Resilient Destinations and Tourism

Governance Strategies in the Transition towards Sustainability in Tourism

Jarkko Saarinen, Alison M. Gill, Jarkko Saarinen, Alison M. Gill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351667357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Sustainability is one of the most important issues currently facing the tourism sector. Recently, the role of resilience thinking has been highlighted in sustainable development discussions as an alternative perspective. This book approaches these concepts as interwoven processes and looks at change through a socioecological lens.

Instead of seeing resilience and sustainability as alternative approaches, Resilient Destinations and Tourism argues that resilience should be understood as a fundamental part of sustainable tourism thinking for destination systems, and calls for better governance in implementation and management. Improving governance is the key issue in sustainable tourism development. The chapters in this edited collection focus on resilient destinations from a governance perspective, in which tourism resilience is contextualized as an integral part of pathway creation in the process of moving towards sustainable tourism. The contributions to the book represent a range of theoretical and empirical approaches with a wide international scope. Resilient Destinations and Tourism calls for rethinking the meaning of sustainable development in tourism and looks at how sustainability and resilience could be integrated.

This book will appeal to a wide range of research disciplines and students whose modules focus on the relationship between tourism and sustainability planning, governance, the environment, and hazards and disasters.

Part I

Introduction

1 Introduction

Placing resilience in the sustainability frame

Jarkko Saarinen and Alison M. Gill

Introduction

Sustainability and resilience are complex ideas and their relationship can be conceptualized and applied in multiple ways. This book approaches these concepts as interwoven processes that work with change in socio-ecological system contexts. Although there are some key differences between the concepts, for example, in respect to spatial and temporal scales, resilience is understood here as an integral part of sustainability thinking. Sustainable development has become a paradigm, although a troubled one, in various policy and planning discourses and models. In a report, Revisiting Sustainable Development, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD, 2015) refers to the great policy success of sustainability in development discussions. The report states that “virtually all development actors and organizations, and the public at large, have bought into the narrative of sustainable development” (Utting, 2015, p. 1). Similarly, in the context of tourism studies the idea of sustainability is often seen as “one of the great success stories of tourism research and knowledge transfer” (Hall, 2011, p. 649), making tourism and related studies highly policy relevant issues in development discussions.

A need for sustainability has been integrated into management and governance models in various planning and development scales, emphasizing the positive role and change that tourism could make for destination communities and environments (Bramwell, 2011; Butler, 1999; Hall & Lew, 1999; Lu & Nepal, 2009). This beneficial and prospective developmental role of the industry is highlighted in many international policy documents and declarations. For decades, the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has emphasized the positive difference the growth of international tourism makes to global and local economies. According to UNWTO (2018) international tourist arrivals have increased from 25 million in 1950 to 1.3 billion worldwide in 2017. At the same time, international tourism receipts have grown from US$2 million in 1950 to US$1.220 billion in 2016. Based on a World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC, 2017) estimate, the direct, indirect, and induced gross domestic product (GDP) impact of the tourism and travel sector generated over 10 percent of global GDP in 2016, and in the past few years the industry has grown faster than world trade in general.

Based on the massive scale of tourism and its growth prospects, many international development agencies state that the industry could be used in tackling global scale challenges, such as extreme poverty (see Brickley, Black, & Cottrell, 2013; Saarinen, Rogerson, & Manwa, 2013; Scheyvens, 2011). The World Bank (2012), for example, has indicated that the tourism industry is an attractive vehicle for poverty alleviation and development and recently, in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), the World Bank Group (2017) launched its list of 20 reasons why tourism works for development. These elements, positioned within a sustainable tourism framework, are: sustainable economic growth; social inclusiveness, employment and poverty reduction; resource efficiency, environmental protection and climate; cultural values, diversity, and heritage; and mutual understanding, peace, and security (see also UNWTO, 2017).

