Informal institutions as socio-material assemblages in the regional ecosystem. Discourse for a posthumanist neo-materialist diagnostics

Abstract

Increasing attention to the role of informal institutions in urban and regional contexts is defining much of the debate in spatial economics and policy. In this regard, a large part of regional development doctrine, using the concept of “civic networks” as a proxy, has seen them as constitutive of the local economy's adaptive capacity to external shocks. On the other hand, frequent global crises push for critical “diagnostics” that can be inspired by the new ontologies introduced by the ideas of posthumanist neo-materialism. In this key, informal institutions could be seen as socio-material assemblages immersed in the eco-system of reference. The article aims to open a line of critical debate in regional economics and politics in questioning some crucial assumptions of the neo-institutionalist framework with the interesting suggestions emerging from the major works of D. Haraway and K. Barad’s neo-materialist and post-humanist approach. At the centre of the discussion is the concept of informal institutions and the most recent proposals regarding their positioning in local economies. On the other hand, and in the absence of an alleged synchronisation and/or integration of the two models, the proposal, as a kind of “discussion-by-difference” allows us for a local context up-to-dating diagnostic analytics.