Destination Resilience

Challenges and Opportunities for Destination Management and Governance

Elisa Innerhofer, Martin Fontanari, Harald Pechlaner, Elisa Innerhofer, Martin Fontanari, Harald Pechlaner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351331920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

This book calls for rethinking the meaning of sustainable development in tourism and explores how sustainability and resilience could be integrated. It argues that these concepts should be seen as interwoven processes, rather than alternative approaches. Resilience should be understood as a fundamental part of sustainable tourism thinking for destination systems. This can be achieved by calling for better governance in implementation and management. With insights from leading experts, chapters focus on resilient destinations from this governance perspective, in which tourism resilience is contextualized as an integral part of pathway creation in the process of moving towards sustainable tourism. The chapters represent a range of theoretical and empirical approaches with a wide international scope to demonstrate how governance is the key issue in sustainable tourism development.

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

Part I
Definition and conceptual framework

1
Linking destinations and resilience – challenges and perspectives

Harald Pechlaner & Elisa Innerhofer

1. Introduction

One of the challenges destination managers and tourism organizations responsible for the governance of destinations are facing is the management of the risks and impacts globalization as well as global economic, environmental and social changes have on tourism. They are forced to give support in the recovery from crisis, to cope with complex interrelated changes and to implement systems of crisis management, which are aimed at reducing the impact of crisis. The ongoing intensity and overlapping of various global structural changes and economic turmoil require adaptation and transformation processes not limited on single and medium-term initiatives, but asking for adaptability and the organizational ability to change. Tourism needs new strategies to cope with complex and interrelated change impacts (Luthe & Wyss, 2014). In the future, successful destinations will have to concentrate more and more on their ability to adapt to changing conditions and circumstances. In order to describe this ability, researchers in natural as well as in social sciences and psychologists are more and more referring to the concept of resilience. Among different resources and capabilities for dealing with such a situation of change, “resilience is the concept that is gaining currency”. Resilience is the capacity of a system (a social system like a group, a community, an organization or the society) to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change (Holling, 1973; Walker, Holling, Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004). Concepts aimed at resilience are taking into account insecurities, uncertainties and unexpected events and are trying to turn these challenges into opportunities (Meyen, 2015). The management of unforeseeable and unpredictable situations is one of the “strategic issues”, which lies within the responsibility of the top management of a destination.

The main objective of the following chapter is to link the concept of destinations to those of resilience and thus to introduce the concept of resilience to the destination dialog. This objective is based on the assumption that resilience has much explanatory power for destinations coping with changes (Luthe & Wyss, 2014). Changes, disturbances and crisis in tourism are diversifying and not only connected to climate and natural environment, but next to economic disturbances, they increasingly include phenomenon such as terrorism, internal turmoil, digital economy and profound social changes. Thus, the topic requires more attention in tourism research (Fabry & Zeghni, 2016; Calgaro, Dominey-Howes, & Lloyd, 2013; Hall, Prayag, & Amore, 2017). Existing tourism studies on resilience mainly focus on ecological and environmental resilience of tourism systems (Becken, 2013). However, in the last two decades, the analysis of tourism in times of crisis and conflict arose as a new area of tourism research studies (Paraskevas, Altinay, McLean, & Cooper, 2013). In order to deal with the deterioration of natural, social and economic environments and to manage and handle crisis as well as the challenges arising from them, the introductory article will discuss the terms “destination” and “resilience” and describe the link between the two concepts. This complex and important link cannot be fully analyzed and explained on the few pages of this chapter. But it should contribute to the scientific discussion and point out some key and important approaches and ideas.

