Knowledge Networks and Tourism

Current Issues in Tourism, 2015

Studied for decades in disciplines such as ecology, psychology, engineering and sociology ‘resilience’ can be defined as a system’s ability to withstand and respond to change. The tourism literature has embraced the concept of community resilience by harnessing concepts of adaptive capacity and vulnerability. Many of these studies have focused on the tourism system’s ability to respond to short-term disasters and hazards. With the growth of resilience studies in tourism, it is timely to take stock of the core premise of resilience as it is applied to tourism and to identify key gaps in current research. Consequently, this research aims to identify the core concepts of community resilience, with a focus on its application within tourism. The findings reveal that many studies have been conceptual, although there are an increasing number of empirical studies underpinned by resilience theory. Therefore, a conceptual model is presented to broaden existing resilience research and to guide future research into community resilience to tourism decline and rejuvenation.

Tourism Leisure and Global Change, 2015

Tourism industry has become a major contributor to the world's economy. Being as one on the economy contributor, it is important to take the pre emptive measure in order to remain intact. In other word, it is important to remain resilience. The level of resilience measured will determine the action to be taken by the community as well as the government to ensure the homestay operators sustained in the market. Comprehensive community resilience involves several categories of resilience ranging from disaster setting to a normal environment that people live, which are varied, can be classified into different types and make different contributions to different circumstances. This conceptual study will further add to the literature by exploring resilience in community-based homestay tourism. As this study focus at community-based homestay tourism vulnerability through the concept of resilience, the conclusion made at the end of this study should increase understanding of various aspect of community resiliency within the homestay community at large. Subsequently, this information can assist the policy makers and the homestay operators in planning effective strategies and maintaining the resiliency in the homestay tourism community.

Tourism Management, 2011

Socio-ecological resilience (SER), as a theoretical framework, provides an original approach to the study of socio-ecological sustainability, affirming that sustainable development can only be achieved in sufficiently resilient socio-ecosystems. Sustainability is one of the major challenges facing tourism. Therefore, the exploratory application of this theoretical approach to tourist contexts could be particularly apt. Practically all current modes of tourist operation profess a commitment to sustainability, but this is much more significant in experiences of community-based tourism (CBT). This paper presents an ethnographic case study in Agua Blanca, an Ecuadorian community that engages in turismo comunitario, a community-based tourism development strategy. The study explores the expediency of studying socioecological resilience in tourist research and attempts to open up new pathways for analytical and methodological development.

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 09669582 2013 855222, 2014

ABSTRACT The Franz Josef and Fox Glacier townships in New Zealand's “Glacier Country”, neighbouring Westland National Park, are remote tourist attractions facing multiple future sustainability challenges. Despite their distance from their markets, they attract 600,000 visitors annually and are fundamental to the district's economy. However, issues of geographic isolation are compounded by major threats of flooding and earthquake, rising fuel prices and climate change scenarios which imply serious glacier melting. Using 24 stakeholder interviews, this study evaluates susceptibility to change at multiple scales which could undermine the economic and social longevity of this iconic destination. Adopting a human–environment systems perspective, it utilises the concepts of vulnerability and resilience to examine dimensions of change and response that have shaped the community, conservation and tourism in this peripheral region. It finds high levels of vulnerability do not necessarily determine low levels of resilience, nor vice versa. Rather than mutually exclusive, vulnerability and resilience are discrete, but highly compatible concepts, offering much to the analysis of protected area tourism facing global change. The paper notes the potential guidance and governance role of the protected area in building resilience, and equally the threat to the protected area's integrity if tourism is compromised by its vulnerabilities.

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 focusses 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 the 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 2x2 matrix presents four context with distinct resilience issues, methodologies and measurements, ranging from entrepreneurs managing daily maintenance needs, to community disaster readiness, response and recovery.