Thus, in policy discourses and research sustainable tourism has been widely positioned as a “tool for development, benefitting communities in destinations around the world” (World Bank Group, 2017, p. 5). However, local and global realities may often be perceived differently as (sustainable) tourism development “comes with its own set of risks and challenges” (World Bank, 2012, p. 7; see also Mowforth & Munt, 1998; Scheyvens, 2011). Related to this, Sinclair (1998) has noted that the positive economic aspects of tourism should be placed in an equation consisting of both the advantages and disadvantages of tourism-based development. Moreover, Utting (2015, p. 1) has stated that the core elements of sustainability may “often got lost in translation” when we are actually ‘doing development’ (see Hunter & Green, 1995; Saarinen, 2018). In academic research this has led to increasing, and often harsh, criticism among scholars on the applicability of sustainable development thinking to tourism (see Butler, 1999; Liu, 2003; Scheyvens, 2009; Sharpley, 2000). After all, tourism is a global scale growth industry by nature and recently Hollenhorst, Houge-MacKenzie, and Ostergren (2014, p. 306), for example, have critically noted that

tourism hides its unsustainability behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it appears so sustainable. We too easily imagine that tourism is the embodiment of sustainability, when in reality it may represent unrealized hopes and desires for the world we want to live in.

In this respect the growth of the industry may not necessarily lead to (sustainable) development for localities where tourism takes place (see Holden, 2008; Saarinen, 2014; Schilcher, 2007).

The kind of deep frustration that emerges from three decades of active research and discussion on sustainable tourism development and management has caused some scholars to conclude that the idea and applicability of sustainable tourism has reached a dead end. Sharpley (2009, p. xiii), for example, has suggested that it is now time to move beyond sustainability as the “academic study of sustainable tourism development has reached something of an impasse.” However, moving beyond the sustainable tourism paradigm has turned out to be a challenging task (McCool & Bosak, 2016; Saarinen, 2014). First, as noted above, the idea of sustainability is widely utilized by tourism policy-makers and institutions that define the goals and governance models for tourism and development at various spatial scales ranging from local to global approaches. There is also a strong body of research and study programs that specialize in sustainable tourism, which support the key role of sustainability in tourism planning and development thinking (Saarinen, Rogerson, & Hall, 2017).

Second, the position of sustainable tourism is a paradoxical one (Hall, 2011). While the concept is fuzzy and difficult to implement in tourism planning and development practices, its role and application in tourism is now more urgent than ever before. In addition to the current massive scale of global tourism, UNWTO (2011) estimates that international tourist arrivals will increase over 3 percentage points a year between 2010 and 2030 to reach 1.8 billion arrivals by 2030. These passenger numbers are largely based on air transport, which is seen as highly detrimental to the environment and a major contributor to global warming (Gössling & Hall, 2006). Thus, there is an increasing need for development thinking that would lead to better environmental management of tourism impacts at different spatial and temporal scales. Third, if the future route towards better environmental management is not to be based on sustainable development thinking, there needs to be a viable alternative governance framework. However, the search for an alternative has turned out to be a major task. Recently, one prospective approach has focused on the idea of resilience originating from dynamic systems’ thinking in the environmental sciences (Berkes & Ross, 2013; see also Holling, 1973).

In general, resilience refers to the capacity of a (socio-ecological) system, such as a local ecosystem or community, to absorb disturbance and reorganize its functionality while undergoing a change (Adger, 2000; Folke, 2006). Some discussants have pondered if resilience could represent the new sustainability in resource management (see Brill, Peck, & Kramer, 2015; Davidson, 2010). Also, in tourism research “resilience planning has emerged in recent years as an alternative to the sustainable development paradigm” (Lew, 2014, p. 14). Current thinking (discussed later: see Chapters 2 and 3) does not, however, strongly support such a step or interpretation (see also Butler, 2017; Hall, Prayag, & Amore, 2018; Lew & Cheer, 2018). This was also indicated in the United Nations report Resilient people, resilient planet: A future worth choosing, which placed the issue of resilience within the context of global sustainability, as a tool to help put sustainable development into practice (see United Nations, 2012).

