The aim of this article is to provide a better understanding of long-term uneven resilience by critically exploring the notions of adaptation and adaptability. Moving beyond the conventional trade-off assumption, the article proposes three main types of adaptation–adaptability relationships: Competing, Separated and Reciprocal, as an analytical approach to explain uneven regional resilience. Two empirical case studies of municipal-level mining regions with a common crisis of coal exhaustion in China, namely Zaozhuang and Fuxin, show how variations of adaptation–adaptability relationships result in uneven resilience.

Existing literature on the economic resilience of cities has primarily focused on the study of capabilities and outcomes, while little has been conducted on the evolutionary processes. Drawing upon institutional change and path development concepts, this article develops an analytical framework that explains how different modes of institutional change shape path development processes in relation to economic resilience in cities. This article provides a comparative study on the divergent path development involving distinctive institutional change mechanisms in two Chinese mining cities both facing resource depletion since 2000, namely Zaozhuang in Shandong province and Fuxin in Liaoning province. It shows that Zaozhuang enables endogenously-based layering and conversion that leads to path renewal and creation with a more dynamic resilience engendering structural change, whereas Fuxin is trapped in exogenously-induced institutional thickening that results in path persistence and extension with a less dynamic resilience hindering economic renewal. The findings of this study advance the regional resilience literature by incorporating the role of agency, institutional change and path development in the context of China.

Place leadership with Chinese characteristics? A case study of the Zaozhuang coal-mining region in transition. Regional Studies. Although the role of the local state in China’s regional development has been regarded as important, individual local state actors and their relation with institutional change have been under-explored. Critically exploring the Western idea of place leadership, this paper launches the notion of local state leadership as a specific Chinese form of place leadership. Through a case study of the coal-mining region of Zaozhuang in Shandong, it articulates how interpretive, formal and network leadership are exercised by the prefectural-level mayor to affect institutionalization processes. These processes collectively create broader enabling conditions for local industrial change.

The actions of platforms and their all-inclusive impact on place development is coined platform-based place making in this article. We use the actor-network theory to analyse a typical e-commerce platform-based place making, namely the emergence, development and upgrading of Taobao villages in China, and to explore the mechanisms of platform place making power. Our study shows that platforms ‘make’ places by platform–place interactions of progressively expanding the enrolment of intra-regional and extra-regional actors. In addition, our research advances the actor-network theory and its application and transcends the urban and production-side bias of economic geography.

In recent years, regional resilience has become a fashionable term mainly used to understand how regional economies recover after ‘sudden’ shocks. However, little attention has been paid to how regions adapt to a ‘slow-burn’ crisis in a long-term perspective, and why they adapt differently. Moreover, the notion of resilience has suffered from conceptual fuzziness and trade-off thinking, which undermines its explanatory power in empirical studies. This chapter addresses this gap by developing a conceptual framework of uneven resilience of regions in a long-term perspective. This framework defines adaptation and adaptability in an evolutionary and mutually influencing way that goes beyond the traditional trade-off idea. It also demonstrates how variations of the adaptation–adaptability relationship can result in uneven regional resilience. In future research, more attention should be paid to the differentiated processes and qualities of regional long-term economic evolution both from the adaptation and adaptability perspective.