Integrating behavior into regional resilience concept for sustainable growth: An example of agricultural sector

Abstract

Regional economic resilience, which is a necessary and indispensable component for ensuring both regional and overall sustainability, is understood principally in relation to the system’s structure and overall functioning ignoring human agency and its bounded rationality. This leads to missing important and potentially crucial elements fostering or hindering resilience, and consequently to designing resilience enhancing programs with low effectiveness. This paper argues that the focus of the resilience concept should shift from the system structure to the behavior of agents, since any outcome at the macro level is a product of the myriad of interacting behaviors. The structure of the system and all the context matters as the options for the behavior and which options are chosen depends on the internal factors of the decision maker. A framework, depicting the mechanism how the above mentioned factors interact and determine behavior thus consequently influencing resilience is proposed. An exemplary analysis of how to use the framework is also presented.