Tourism, Resilience and Sustainability

Adapting to Social, Political and Economic Change

Joseph M. Cheer, Alan A. Lew, Joseph M. Cheer, Alan A. Lew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315464039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

In a world increasingly faced with, and divided by, regional and global crises, resilience has emerged as a key concept with significant relevance for tourism.

A paradigmatic shift is taking place in the long-term planning of tourism development, in which the prevailing focus on sustainability is being enhanced with the practical application of resilience planning. This book provides a critical appraisal of sustainability and resilience, and the relationship between the two. Contributions highlight the complexity of addressing social change with resilience planning in a range of tourism contexts, from islands to mountains, from urban to remote environments, and in a range of international settings. Case studies articulate how tourism is both an agent of social change and a victim of larger change processes, and provide important lessons on how to deal with increasingly unstable economic, social and environmental systems.

This is the first book to specifically examine social change and sustainability in tourism through a resilience lens. This much-needed contribution to the literature will be a key resource for those working in tourism studies, tourism planning and management, social geography, and development studies, among others.

Part I
Introduction

1 Understanding tourism resilience

Adapting to social, political, and economic change

Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew

Complexity of the modern world

The UN’s World Population Prospects cite that ‘the world has added approximately one billion people since 2003 and two billion since 1990’ (UN, 2015, p. 3). The UN projects the next billion to be added by 2030, when its Agenda for Sustainable Development is to be realised, bringing the world’s total population to 8.5 billion, and then ‘9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100’ (UN, 2015, p. 3). Such growth has enormous implications for resource and land use, and anthropogenic climate change, in addition to human mobilities (migration, travel, and tourism) and quality of life on the planet. Forecasts for increases in life expectancy and improvements in infant mortality rates further intensify these global changes.

The links between population growth and environmental and resources management, including food security, will require adaptive responses, especially in the face of the growing social and spatial impacts of climate change and global warming (Lang & Heasman, 2015). The World Bank’s 2012–2022 environment strategy warns that ‘environmental degradation, pollution, or overexploitation of natural resources hampers economic progress’ (World Bank, 2012, p. 6). The World Bank also contends that the ‘current economic model, driven by unsustainable patterns of growth and consumption, is clearly putting too much pressure on an already stretched environment’. Such pressures signal a greater reliance on governance, at supra-national, national, and local levels and highlights the links between population, environment, and governance frameworks, and the compulsion for integrated approaches that acknowledge that the ‘key to building resilience is the stability of societies’ (WEF, 2016, p. 7).

In assessing global risk, the World Economic Forum (2016, p. 8) asserts that ‘the increasing volatility, complexity and ambiguity of the world … only heightens uncertainty around the ‘which’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘who’ of addressing global risks’. This is reminiscent of Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ concept in which he argues that ‘we live in a world that has to make decisions concerning its future under the conditions of manufactured, self-inflicted insecurity’ (Beck, 2009, p. 8). Although highly contextual and therefore somewhat limited (Dingwall, 1999), notions of ‘risk society’ are invariably aligned with the development of adaptive capacities, and as Beck (2009, p. 8) emphasises, ‘epitomizes an era of modern society that no longer merely casts off traditional ways of life but rather wrestles with the side effects of successful modernisation’. In conceptualising resilience, risk mitigation and adaptation are intertwined because ‘[r]isks concern the possibility of future occurrences’ (Beck, 2009, p. 9) and concomitantly, resilience considers responses to such possibilities.

The World Economic Forum’s (2016) call for caution and vigilance amidst unprecedented global ‘uncertainty’ is unsurprising and signals that much of what occurs in present-day social, political, and economic contexts makes the task of setting tourism planning and policy frameworks problematic and imprecise. The links between uncertainty and adaptive capacities suggests that developing adequate responses to the vicissitudes of global and local events is key to enabling rapid rebound and at the very least, efficient adaptation. Volatility in the wider global context segues appropriately into issues of resilience, and the application of resilience thinking that is focused on how to build ‘capacity to deal with unexpected change’ (SRC, 2015, p. 3).

Tourism and global change

David Harvey (1989) articulated the notion of time-space compression (also known as time-space distanciation) by which the emergence of new technologies in transportation and telecommunications since the industrial revolution has made the world increasingly smaller in functional terms. People can travel faster and cheaper; news, information, and ideas cross the planet in seconds instead of months; and products, trade, and economic activity move across an almost borderless globe. Harvey (1999, pp. 117–118), summarises that ‘the conditions of postmodern time-space compression exaggerate, in many respects, the dilemmas that have from time to time beset capitalist procedures of modernisation’, resulting in impacts for which ‘the range of responses differs in certain important respects from those which have occurred before’. Tourism, of course, is both enabled by a smaller, more readily accessible world, and is a major force in spreading the benefits and disbenefits wrought by time-space compression.

Globalization, in both its cultural and economic forms, is arguably the most significant impact of a smaller world. Notwithstanding the multivalence and slipperiness of the core concepts, time and space are largely ‘contingent upon the social interpretations’ attached to them and ‘heavily scale dependent’ (Warf, 2008, pp. 4–5). As such, globalization may be interpreted as either a positive force for modernisation and increasing opportunity and well-being for a community, or as a negative force that destroys local sovereignty and uniqueness (sense of place). International tourism, which is often accompanied by the global branding of multinational companies, can be viewed as a symbolic coming of age for an emerging economy. Alternatively, it could be seen as an external assault on traditional and more human-scale norms of behaviour, which needs to be rejected or resisted, sometimes in the form of violent terrorist attacks.

