The role of the resilience concept in informing regional policy approaches at multiple territorial scales

The aim of this doctoral dissertation is to investigate the issues and insights raised by the advent of the resilience concept in the regional development arena. It attempts to identify the scale at which development policies can best be used to build economic resilience. The theoretical objective of this thesis thus focuses on assessing the potential role of resilience in informing the outcomes of regional development policies, whether spatially blind or place-based, which are two established development approaches advocated by different international organizations to better the economy of regions or countries that are lagging behind. Resilience is a concept that migrated across different disciplines, and finally landed in the planning domain bringing new metaphors to the field of urban studies and regional planning. It has raised new questions regarding how to govern in the face of disturbance whilst maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation. However, the concept has not yet been fully explored in either the development policy literature or empirical research. This thesis is therefore a contribution to fill this gap, as it confronts simultaneously the concept of resilience with different regional development policy approaches at multiple spatial and temporal scales, looking at the implications raised by the introduction of this concept. Throughout this investigation, political governance and its related dynamics are constantly evaluated and used as transversal variables to assess the readiness of institutional structures and review the level of internalization of different policies aimed at building economic resilience. The hypothesis of this dissertation is derived from the existing literature regarding the differences between the two development approaches, the multiple meanings of resilience (and in particular economic resilience), the role of good governance in tackling vulnerabilities, and finally the implications of scale on the aforementioned variables. All this suggests that the territorial scale at which economic resilience is addressed and the performance of the existing governance structure constitute major factors in informing regional development policy outcomes. Similarly, the hypothesis suggests that the advent of the resilience concept in the development arena tends to render the two discourses on regional development (spatially blind or place-based) somehow obsolete. In that sense, the research here attempts to seek answers to the following overarching questions: 1. What is the relevance of scale for resolving urban resilience and development issues or can these be better addressed at different scale configurations? 2. What are the implications of resilience building on local institutional organization and governance structure? 3. What is the role of territorial policy responses in promoting economic resilience? 4. What issues and insights does resilience raise for spatially blind or place-based policies? Specifically chosen case studies have been identified to test these hypotheses looking at three different regional capitals in three different countries of the MENA region (Marrakech in Morocco, Sfax in Tunisia, and Saida in Lebanon). As such, methods including qualitative interviews and the analysis of existing policy documents are being used to explore the rationale of the two different policy approaches, and to examine the existing governance structure and the scale at which such policies have been devised. Research in the three different cities illustrates that the scale at which policies and interventions are devised is a crucial factor in building economic resilience and that both the supra-local and regional scales can create better solutions in terms of addressing territorial vulnerabilities. Indeed, although the solutions might be locally known, the necessary decisions and funds to absorb such shocks are paradoxically made by central authorities. In terms of democratic governance, the analysis revealed that the three regional capitals suffer at different levels from unfinished democratization processes. Indeed, institutional and financial decentralization is still a faraway and unachieved but long-promised goal leaving the important decision making processes within the hands of respective central governments creating a leadership vacuum at the local level while reducing the flexibility of locally elected authorities. Even worse, the aforementioned democratic deficits are also hampering the formation of a solid governance structure regardless of the fact that both state and non-state actors are ready to contribute their know-how and extended social capital to enhancing the economic resilience of their city-regions. Collected evidence throughout the investigative process demonstrated that the concept of resilience raises several issues for both spatially blind and place-based development approaches and calls for a renewed discourse that relies on a new family of tailor-made mixed policies that should be adapted to existing variegated contexts. Finally, this work highlights the lessons learnt from different case studies. It aims to demonstrate that there are significant relationships, which are identified between the different variables (policy approaches, scale, resilience, as well as transversal governance), that can be understood as empirical generalizations.