Transforming visions and pathways in destination development: Local perceptions and adaptation strategies to changing environment in finnish lapland

While the adaptation dimension has been strongly emphasised in the recent tourism and climate change literature, the need to respond to external and internal changes and be proactive and resilient, if possible, has also been noted outside the current discussions on climate change. Actually, the issue of future changes in destination development has been studied for a relatively long time within tourism research: e.g. the evolution cycle of tourist destination (Butler 1980) represents a model aiming to demonstrate future challenges in development of a tourist destination if certain limits to growth are not considered (see Saarinen 2006). Recently, flexible and proactive evolutionary approaches have evolved to consider the development perspectives of tourist destinations under increasing or deepening external and internal change factors. The dimensions of path-dependency and path-creation in tourism development have received special interest (see Saarinen and Kask 2008; Ma and Hassink 2013). These dimensions demonstrate local-global relations, contingency and self-reinforcement, i.e., localresponses to internal and external processes, structures and changes (see Baláž and Williams 2005). As a dimension path-dependence refers to a situation in which the actors and their possibilities are seen as limited by existing resources and traditions which support some development pathways better than others (Williams and Baláž 2002; Saarinen in Chapter 3 of this volume). In contrast, the dimension of path-creation emphasises the potential of local actors to influence the course of destination development and break away from path-dependency if necessary (see Nielsen et al. 1995; Stark 1996).