Tourism, resilience, and governance strategies in the transition towards sustainability

During the 1990s the issue of sustainability became a policy discourse, which started to direct the economic, social, and political structures and processes that constitute the contemporary operative contexts of the tourism industry (Bramwell and Lane 1993; Mowforth and Munt, 2003; Sharpley, 2000). The need for sustainable development in tourism was based on several interrelated processes (see Saarinen, 2014), but since the 1960s and 1970s the key drivers have been the growing impacts of global tourism and, in general, intensified calls for environmental protection and environmentally sound forms of production and consumption. As a result, sustainability thinking is currently firmly embedded in tourism planning, development, and governance approaches at different scales. At the same time, however, the connections and misconnections between tourism as a growth industry and sustainable development are critically debated and challenged. One of the challenging ideas has been a resilience approach in tourism destination planning and governance.