Scale, change and resilience in community tourism planning

TLDR

Resilience planning offers an alternative to sustainable development for community development, yet tourism scholars have been slow to adopt these concepts, and most research has focused on disasters rather than slow change variables. The study proposes a tourism resilience model that accounts for the rate of change and the scale of tourism interest. The model is operationalized as a 2×2 matrix identifying four contexts—entrepreneurial maintenance, community disaster readiness, response, and recovery—each with distinct resilience issues, methods, and metrics.

Abstract

Resilience planning has emerged in recent years as an alternative to the sustainable development paradigm to provide new perspectives on community development and socio-ecological adjustments to a rapidly changing world. Tourism scholars have been somewhat slow to adopt the recent conceptual ideas related to community resilience that have been published in other disciplinary areas, though this situation is also changing rapidly. While most resilience research focuses on major disasters and crises, new frameworks that encompass slow change variables provide a more comprehensive view on resilience. A model for tourism resilience considers this rate of change (transitioning from slow to fast), and the scale of tourism interest (scaling from that of the entrepreneur to those that are community-wide). The resulting 2 × 2 matrix presents four contexts with distinct resilience issues, methodologies and measurements, ranging from entrepreneurs managing daily maintenance needs, to community disaster readiness, response and recovery.