Tourism and Resilience

Individual, Organisational and Destination Perspectives

C. Michael Hall, Girish Prayag, Alberto Amore

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781845416324
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book is the first authored overview of resilience in tourism and its relationship to the broader resilience literature. The volume takes a multi-scaled approach to examine resilience at the individual, organisation and destination levels, and with respect to the wider tourism system. It covers the different approaches to understanding resilience (the ecological and engineering approaches) and identifies issues with their understanding and application. The book connects issues of resilience to related key concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation, networks, systems, change and social capital. It is designed to be an upper level undergraduate and postgraduate primer on resilience in a tourism context and will be of interest to tourism researchers in planning, development, geography, impacts, sustainability, disaster management and environmental studies.

1Disturbance and Change in the Tourism System

Introduction: From Stability to Change

Complex systems such as economies, ecosystems, societies or, as is the focus of this book, the tourism industry sectors, destinations and international travel networks, consist of autonomous agents such as organisms, humans, businesses, organisations and institutions that pursue their own objectives and interact with one another and their environment (Grimm et al., 2005). Fundamental questions exist with respect to the stability of such systems. How long will these systems exist? How much do their characteristic features vary over time and space/jurisdictions? Are they sensitive to disturbances and change? If so, will they recover to their original state and, if that is the case, why, from what set of states and how fast? (Grimm & Calabrese, 2011). These are questions of resilience.

The building blocks of these systems – the organisations, organisms and people – usually do not have a blueprint of the entire system in mind, and instead follow their own aims, goals and objectives. Nevertheless, system-level properties emerge over time that allow for the identification of such systems and their behaviours (Grimm & Calabrese, 2011). Coral reefs and tropical rainforests, for example, can be self-similar over thousands of years and reliably provide functions and services that are important for the tourism industry. Systems can, however, also collapse and lose their identity and functions; for example: a stock market can crash; a coral reef can be exposed to agricultural runoff, overfishing or a bleaching event and be replaced by seagrass; a destination may experience a dramatic fall in visitation as a result of a disaster; or a savannah can turn into a scrubland due to overgrazing, rendering it virtually useless as rangeland and as a safari tourism location (Scheffer et al., 2001, 2009).

In one of the most widely cited socio-ecological definitions, resilience is ‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks’ (Walker et al., 2004: 6) that existed before the disturbance began. If resilience is a term that finds its meaning in relation to change, then we are at a stage in the Earth’s history, and in human history, that has rarely been marked by so much change in such a short space of time – so much so that that the amount of change and ‘markers’ (its permanent effects that will show in the geological record) has even been given its own term: ‘the Anthropocene’.

This chapter begins by highlighting some of the major forms of change that are affecting tourism and our understanding of resilience today. These include socio-economic change, technological change and environmental change. One form of rapid change is disaster and considerable attention has been given in the tourism literature to understanding how resilience concepts may assist in better mitigation and adaptation to the effects of disasters. The chapter then discusses the notion of a tourism system and the emphasis given in the literature to tourism being conceptualised as a complex rather than a complicated system. This then provides a context for the next chapter in which the concept of resilience is outlined and the ways in which it is used in the wider science and social science literature are discussed. The chapter concludes with a brief outline of the book.

All Change?

In human terms change is marked by the contemporary phase of globalisation – marked as it is by greater international trade, telecommunications, transport and movement of financial and economic capital than at any time in history. Of course, it is not just the size of such movement, but also the speed at which movement occurs. Events can be simultaneously seen on personal phones anywhere around the world, where digital controls allow, and video messaging via programmes such as Skype is something that only a generation earlier was regarded as close to science fiction and where the fax was still regarded as a very cool thing! However, another major socio-economic change is coming. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) mean that a ‘second wave’ of robotic/AI technological change is approaching as part of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’: the first wave meant job losses in manufacturing; in the second wave the jobs at risk from the machines are going to be jobs in the service sector (Elliot, 2017).

This fourth industrial revolution, just like all the others, is expected to lead to a spurt in economic growth. ‘Automation could raise productivity growth on a global basis by as much as 0.8 to 1.4 percent annually’ (McKinsey Global Institute, 2017: 1). But the last major epoch of technological change was accompanied by political change which ensured that those making the cars, the washing machines and the televisions could also afford to purchase them. Full employment policies, capital controls, progressive income tax and strong trade unions helped ensure that this was the case (Elliot, 2017). However, technological change, global integration, domestic labour and economic market deregulation and increased immi...