This aim of this paper is to present the objectives and scope of an evolutionary approach to economic geography. We argue that the goal is not only to utilise the concepts and ideas from evolutionary economics (and evolutionary thinking more broadly) to help interpret and explain how the...

Although the literature on the evolution of industrial clusters is not vast, a preferred approach has already become evident, based around the idea of a cluster 'life-cycle'. This approach has several limitations. In this paper we explore a different conception of cluster evolution drawing on...

Over the past two decades, the notion of ÔemergenceÕ has attracted increasing attention and controversy across the social sciences, as par of a growing interest in the applicability of complexity theory to socio-economic-political systems. Within this context, as economic geographers, our...

Over the past few years a new buzzword has entered academic, political and public discourse: the notion of resilience, a term invoked to describe how an entity or system responds to shocks and disturbances. Although the concept has been used for some time in ecology and psychology, it is now...

Over the past couple of decades or so, there have been increasing moves within evolutionary theory to move beyond the neo-Darwinian principles of variety, selection and retention, and to incorporate development. This has led to a richer palette of concepts, mechanisms and models of evolution and...

The notion of 'resilience' has recently risen to prominence in several disciplines, and has also entered policy discourse. Yet the meaning and relevance of the concept are far from settled matters. This paper develops the idea of resilience and examines its usefulness as an aid to understanding...

In recent years, economic geographers have seized on the concepts of ‘path dependence’ and ‘lock-in’ as key ingredients in constructing an evolutionary approach to their subject. However, they have tended in to invoke these notions without a proper examination of the ongoing discussion...

Thus far, most of the work towards the construction of an evolutionary economic geography has drawn upon a particular version of evolutionary economics, namely the Nelson-Winter framework, which blends Darwinian concepts and metaphors (especially variety, selection, novelty and inheritance) and...

This paper argues that in its 'canonical' form, the path dependence model, with its core concept of 'lock-in, affords a very restrictive and narrowly applicable account of regional and local industrial evolution, an account moreover that is tied to problematic underpinnings based on equilibrist...

This wide-ranging Handbook is the first major compilation of the theoretical and empirical research that is forging the new and exciting paradigm of evolutionary economic geography.