The resilience of clusters and cluster policies

May 21, 2024, Opinion: "More than three decades after Michael E. Porter’s seminal “Competitive Advantage of Nations” (Porter, 1990), the competitive environment has changed substantially. The Great Recession of 2008/2009 and ensuing policy responses put an end to a sustained phase of relative macroeconomic stability and rapid globalisation. The financial crisis and the turbulences that followed gave rise to a new wave of enquiry into the drivers or resilience that allow regions to withstand, and recover from, such external shocks, or which even enable the region to gain from such shocks by initiating new growth paths (Simmie and Martin, 2010; Martin and Sunley, 2015). In parallel, the digital transformation continues to push technological boundaries, reviving assertions such as the death of distance or the end of geography from the early days of the internet (Cairncross, 1997; O'Brien, 1992). The pandemic and the return of geopolitics put a brake on hyper-globalisation, potentially strengthening clusters in advanced economies through reshoring (Somoza Medina, 2022). The demands on clusters to contribute to addressing all these challenges are rising (European Commission, 2022; Franco et al., 2021). But what determines if clusters prove helpful or harmful in times of crisis, and how can experiences from the crisis inform the evolution of cluster policies?"