2009

This paper examines the applicability of the concept of "resilience" and a closely associated management framework ("resilient futures process") to the tourism context. The approach has developed as a methodological derivative of ecological systems analysis. The paper sets to explore the potential contribution of the resilience approach to tourism, by firstly outlining the ways in which tourism constitutes a "complex system", in the first section. Additionally, it uses the example of "climate change and tourism" adaptation frameworks to explore the implications of the approach as well as some challenges with its extension towards tourism sector coordination. In the light of the tourism system being understood as a complex network of stakeholders' collaboration the emphasis being as a mechanism supporting the coordination of diverse and imperfectly compatible assets on which the tourism sector depends. Developing and implementing adaptive management strategies inevitably starts by identifying stakeholders' values as well as developing shared decision-making responsibilities. The ability of social and ecological systems Dealing with complexity in tourism settings 2 to cope and learn from radical change can be referred to as "resilience" aiming for the system to build the capacity to learn and adapt. Climate change provides a generic category of threat that arises out of global human actions (in which tourism participates) but is predominantly external to the tourism system-both in terms of its causes and the remedies that are likely to mitigate it. Using and applying resilience thinking to tourism systems in cases of uncertainty is beneficial in order to address and adapt to changing conditions. This paper explores the resilience concept, illustrates how it can link to complex tourism systems and its potential applicability on the example of climate change.

'Sustainability' has endured as an important concept for tourism scholars, and volumes have been written about how to achieve this holy grail of the tourism industry. Sustainable tourism destinations are often promoted as the ethical choice for discerning travellers, with some marketers taking full advantage of the widely acknowledged ambiguities implicit in the term. More recently 'resilience' has generated appeal in the academic tourism literature as a term that might capture core aspects of sustainability, while acknowledging the considerable influences that multiple contexts have on the capacity of communities to adapt and ultimately sustain their tourism enterprises. The resilience concept encompasses an inclusive and integrative 'social ecological systems' approach which gives it a firm interdisciplinary underpinning in its application in tourism. While in a tourism context sustainability and resilience are kindred terms, relatively little scholarly effort has been committed to a critical treatment of these concepts. Addressing this deficiency, we present a conceptual model to discuss the relationship between sustainability and resilience in tourism. Drawing on examples from New Zealand's nature-based tourism sector, this conceptual paper explores the insights that a critical treatment of the sustainability-resilience nexus might offer both academics and practitioners with interests in the field of tourism studies.

Tourism is a key driver of global socio-economic progress. However, its sustainability is at risk from multiple shocks and hazards that threaten livelihoods. Surprisingly little is known about the complex drivers of destination vulnerability, leading to the creation and application of ineffective resilience-building solutions. The paper presents the Destination Sustainability Framework (DSF) designed to assess destination vulnerability and resilience, and support successful resilience-building initiatives. Holistic in nature, the DSF comprises: (1) the shock(s) or stressor(s); (2) the interconnected dimensions of vulnerability -exposure, sensitivity, and system adaptiveness; (3) the dynamic feedback loops that express the multiple outcomes of actions taken (or not); (4) the contextualised root causes that shape destinations and their characteristics; (5) the various spatial scales; and (6) multiple timeframes within which social-ecological change occurs. This innovative framework is significant because it's the first framework to chart the complex manifestation of vulnerability and resilience in tourism destinations. Further, it brings tourism sustainability research in line with wider debates on achieving sustainability within the dynamic coupled human-environment system, doing so through the inclusion of insights from contemporary systems approaches, including chaos-complexity theory, vulnerability approaches, sustainability science, resilience thinking, along with the geographies of scale, place and time.

