The first time I came across the notion of resilience was 11 years ago during a series of workshops on organizational resilience, focusing on the response and preparedness of businesses to sudden natural hazards. At first sight, I thought this notion had the potential to advance research in tourism, crisis management, and adaptation in the aftermath of major events like earthquakes, hurricanes, and man-made disasters. I then started writing a short research note for submission to a major tourism studies conference I wanted to attend in Australia in early 2014, but it was eventually rejected for not being of much relevance by the conference organizers.
Ten years later, the concept of resilience and its application in tourism studies has become the norm. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time during my PhD in New Zealand, where I joined a group of scholars who recognized the potential of resilience thinking in advancing theory and practices in tourism research. I was invited to contribute to the first monograph on tourism and resilience with C. Michael Hall and Girish Prayag. However, in recent years, I have witnessed the proliferation and misuse of the term resilience in my field.
In a recent review of the state of the art in tourism and resilience research (Amore, 2024), I pointed out two major challenges for the advancement of the field. From a research perspective, there are intrinsic contradictions and a weak framing in tourism studies around the notion of resilience. This can be mainly attributed to the tendency in the field of tourism to build most of the frameworks and arguments from a narrow disciplinary perspective that mostly builds from studies in management, marketing, and business studies.
Second, the proliferation of studies at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the current polycrisis tend to use resilience and recovery almost as synonyms. The latter point sometimes leaves me wondering why resilience as recovery – a narrative often sweetened by the Build-Back-Better mantra – is ultimately what we should aspire for or whether the status quo that we had in place prior to the pandemic should indeed be the way resilience thinking should follow.
Critical tourism geographies have emphasized this point well before the turn of the decade and have further highlighted the need to radically change the way we research tourism. One of the points I have been recently reflecting upon concerns Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and how it ties to ecology, socio-ecological vulnerability, and resilience in tourism. I am currently working on a paper with Roosa Ridanpää and Jarkko Saarinen specifically on CAS, living systems thinking, and resilience building from the presentation we gave at the 2024 Arctic Conference in Bødø, Norway. From a resilience and policy response perspective, CAS thinking emphasizes the resiliency of collaborative policy processes and their ability to absorb radical changes while maintaining their integrity. This is of extreme importance when it comes to tourism and sustainability and new ways to blend environmental protection and socio-ecological resilience to the challenges of global warming and biodiversity loss.
While this is, on paper, the most logical thing to do, there are practical challenges. One concerns the implementation of effective cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of resilience in ways that can effectively contribute to a constructive and collaborative dialogue between fields. There are encouraging signs indicating a greater integration of fields as part of the most recent funding calls, particularly in the Nordic countries.
The second point concerns whose and which resilience we need to focus on. In the case of tourism, there have been calls to find a suitable alternative to the prevailing rhetoric of resilience as recovery and Build Back Better. It is paramount to look at the intrinsic vulnerabilities of contemporary travel and tourism and re-align this quintessentially global phenomenon to the ecological and social limits of places. Notions and models of resilience and tourism that do not consider the centrality of vulnerable and finite ecosystems, the impact of human activities, and the instances and voices of the local community are inherently flawed. Genuine resilience thinking represents a new avenue to understand and research tourism and disseminate problem-centred knowledge to address the wicked problems in tourism nowadays.
A shift towards a normative agenda in resilience must move beyond the potentially dangerous technical-reductionist frameworks and models. Arguably, a geographical approach that considers resilience as a socially and politically embedded process that acts and influences ecosystems and the interactions of individuals and societies with the surrounding environment is the way forward in resilience thinking. As the Mandalorian best puts it: This is the way.
Writer of this blog post is Assistant Professor Alberto Amore (Tenure Track) in Geography Research Unit, at the University of Oulu and an Affiliated Scholar of Biodiverse Anthropocenes research programme.
The Exploring resilience blog discusses the current themes of research, teaching and development of resilience, i.e., crisis resistance and deepens knowledge about the management of global change, and possible solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability. The authors are researchers and experts in the field, and members of the cooperation networks of the University of Oulu’s FRONT PROFI7 research programme.