Regional development is a policy issue that encompasses diverse economic, environmental, and social concerns. Its implications for national and international policies range from promoting local businesses over state-owned enterprises to providing access to long-term financing and upskilling, and it may involve the redistribution of central government resource allocations between economically successful and less-developed regions. It can also involve a rethinking of the structure of the state itself to address the economic instability that characterizes many states.

These developments have prompted the emergence of a new set of policy rationales that are increasingly taking into account not just the traditional economic concerns, but also environmental and social concerns. These broader approaches to regional development are often denominated as strategic-based or territorial development, and they build on the foundations of established regional development paradigms.

Despite the growing attention to these wider dimensions of regional development, however, there is still much work to do in developing an analytical framework for understanding how and why they occur. The articles in this special issue make an important contribution to addressing these gaps by considering how and why both economic and noneconomic factors can influence the process of regional development.

In the end, it is the interaction of these two types of forces that determines whether and how a region develops. In a broader sense, it is these forces that ultimately produce the region’s unique qualities – be they its natural resources, specific comparative advantages, or even its human capital – and that provide the basis for identifying and pursuing potential opportunities for growth and prosperity.