In theory, the death of distance leads to increasing connectivity between peoples and places, which should enable resilience in a new ‘glocal’ (global + local) knowledge network (Robertson, 1995). For example, the ability to communicate and deal more effectively with the occurrence of a tsunami, the eruption of volcanoes, the outbreak of a disease, or a sudden political upheaval is compressed such that local adaptive capacities can be quickly mobilised (Medd & Marvin, 2005). Similarly, increased contact between different peoples through travel and tourism has the potential to increase understanding and empathy for the plight of others through a sense of shared humanity. While this may be very true for some, the direct encounter with the ‘other’ can also enliven a politics of differentiation that works counter to such lofty goals.

The twin issues of uncertainty and resilience are central to tourism where global mobilities are very much contingent on social, political, and economic conditions that can either be a hindrance or help. Over a decade ago, Gössling and Hall (2006) observed that the underpinning interrelationships between ecological, social, economic, and political variables are highly influential on the nature of tourism and global environmental change. In particular, they argued that ‘the scale and rate of change has increased dramatically because of human actions within which tourism is deeply embedded’ (Gössling & Hall, 2006, p. 1). This was arguably a precursor to the contemporary discussion of resilience in tourism, because they reference the extent to which tourism interfaces with change in attendant communities, and the degree to which those communities can adapt and respond favourably.

In contexts where tourism is a vital cog in the local economy, the overriding ability to adapt and deal effectively with change frames the nature and extent of resilience (Luthe & Romano, 2014). As Lew et al. (2015, p. 24) outline, communities face the circumstance of having to be sustainable and resilient because community well-being is reliant on having both ‘strength and vision’ in negotiating uncertainty. In examining the dimensions of social, political, and economic change, a wide net is cast by the authors in this book to capture transformations other than, and distinct from, environmental change, climate change, and natural hazards disaster management. (For these issues, see Lew & Cheer, 2017, Tourism and Resilience to Environmental Change.)

Lew’s (2014) scale, change, and resilience (SCR) model is a reference point for distinctions where tourism resilience is underpinned by slow and fast change variables. Slow change relates to gradual variations and changes over time, while fast change implies sudden, largely unexpected change, best exemplified by large earthquakes and extreme climate events, but socially akin to the violent overthrow of a government or a sudden economic crisis. Demarcating between slow and fast change is a critical dimension of resilience thinking because in each case, the adaptive capacities and the calls to action that are invoked require tailored responses.

In setting the framework for understanding resilience amidst social, political, and economic contexts, Hall, in Chapter 2, describes how the prevailing academic discourses on resilience are still very much in the formative stages, with engineering resilience a predominant theme, and where the key challenge lies in operationalising conceptual understandings that link theory and practice. Defining slow resilience in community contexts is especially pertinent given that all the cases presented in this book speak of the encounter that tourism communities have with slow change, which is articulated by Lew in Chapter 3. Following the introduction and background section of the book, a key distinction is made between how external social, political, and economic drivers of change shape tourism (Part II) and how tourism induces the socio-economic outcomes in the broader contexts in which it operates (Part III).

Social change impacting tourism

When it comes to social, political, and economic change, these dimensions tend to unfold gradually making responses dependent on mutable circumstantial and contextual stimuli. This contrasts with fast change where scale, change, and response occur at different speeds but within defined time-space parameters (Agnew, 2015). The three dimensions are inherently linked and any fundamental change to one is very often linked to ripple effects upon the other two. Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 (comprising Part II of this book) demonstrate in very different contexts how changes over the medium to long term have transformed the tourism backdrop. For example, China’s growing influence on the global economy can have wide-ranging repercussions (Overbeek, 2016). This is relevant for tourism where unprecedented heights in Chinese outbound travel now underline the tourism economy in many destinations (Lew & Li, 2016; Li, 2015; Goldman Sachs, 2015).

Global social change necessarily drives political and economic transformations, aptly exemplified by advances in telecommunications and transportation that continue to drive time-space distanciation (Keightley, 2013), as well as demographic shifts characterized by ageing populations and low fertility rates in developed countries, contrasted with rapid population growth in less developed contexts (UN, 2015). These changes impact relationships between peoples, seen to some degree through tourism, but even more so in modern-day international migrations in which political, economic, and social drivers of change are deeply intertwined. The recent rise in anti-immigrant populism in many developed Western countries is a political response to such social changes (Polyakova, 2016) and the increasing numbers of refugees to Europe, in particular, reflects persistent and prolonged economic, political, and environmental crises in Africa and the Middle East (Martin, 2016).

Collectively, the extant social, economic, and political global context is giving way to what many consider to be potentially more volatile and unpredictable shifts toward protectionism, isolationism, and populism (Kazin, 2016; Zakaria, 2016). The vicissitudes of global affairs raise many questions including whether another global economic recession is imminent and to what extent will this be dependent on perturbations taking place in the Chinese or American economies. And to what degree will the changing face of international affairs influence social relatio...