Abstract
As institutional change is an integral part of economic development, institutionalism ought not to be left behind in favour of an evolutionary economic geography despite the attention the ‘evolutionary turn’ has recently received. Rather, we need to re-address our treatment of institutions within the analysis of evolutionary economic landscapes. This paper engages a new institutional economics (NIE) conceptualization that draws on cognitive sciences instead of Darwinism when investigating processes by which institutions and economies change. It finds that NIE offers a useful definition of institutions as well as existing analytical frameworks, both capable of informing our view of the economy as an evolving system in which place and space matter.