Thus, instead of seeing resilience and sustainability as alternative approaches or a matter of a zero-sum game, we argue in this book that resilience should be understood as a fundamental part of sustainable tourism thinking and destination systems, by calling for better governance in implementation and management. This aspect of ‘better’ governance is the key issue in sustainable tourism development (Baggio, Scott, & Cooper, 2010; Bramwell & Lane, 2011). However, it is highly sensitive to many linked ‘variables,’ including the scale of analysis (see Amore & Hall, 2016; Bramwell, 2011). Contemporary tourism is obviously based on a global system, in which sustainability cannot be contained at a destination level of governance alone (see Scott, Higham, Gössling, & Peeters, 2013). In a global system, which includes origins, destinations and the routes between them as well as the overall global networks of the industry, the sustainability of tourism would require a total restructuring of the industry and transition of current modes of transportation towards carbon neutral forms of mobilities. The reality, however, is that “as one of the world’s largest industries, tourism is also one of the largest emitters of carbon, primarily from air transport” (Hollenhorst et al., 2014, p. 306) as noted above (see also Becken & Hay, 2007; Scott, Hall, & Gössling, 2012; Weaver, 2011).

Obviously, this is a major challenge. While it is crucial to realize the global scale problems and impacts of tourism, this global sustainability challenge is beyond the scope of this edited volume and, indeed, this introduction. Our focus is on resilient destinations from a governance perspective, in which the resilience of tourism is contextualized as an integral part of pathway creation in the process of moving towards sustainable tourism. This approach calls for rethinking the meaning of sustainable development in tourism and how sustainability and resilience are integrated. Furthermore, the role of governance and the principal conditions of tourism governance that support transitioning towards sustainability are critical issues in this debate.

Overview of contributions to this volume

In addition to the Introduction and Conclusions, the book includes two main parts: Part II, Frameworks and conceptualizations and Part III, Applications and cases. The chapters in Part II are theoretical and conceptually driven, while those in Part III are based on empirical examples and ‘real world’ implications. The cases cover an array of places and circumstances that represent examples of governance responses to changes and shocks due to natural disasters, environmental change threats, and economic and rural transition stresses, especially in vulnerable tourist destinations. The individual chapters are linked through the book’s focus on sustainable tourism governance and resilience thinking, with the case studies illustrating and referencing the theoretical frameworks presented in Part II. The concluding chapter (Part IV) summarizes the two main parts and highlights the key issues in respect of sustainable tourism governance and resilient destinations and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

At the start of Part II, Chapter 2 by Jarkko Saarinen and Alison M. Gill contextualizes resilience thinking and destination governance within the sustainable tourism discourses. Saarinen and Gill overview the idea of sustainable development and sustainable tourism and discuss the relationship between sustainability and resilience. They acknowledge that sustainable development and sustainable tourism are highly contested ideas and extremely difficult to apply in practice, especially at a global scale. Despite these challenges, they consider the call for sustainability to be one of the most urgent issues facing the tourism industry. According to Saarinen and Gill, the destination scale provides a realistic, although limited, way to work with sustainability in tourism. They highlight the idea of resilient destinations and the need for destination governance strategies that would support transitioning towards sustainable development in tourism.

In Chapter 3, C. Michael Hall provides an overview of the different theoretical groundings of resilience and the way they have been (mis)used within the tourism literature. He draws a contrast between the ecological stance that is to be found in geographical and environmental accounts of resilience in tourism and the more static engineering approaches to be found in management and organizational studies. According to Hall, the different approaches are also regarded as having substantial implications for sustainable tourism and how destination resilience is perceived and policies are enacted. He concludes by noting the dangers associated with paradigm change regarding destination management and the extent to which the notion of resilience may be used as an opportunity for the enactment of neoliberal regimes that, ironically, may only further contribute to the vulnerability of destinations to global change.

In Chapter 4, Dianne Dredge discusses the challenging interplay between governance, tourism, and resilience. In this complex context she seeks to engage in a more critical, theoretically curious, and interdisciplinary discussion of the terms “governance” and “resilience” in the tourism context. Dredge contextualizes her discussion in twentieth-century scientific thought, late modern capitalism and the Anthropocene. Based on these historically contingent societal contexts her aim is to challenge our assumptions and excavate meanings underpinning commonly used terms s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Frameworks and conceptualizations
• PART III Applications and cases
• PART IV Conclusions
• Index