Resilience in tourism development: A socio-ecological perspective

Our symposium explores the concept of resilience as applied in tourism studies. Our opening presentation introduces “resilience,” or the capacity of a system to experience or absorb disturbance while still maintaining its... [ view full abstract ]

Our symposium explores the concept of resilience as applied in tourism studies. Our opening presentation introduces “resilience,” or the capacity of a system to experience or absorb disturbance while still maintaining its ongoing functions, structures, identity and feedbacks (Holling, 1996; Walker et al. 2004). In recent years, resilience theories have been applied to tourism with great success. In tourism systems, local to global economic linkages and flows of people and resources can result in the rapid and unexpected spread of impacts from shocks or disturbances. Major ecological (e.g. Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Hurricane Katrina), health (e.g. SARS outbreak), economic (e.g. global financial crises), political (9/11 terrorist attacks, gulf war) and other shocks and disturbances impact the socio-ecological system of tourism and, depending on the resiliency of the system in a given place, can cause a system to reorganize or to flip to a different state. Holling’s Adaptive Cycle model illustrates the resilience concept as a cyclical process with four phases —exploitation, conservation, release and reorganization. As a loop, the cycle returns to exploitation. This cycle offers a more complete (systems view) of what Butler’s (1980) “Tourism Area Life–Cycle” model began to explore. While Butler proposed three set phases of exploitation, development and conservation leading up to one of three states—standstill, decline, or reorganization, Holling’s Adaptive cycle allows for a destination to decline, release and reorganize. This presentation will introduce the concept of resilience and Holling’s Adaptive Cycle and apply both to understanding tourism using specific case studies to illustrate how these concepts help both researchers and tourism industry professionals to understand and learn from tourism development cycles.