Assessing Regional Economic Resilience
The capacity of a region to withstand large economic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, depends on a variety of factors including the level of diversification in the economy, industry structure, social vulnerability, collaborative governance structures, and more.
Graduates students Sarah E. Sharma and Hadi Shaheen created a report for the Eastern Ontario Leadership Council outlining a comprehensive approach to building regional economic resilience in Eastern Ontario.
Following an extensive literature review, Sharma and Shaheen developed a resilience index that enables regions to assess the level of economic resilience in their communities and engage in a community-based process to drive collaboration and decision making on areas that need improvement.
Sarah Sharma
Sarah E. Sharma is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She was a Vanier Scholar in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University while earning her doctoral degree. Her research considers the global political economy of climate change and the environment. Sarah attempts to break down traditional divides between the global North and South to understand relationships between climate change, states, corporate and financial power, urban affairs, and migration and displacement, and how these themes interact with class-based, gender and racial equality. Sarah is the Vice-Chair of the Women and Inclusivity in Sustainable Energy Research Network (WISER), a grassroots network of women academics in the field of clean, low–carbon, or sustainable energy research, a Junior Fellow in the Defense and Foresight (DSF) Group at the University of Waterloo, a mentor for Women in International Security (WIIS) Canada, and a member of the Locally-led Adaptation and Resilience Network (LLARN) with the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD).
Hadi Shaheen
Hadi Shaheen is a Ph.D. Candidate in strategy at Smith School of Business at Queen’s University. He researches how organizations navigate through complex environments and respond to changing social or environmental demands to accomplish change. He conducts his research in the context of activism, crisis management, and social entrepreneurship. Hadi holds an MSc in Management from Smith at Queen’s University and an MBA from the University of Alberta. Before his academic journey, Hadi worked for 18 years in private and public organizations in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.