Regional Development Theory
Theoretical Dialogue
Regional development theory is a major dialogue partner for Regional Development in World Society (RWS) because it provides concepts for analysing spatially differentiated development, institutional capacity, path dependency, innovation, governance and regional transformation.
RWS shares many of these empirical concerns but approaches the concept of region from a different theoretical starting point.
Rather than treating regions as territorially bounded social or economic containers, RWS asks how heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected, organizationally stabilized, materially conditioned and institutionally condensed in particular regional configurations.
The central theoretical question is therefore:
How can established regional development theory be connected to a non-container concept of region?
Regional Development as a Field
Regional development research examines why development trajectories differ across territories.
Typical themes include:
- economic restructuring,
- regional specialization,
- innovation,
- institutions,
- governance,
- infrastructure,
- labour markets,
- knowledge,
- entrepreneurship,
- path dependency,
- regional resilience,
- and territorial inequality.
These themes overlap substantially with RWS.
The difference lies less in the empirical objects than in the theoretical construction of the region.
The Region Problem
Much regional development research takes the region as an empirical unit of analysis.
This is often pragmatically useful.
Administrative regions, metropolitan areas, industrial districts or mining regions provide identifiable spatial contexts for research.
However, such an approach can obscure a deeper theoretical problem:
What makes a region analytically coherent?
Geographical proximity alone is insufficient.
Administrative boundaries may not correspond to economic, ecological or organizational processes.
Global markets, scientific networks, financial systems and legal standards extend far beyond regional borders.
RWS therefore treats the region as something that must be explained rather than presupposed.
From Container to Configuration
RWS proposes a shift from a container concept to a configuration concept of region.
A region is not understood as a bounded social totality.
Instead, it emerges through the selective configuration of heterogeneous processes.
These may include:
- investment,
- public policy,
- scientific knowledge,
- legal regulation,
- infrastructure,
- migration,
- environmental change,
- financial flows,
- organizational decisions,
- and local institutional structures.
This approach allows RWS to retain the empirical relevance of regions without assuming territorial closure.
Institutions
Institutional approaches are central to regional development theory.
Regions with strong institutions are often considered better able to:
- coordinate actors,
- support innovation,
- mobilize resources,
- implement policy,
- and adapt to change.
RWS shares the interest in institutional capacity but differentiates more sharply between:
- organizations,
- institutional arrangements,
- decision structures,
- and regional configurations.
Organizations decide.
Institutional arrangements stabilize expectations and procedures.
The region itself is not treated as a collective institutional actor.
This distinction helps avoid reifying regional capacity.
Regional Governance
Regional governance is another major area of convergence.
Regional development often depends on coordination among:
- municipalities,
- firms,
- universities,
- associations,
- development agencies,
- NGOs,
- and higher levels of government.
RWS interprets such governance arrangements as interorganizational configurations.
The important question is not only whether cooperation exists, but how heterogeneous organizational expectations become selectively coordinated.
Regional governance is therefore understood as contingent and partial rather than as evidence of regional integration.
Path Dependency
Path dependency is highly relevant to both regional development theory and RWS.
Past investments, infrastructure, institutions and organizational routines shape current possibilities.
Industrial regions may remain tied to established technologies.
Mining regions may remain dependent on extractive infrastructures.
Administrative routines may reproduce earlier policy priorities.
RWS adopts this insight but rejects deterministic interpretations.
Historical structures condition possibilities without fixing future outcomes.
Historical Accumulation
RWS places strong emphasis on historical accumulation.
Regional structures emerge through layers of previous:
- decisions,
- investments,
- institutionalization,
- infrastructure,
- organizational development,
- and material transformation.
This creates continuity without implying linear development.
Regionalization therefore has a temporal dimension that complements traditional regional path-dependency approaches.
Innovation and Knowledge
Regional development theory frequently emphasizes innovation systems, knowledge networks and learning regions.
Universities, firms and public institutions may form regional knowledge infrastructures.
RWS shares the interest in knowledge but reframes the problem.
The key question is not simply whether knowledge is present.
It is:
Which knowledge becomes observable, standardized and decision-relevant, and through which organizations?
This connects regional innovation research to the RWS mechanism:
knowledge → measurement → standardization → finance → governance
Regional Innovation Systems
The concept of regional innovation systems is especially relevant.
It highlights:
- firms,
- universities,
- research institutions,
- public agencies,
- innovation networks,
- and institutional support.
