Human agency plays a central role in territorial resilience. Specially, if ‘anti-fragility’ could be conceived as a possible aim in territorial planning for economic resilience in coping with ‘black swans’. Anti-fragility requires coping with uncertainty and with the effects of events whose nature, moment and eventual negative consequences cannot be anticipated. Planning for economic resilience requires detailed knowledge about how humans coped with shocks they lived in the past and how this experience lead them to cope with the very possibility of shocks that cannot be antecipated in their concreteness. This kind of detailed knowledge requires the understanding of how the ways of coping with material challenges was related in past experiences with the ways human agents ‘made sense’ of the events they were coping with and ‘made sense’ of the political discourses and ways of reasoning concerning the nature of the challenge society was simultaneously facing. Acting, or the absence of acting, may both be forms of informed agency either resulting from the understanding of the non-possibility of acting, or the possibililty of non-acting given absence of knowledge (“not knowing how”) or given critical awareness concerning adverse relations of power. Active and passive survival strategies have to be understoood in their interdependencies. Also territorial path-dependency can be overcome if critical awarenes concerning associated vulnerabilities would be clarified. It will be needed to understand how human agents learn from past shock experiences, how this learning can be associated with acting aiming at avoiding vulnerabilities and how this acting can be related with the eventual opening of new avenues for social innovation, namely, in the form of institutional innovation, organizational capacity or meeting skills gaps. These issues may require adequate conditions for knowledge production if planning for economic resilience sould be considered to play a relevant role in Municipal acting for development in contemporary conditions. This may involve knowing deeper about the ‘substantive economy’ by means of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (involving non-scientific agents in knowledge production, ‘making sense’ of common sense ways of expressing ‘real-life’ economic challenges, building ‘dialogues’ for possible communication, etc.) as well as combining quantitative with qualitative research methods in Economics (‘locality studies’ as case studies, life stories of local entrepreneurs, focus groups with long term unemployed, etc.).

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Regional Economic Resilience,Territorial Planning,Transdisciplinary Research,Qualitative Methods in Economics

• Economia e Gestão - Ciências Sociais