Resilient Destinations and Tourism ― Governance Strategies in the Transition Towards Sustainability in Tourism

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 socio-ecological lens.

Instead of seeing resilience and sustainability as alternative approaches, this book argues that resilience should be understood as a fundamental part of sustainable tourism thinking for destination systems, by calling for better governance in implementation and management. Improving governance is the key issue in sustainable tourism development. 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. This book 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 with respect to sustainability planning, governance, environment, and hazards and disasters.

Jarkko Saarinen is a Professor of Geography in the University of Oulu, Finland, and Distinguished Visiting Professor (Sustainability Management) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Alison M. Gill is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Geography, and School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.