RWS can interpret such systems not as integrated regional systems in a strict systems-theoretical sense, but as relatively stabilized interorganizational configurations.
This distinction matters.
A regional innovation system can be empirically useful without implying that the region itself forms an autopoietic social system.
Clusters and Agglomeration
Regional development theory also studies clusters, agglomeration economies and industrial districts.
Spatial proximity can facilitate:
- knowledge exchange,
- specialized labour markets,
- supplier networks,
- infrastructure sharing,
- and organizational coordination.
RWS can incorporate these observations while asking how such proximity becomes societally consequential.
Geographical closeness alone does not create regional coherence.
It becomes relevant through organizational, institutional and infrastructural connections.
Regional Capacity
Capacity is a major point of convergence.
Regional development research often examines the ability of regions to:
- innovate,
- coordinate,
- attract investment,
- adapt,
- learn,
- and implement policy.
RWS reframes regional capacity as a historically accumulated configuration of:
- organizational capacity,
- institutional arrangements,
- knowledge infrastructure,
- finance,
- material infrastructure,
- and connectivity.
This avoids treating capacity as an intrinsic property of a territorial unit.
Uneven Development
Regional development theory has long addressed spatial inequality.
Some regions attract investment, research institutions and infrastructure.
Others experience:
- outmigration,
- declining industries,
- weak public capacity,
- dependency,
- or limited connectivity.
RWS interprets such differences through regional asymmetry.
Uneven development arises not only from internal characteristics but from differentiated connections to world-societal processes.
Globalization and Regions
Regional development theory increasingly recognizes that regional trajectories are shaped by global processes.
Regions participate in:
- commodity chains,
- innovation networks,
- migration systems,
- global finance,
- regulatory frameworks,
- and transnational knowledge networks.
This is highly compatible with RWS.
The difference is that RWS starts theoretically from world society and then asks how regional differentiation emerges.
Globalization is therefore not an external force acting on pre-existing regions.
Regional configurations themselves emerge through selective world-societal connections.
Selective Territorialization
This is where RWS makes one of its strongest contributions to regional development theory.
Traditional regional approaches often begin after economic, political or technological processes have already become regionally relevant.
RWS asks an earlier question:
Why does a particular world-societal process become territorially relevant here rather than elsewhere?
Selective territorialization directs attention to:
- organizational selection,
- material conditions,
- knowledge,
- standards,
- finance,
- and decision relevance.
This helps explain the emergence of regional trajectories rather than only their later evolution.
Regionalization
Regionalization provides the second RWS contribution.
Once a process becomes territorially relevant, it interacts with historically accumulated structures.
This explains why:
- similar investments,
- policies,
- technologies,
- or standards
produce different outcomes across regions.
Regionalization therefore provides a mechanism for analysing regional differentiation without assuming territorial autonomy.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure is central to regional development theory.
Transport, energy, communication and public services shape development possibilities.
RWS adds a stronger emphasis on infrastructure as:
- materialized decision history,
- organizationally maintained structure,
- selective connectivity,
- and source of path dependency.
Infrastructure therefore links materiality, organization and regional transformation.
Resilience
Regional resilience has become an important concept in regional studies.
It usually concerns the capacity of regions to absorb, adapt to or transform in response to shocks.
RWS can engage with this literature, but with caution.
The key question is:
What exactly is resilient?
A region is not a unitary actor.
Different organizations, populations, infrastructures and economic sectors may respond differently to the same shock.
RWS therefore favours analysing differentiated capacities rather than attributing resilience to a region as a whole.
Adaptation and Transformation
Regional development increasingly concerns adaptation to:
- climate change,
- technological shifts,
- demographic change,
- economic restructuring,
- and geopolitical transformation.
RWS interprets adaptation as a distributed process involving organizations and institutional structures.
Transformation emerges through selective decisions and changing configurations rather than through collective regional action.
Policy Intervention
Regional development theory often has a normative and policy-oriented dimension.
Research seeks to identify strategies for:
- economic diversification,
- innovation,
- inclusion,
- infrastructure,
- institutional strengthening,
- and sustainability.
RWS can contribute analytically by asking how such interventions become territorialized and regionalized.
A policy does not enter an empty region.
It encounters existing capacities, institutions, organizations and material conditions.
The same intervention may therefore produce highly different outcomes.
Regional Policy as World-Societal Process
Regional policy itself can be understood as part of world society.
