Complexity thinking and evolutionary economic geography

Thus far, most of the work towards the construction of an evolutionary economicgeography has drawn upon a particular version of evolutionary economics, namelythe Nelson-Winter framework, which blends Darwinian concepts and metaphors(especially variety, selection, novelty and inheritance) and elements of a behaviouraltheory of the firm. Much less attention has been directed to an alternative conceptionbased on complexity theory, yet in recent years complexity theory has increasingly beenconcerned with the general attributes of evolutionary natural and social systems. In thisarticle we explore the idea of the economic landscape as a complex adaptive system.We identify several key notions of what is being called the new ‘complexity economics’,and examine whether and in what ways these can be used to help inform anevolutionary perspective for understanding the uneven development and adaptivetransformation of the economic landscape.