Rethinking relational economic geography

TLDR

Recent work in economic geography has undergone a “relational turn,” emphasizing how socio‑spatial relations of economic actors intertwine with processes of economic change across scales. This paper critically evaluates the relational turn, revisits its antecedents and conceptual frameworks, and seeks to illuminate how power operates within relational geometries. The authors conceptualize various forms of power in relational geometries and demonstrate how this perspective offers an alternative understanding of regional development. They argue that much of the relational turn remains only thematic, lacking sufficient theorization of relationality and its manifestation through power and actor‑specific practice.

Abstract

Recent theoretical and empirical work in economic geography has experienced what might be termed a ‘relational turn’ that focuses primarily on the ways in which socio‐spatial relations of economic actors are intertwined with processes of economic change at various geographical scales. This phenomenon begs the questions of whether the ‘relational turn’ is simply an explicit reworking of what might be an undercurrent in economic geography during the late 1970s and the 1980s, and whether this ‘turn’ offers substantial advancement in our theory and practice. In this paper, I aim to evaluate critically the nature and emergence of this relational economic geography by revisiting its antecedents and conceptual frameworks. This evaluation opens up some significant conceptual issues that are further reworked in this paper. In particular, I argue that much of the work in this ‘relational turn’ is relational only in a thematic sense, focusing on various themes of socio‐spatial relations without theorizing sufficiently the nature of relationality and its manifestation through power relations and actor‐specific practice. This paper thus illuminates the nature of relationality and the multiple ways through which power works itself out in ‘relational geometries’, defined as the spatial configurations of heterogeneous power relations. As a preliminary attempt, I first conceptualize different forms of power in such relational geometries and their causal effects in producing concrete/spatial outcomes. I then show how this relational view can offer an alternative understanding of a major research concern in contemporary economic geography – regional development.