Concepts such as:
- competitiveness,
- innovation,
- resilience,
- sustainability,
- smart specialization,
- and climate adaptation
circulate widely across governments and development institutions.
These concepts become regionally consequential through programmes, indicators, standards and funding.
RWS therefore treats development policy not only as a response to regional conditions, but also as a world-societal process subject to selective territorialization.
Example: Mining Regions
Mining regions provide a useful dialogue case.
Regional development theory may ask whether mining generates:
- diversification,
- employment,
- infrastructure,
- fiscal capacity,
- or dependency.
RWS adds questions such as:
- how did global mineral demand become territorially relevant?
- which organizations processed investment?
- how did material conditions matter?
- which capacities shaped regionalization?
- which structures persisted after initial investment?
This broadens the explanation beyond sectoral effects.
Example: Deindustrializing Regions
Deindustrializing regions provide another important case.
Regional development theory examines:
- industrial decline,
- labour-market adjustment,
- innovation,
- structural transformation,
- and policy responses.
RWS can analyse how historically accumulated industrial structures interact with new world-societal expectations, technologies and investments.
Regions such as the Ruhrgebiet or Saarland illustrate how past development remains materially and institutionally present while new processes attempt to reconfigure regional trajectories.
Example: Amazonian Regions
Amazonian regions make the problem particularly visible.
Mining areas, coastal regions, forest territories and metropolitan centres participate in very different world-societal processes.
Their development cannot be explained solely through territorial location.
They emerge through different combinations of:
- extraction,
- conservation,
- infrastructure,
- public policy,
- migration,
- knowledge,
- finance,
- and global environmental governance.
RWS therefore treats Amazonia not as one internally coherent region but as a comparative observation field of differentiated regional configurations.
Tensions with Regional Development Theory
Several tensions remain important.
Regional development research sometimes:
- treats regions as actors,
- assumes regional coherence,
- attributes capacities to territorial units,
- or uses territorial boundaries pragmatically without theorizing them.
RWS challenges these assumptions.
At the same time, systems theory can become too abstract if it neglects spatial concentration, material infrastructure and historically specific institutional formations.
Regional development theory therefore provides an important empirical corrective.
What Regional Development Theory Contributes to RWS
It contributes especially to the analysis of:
- regional trajectories,
- institutions,
- innovation,
- governance,
- path dependency,
- infrastructure,
- capacity,
- resilience,
- and territorial inequality.
These literatures provide important empirical mechanisms and comparative cases.
What RWS Adds
RWS adds a different theoretical starting point.
It asks:
- how regions emerge rather than assuming them,
- how world-societal processes become territorially relevant,
- how heterogeneous societal processes become connected,
- how organizations stabilize these connections,
- how material conditions matter,
- and how differentiated capacities produce regional asymmetries.
The dialogue therefore moves from regional development within regions toward the emergence of regional development configurations within world society.
Analytical Questions
This dialogue directs research toward questions such as:
- How should regions be defined theoretically?
- Which regional development concepts implicitly rely on container assumptions?
- How do institutions contribute to regional stabilization?
- How should regional capacity be conceptualized without reifying the region?
- How do innovation systems relate to organizational configurations?
- How does path dependency interact with world-societal change?
- How does infrastructure shape regional trajectories?
- How do global processes become regionally differentiated?
- Which regional policy concepts circulate internationally?
- How do development interventions become selectively territorialized?
- When does regional coordination generate durable structures?
- How can regional inequality be explained without reducing it to local factors?
Relation to RWS
Regional development theory is a central empirical and conceptual dialogue partner for Regional Development in World Society.
It provides extensive research on regional differentiation, institutions, governance, innovation, infrastructure and path dependency.
RWS builds on these insights while reformulating the region concept.
Within RWS:
Regions emerge as historically contingent configurations in which heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected, organizationally stabilized, materially conditioned and institutionally condensed.
The dialogue with regional development theory therefore allows RWS to connect a world-society perspective to established research on concrete regional transformation.
Theoretical References
A dedicated literature set should be developed for this dialogue.
Relevant traditions include:
- regional development studies,
- evolutionary economic geography,
- institutional approaches to regional development,
- regional innovation systems,
- learning regions,
- regional resilience,
- and place-based development.
Key authors likely to be considered include Michael Storper, Ron Boschma, Bjørn Asheim, Philip Cooke, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Kevin Morgan, Andy Pike, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and John Tomaney, alongside broader regional development literature.
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Theoretical dialogue — part of the ongoing development of Regional Development in World Society (RWS).