The objective of this paper is to develop a decentralised mechanism to counteract the evolving transient instability in a multi-area power system. The methodology proposed employs the principle of the recurrent corrective control (RCC) based upon the real-time dynamic coherent grouping of generators. Therefore, the exercise of delivering a corrective action is continuously repeated until the transient instability is fully suppressed. However, instead of using the RCC via a central transient instability program (TIMP), it is adapted for deployment in a distributed manner via zonal TIMPs (ZTIMPs). Each of such zones may indicate a specific control area of the power system. The relevance of ZTIMPs arises mainly because of the independent functionality of each control area. The coordination scheme and the angle synchronising corrective action for the efficient parallel functioning of ZTIMPs are formulated. With zone-based TIMPs, the other type of corrective action, namely the emergency power balancing corrective action (EPBCA), should be determined through a mixed-integer optimisation calculation. In order to ensure an almost instantaneous computation of the EPBCA decision, a multiplexed unit decommitment algorithm is also developed. The distributed RCC framework proposed is extensively verified by means of real-time software-in-loop simulations. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.