Regional development involves the enhancement of wealth, living conditions, and future prospects in regions understood as subnational territories. It involves identifying and developing unrealized economic potentials and the development of innovative solutions to complex problems such as clean energy sources, job creation, and housing. It is a key issue that is addressed by many disciplines in the social sciences, including geographers, economists, sociologists, and political scientists.
The dominant question in the literature on regional development is how to create and enhance a region’s economic welfare. This tends to be framed in terms of allocating resources in a way that maximizes the value of output. The second issue that arises in this context is how to deal with undesirable interregional welfare disparities.
Noneconomic factors are frequently used as explanatory variables in the analysis of regional development. However, they are not always clearly analyzed. In some cases, they are simply understood as a kind of external resource that is ‘outside’ the dynamics of the region. This understanding is problematic for several reasons, including that it renders noneconomic factors a sort of attribute and generalized feature of the region in question.
Other scholars, drawing on the work of writers such as Gramsci (1947/1999), Bourdieu (1989), and Foucault (1979), have argued that the power relationships in the economy and society are not always visible. They suggest that it is important to include an awareness of the invisible forms of domination and dominance in regional development research.
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