2. Global changes in the context of tourism and destinations

Traditional economic and political ideologies erode. There is something new in today’s political belief system and in the contemporary ideological landscape (Steger, 2008). The contemporary social-political change exerted by globalization and going on a global level does not depend any more on traditional notions of politics and economics alone but on more factors which are mutually interdependent and characterized by a high level of complexity (Benedikter, 2013a). Global change and developments are co-shaped by the “cultural turn of civilizations” and “the renaissance of religions” and by the less embedded and less controllable forces of transformation, which are technology and demography (Benedikter, 2013b). Demographic trends influence political stability or instability, the economic potential for development and the development of a society (De Souza, 2015), while technology, and mainly digitalization and digital data, are causing unprecedented change on a global scale (Benedikter, 2013b). This contemporary global change process, the increasing uncertainty and insecurity as well as economic and environmental shocks and the growing awareness of the negative implications of naturally or human induced developments have led to a higher sense of sensitivity for the ability or capacity of a system to deal with sudden and unexpected changes (Sheppard & Williams, 2016).

The system, whose resistance to crisis and adaptability to change is focused within this edited volume, is the tourism system defined as an interrelated social-economic-ecological system (Nelson, Adger, & Brown, 2007). Talking about tourism and tourism and destination development and the vulnerability of destinations to shocks, stressors and sudden changes is a rising concern for researchers and industry stakeholders. Tourist destinations and actors are facing various governance and management challenges arising from global phenomenon, such as climate and demographic change or economic turmoil (Luthe & Wyss, 2014). Despite these challenges and the rising concern, knowledge on the causal factors and processes that create vulnerability as well as on strategies to handle and manage it is limited. Most of the investigations and studies published focus on a single cause or a few selected factors but fail to capture the whole complexity of vulnerability in tourist destinations (Calgaro, 2011). The resilience perspective is one approach to deal with the complexity of tourism and destination governance and management catching more and more the attention of researchers from different disciplines (see e.g. Tyrrell & Johnston, 2008; Davoudi & Porter, 2012; Sheppard & Williams, 2016; Hall et al., 2017). Studies and analysis focus on the capacity of tourism systems to deal with challenges and to maintain the stability of the tourism-related regional economy, politics and social life and at the same time to guarantee flexibility to react to changes and to ensure innovation and development (Luthe & Wyss, 2014). Even if for the term “resilience” a generally accepted definition doesn’t exist, the general assumption that it is good to be resilient is widely accepted (Davoudi & Porter, 2012).

In the light of contemporary global change, good destination governance and management or good tourism systems’ governance and management will require an understanding of complex global trends and the ability to develop farsighted and strategies (i.e. Khanna, 2017). In addition, destination management faces the challenge to help their destinations to adapt and thus to coordinate its change management. Taking action on change is challenging not only because it requires a new and sophisticated set of methods and toolkits able to handle high complexity, but because it overcomes the boundaries of scientific disciplines and requires interdisciplinary as well as transdisciplinary thinking. A more problem- and challenge-oriented research is needed (Schneidewind, 2016).

Despite the high degree of complexity of change and the lack of clarity regarding the term “resilience” and its inconsistent usage, there is a growing number of organizational, governmental and non-governmental initiatives which aim to develop toolkits for resilience-assessment and resilience-building (e.g. Calgaro et al., 2013). This volume follows the same purpose working in the same direction.

3. Concept of resilience

Discussing and analyzing the term “resilience” often leads to the initial question of what distinguishes resilience from the concept of sustainability. Since the Brundtland Report issued by the World Commission on Environment and Development for the United Nations in 1987, sustainable development has been the leading framework for future development. The Brundtland Report was the global agenda to deal with the disturbances of natural and social environments. It defines sustainability as a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.¹ Although the concept of sustainable development is still the preferred development paradigm (for the majority of developed countries), the non-sustainable world with the environmentally damaging emission of greenhouse gasses, biodiversity losses, income disparities and social inequities remains reality (Lew, 2012).

However, it appears that currently resilience replaces the concept of sustainability in some scientific discourses. Several researchers discuss the equivalence of resilience and sustainability. Therefore, Holling and Walker (2003) state that a resilient socio-ecological system is synonymous with a region that is ecologically, econom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• PART I Definition and conceptual framework
• PART II Destination management and governance towards resilience
• PART III Business aspects and strategies to increase resilience
• Index