Lost in Aggregation : A study between measure and place: economic resilience across scales in Minnesota and Region Nine

Sammanfattning

Economic resilience has become a central organising concept in regional development policy and research, yet how it is defined and measured has direct consequences for what gets analysed, which vulnerabilities are addressed, and whose adaptive capacity is made visible. This thesis examines how economic resilience is constituted across three nested geographical scales: Minnesota, Region Nine, and Mankato. With particular attention to how structural drivers shift depending on the unit of analysis. Drawing on a mixed-methods design combining quantitative analysis of the Innovation Intelligence Index with qualitative semi-structured interviews, the study finds that structural conditions do not operate uniformly across scales. The same condition can shift function rather than merely magnitude when the geographical unit changes, and strong aggregate performance can coexist with pronounced intra-urban inequality. Local actors construct resilience primarily through diversification and operational conditions such as housing and infrastructure, understandings that diverge markedly from what aggregate indicators capture. Across all institutional levels, the role of federal and state funding in sustaining these locally described foundations went consistently unacknowledged, pointing to a structural dependency that becomes visible only at the moment of disruption. The study contributes a concrete account of how aggregate measures institutionally obscure local vulnerability, and how the distributional question of resilience for whom is not merely analytically difficult to answer but, by design, institutionally difficult to act upon.