Why is causal explanation critical in/to economic geography?

Abstract

This intervention elaborates on why causal explanation can serve as an indispensable building block towards robust theory development in economic geography. It argues for the critical importance of causal explanation in the subfield’s intellectual development and to its wider appeal to the social sciences. First, I show how this vital importance is premised on explanations that uncover the causal mechanisms of economic events, practices and processes that make things happen in society and space. Put differently, explanation needs causal connections as its necessary condition of explanatory power and practical adequacy. Its empirical operation is grounded in contextual contingencies and place-based specificities in an economic-geographical world characterized by complexity, multiplicity and emergence. Second, I explain why causal explanation represents a necessary step towards pragmatic research in economic geography. Our socio-spatial interventions can be better developed if we have a clearer sense of why and how carefully theorized causal mechanisms interact with contingent contexts to produce specific events and outcomes in the space-economy. Framed in this double hermeneutic sense of being both vital and pragmatic, causal explanation is critical in/to economic geography.