Tourism activity is emblematic of the challenge in understanding social and economic change because it is often both an agent of and contributor to social change and a victim of larger change process. This is demonstrated through the chapters in this book. A summary of the resilience lessons learned through include: the continuing challenge on defining and conceptualizing resilience (which is something the concept shares in common with its sister concept, sustainability); the importance of slow change process, which is too easily overlooked and underestimated; the extraordinary ability of human community systems to self-organize and adapt in times of need; the strategic role of innovation as a key resilience characteristics, which separates it from many sustainability approaches; the important role that tourism plays as an innovative process and product, thereby enhancing community resilience, especially in economic terms; the potential of tourism to reduce social and cultural resilience, and be an agent of political repression. Tourism is neither good or bad. It is along with many other phenomenon, part of an ever-changing global context that needs to be understood and appreciated to create a successful resilience-based approach to life. Assessing how human social systems respond to social change is a challenge because, in most instances, the systems that are being examined are implicated as both agents and victims of the change that is taking place. This is especially true of tourism, which, as an economic activity, is an active agent in creating a more globalized and homogenous world, while also being deeply dependent on at least the perception of heterogenous places and the uniqueness of destinations. The chapters in this book were roughly structured on this awareness, grouped into chapters that discussed how tourism (as a system) responds to broad changes in social, economic, and political conditions, and chapters in which tourism is actively used to bring about changes in those same conditions. Even this division, however, is precarious depending on how a tourism system is defined. At one scale it may be the driver of social change, whereas at another scale it may be the recipient of such changes. This is a pre-publication copy of a book chapter. Please cite as: Lew, A.A. and Cheer, J. (2018). Lessons Learned: Globalization, Change, and Resilience in Tourism Communities. In J. Cheer and A.A. Lew, editors. 2017. Tourism, Resilience, and Sustainability: Adapting to Social, Political and Economic Change, pages 319-323. London: Routledge.

Journal of tourism futures, 2024

Purpose-The impact of COVID-19 on tourism destinations has been severe, but a future crisis is never far away. How communities can better prepare for disasters to come in the near future continues to be researched. This research aims to understand the tourism community's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and present the Tourism Community Resilience Model as a useful instrument to help communities better respond to disasters in the future. Design/methodology/approach-This research uses a qualitative research approach which seeks to understand phenomena, events, social activities, attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and individual and group opinions that are dynamic in character in accordance with the situation in the field. Research primary data is in the form of Kuta Traditional Village local community responses in enduring the COVID-19 pandemic conducted between January and May 2022. These data were obtained through in-depth observations and interviews involving informants based on purposive sampling, including traditional community leaders, village officials, tourism actors (i.e. street vendors, tourist local guides, taxi drivers and art workers) and tourism community members. We selected the informants who are not only directly impacted by the pandemic, but also some of them have to survive during the pandemic because they do not have other job options. The results of previous research and government data concerning the pandemic and community resilience were needed as secondary data, which were obtained through a study of the literature. The data which had been obtained were further analysed based on the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) technique, which seeks to make meaning of something from the participants' perspective and the researchers' perspective as a result there occurs a cognition of a central position. Findings-Based on findings from Bali, Indonesia, this resilience model for the tourism community was created in response to the difficulties and fortitude shown by the community during the COVID-19 pandemic. It comprises four key elements, namely the Local Wisdom Foundation, Resource Management, Government Contributions and External Community Support. These elements are all rooted in the concepts of niskala (spirituality) and sekala (real response); it is these elements that give the tourism community in the Kuta Traditional Village a unique approach, which can inspire other tourism destinations in other countries around the world. Research limitations/implications-A tourism community resilience model based on local community responses has implications for the process of enriching academic research and community management practices in facing future crisis, particularly by involving local wisdom foundation. Practical implications-A tourism community resilience model based on local community responses has implications for the process of enriching academic research and community management practices in facing future crisis, particularly by involving local wisdom foundation. Social implications-The existence of the resilience model strengthens local community social cohesion, which has been made stronger by the bonds of culture and shared faith in facing disaster. This social cohesion then stimulates the strength of sustainable and long-term community collaboration in the post-pandemic period. For tourism businesses, having strong connections with the local communities is an important condition to thrive.