The dark side of regional industrial path development: towards a typology of trajectories of decline

Over the past few years, scholarly debates on new path development have attracted increasing attention within the economic geography literature. This work distinguishes various trajectories of regional and industrial evolution. So far, these evolutionary trajectories have been mainly conceptualised as ‘positive’ forms of path development. However, in reality, many regions are undergoing phases that can be characterised as ‘negative’ trajectories. Despite their potentially detrimental social and political effects, ‘negative’ pathways have to date largely been ignored in the extant literature. Drawing on the adaptive cycle model of socioeconomic systems, we aim to shed light on the ‘dark side’ of path development by developing a typology of what we call ‘pathways of decline’. The paper identifies conceptually three forms of negative pathways, that is, path contraction, path downgrading and path delocalisation and provides empirical illustrations for each of them.