economies, how agency functions, and specifically what shapes how agents adapt, respond and react to crises. Using the case study of Wales, we draw on insights from CAS thinking to highlight the importance of conceptualising this agency in relation to the opportunities and capacity for action, and the co-evolutionary behaviour of agents within their regional contexts.

Regional Innovation Strategies 3 (RIS3) are intended to promote the economic transformation of European Union (EU) regions, particularly those that are lagging in development. The introduction of RIS3 has not been without its critics. This is not unexpected given its rapid, and, for some, rather hasty, move from conceptual idea to mainstream EU policy. This paper explores the introduction of the RIS3 approach in North East Romania, one of the EU’s least developed regions. Whilst Romania has launched a national RIS3, the Regional Development Agency for North East Romania also voluntarily embarked upon a process of developing a regional RIS3 for the North East region. This provides a valuable opportunity to explore different spatial dimensions of the smart specialization approach and offers the opportunity to consider the extent to which active and well-regarded research actors can act as anchors to a RIS3 approach in a less developed region. The paper argues that whilst the experience of developing a regional RIS3 offers strong learning benefits, the effectiveness of this will be dependent on supporting institutional structures.

The rapid development of groundwater systems as part of urban water supplies around the globe is raising critical questions regarding the sustainable management of this essential resource. Yet, in many major cities, the absence of an effective policy regime means that the practice of groundwater exploitation is driven by the actions of domestic households and drilling contractors. Understanding what shapes the decisions and practices of these actors, their understandings of the groundwater resource and the extent to which scientific knowledge shapes this understanding, is an area of critical importance that is currently under-researched. Using a mixed-methods methodology, the paper explores domestic practices of groundwater abstraction in Lagos, Nigeria. It finds that there is a disjuncture between the households who are actively shaping exploitation of the groundwater resource on a day-to-day basis and science and state actors. This disjuncture results in household decisions that are influenced by commonly held, but potentially outdated, perceptions of the groundwater resource rather than scientific evidence or policy instruments. The unseen nature of groundwater resources effectively renders the scale of changing groundwater conditions invisible to households and the state, adding to the challenge of influencing practice. Addressing this disjuncture requires not just more scientific knowledge, but also the active construction of interfaces with, and between, non-state actors through which knowledge can be confronted, discussed and shared.