A research agenda for sustainable tourism

Citation

Seeler, S. (2020), "A research agenda for sustainable tourism", Journal of Tourism Futures, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 287-289. https://doi.org/10.1108/JTF-09-2020-156

When the 28 international scholars contributed their chapters to this edited book with the title “A Research Agenda for Sustainable Tourism” by McCool and Bosak, they will not have anticipated what tourism would look like only a few months after the publication date. The volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of today’s world were addressed throughout the book, and authors called for more systems thinking approaches that go beyond reductionists thinking that follows the basic assumption of a predictable, linear, understandable and stable world. However, a global pandemic of the scale of COVID-19 was not imagined. The authors of this edited book bring forward that tourism destinations need to be understood as socio-ecological systems that are part of a larger system and can also be split into smaller subsystems, demonstrating the complexity and fragmentation. The overall message of the book is that conventional problem-solving approaches are insufficient and actors in the complex tourism system need to build adaptive capacity and resilience to be able to absorb potential future shock and avoid surprise moments that lead to wicked problems and messy situations. Authors elaborate on the differences and linkages between sustainability and resilience which Espiner, Higham and Orchiston (Chapter 3) summarise as follows: “Resilience, then, may be seen as a ‘buffer’ or a ‘lubricant’ enabling the mechanisms of sustainability” (pp. 24–26). Several authors critically remark that the apparent surprise of overtourism and the negative impacts on the environment and destination communities are rather a testament of management failure and lacking resilience. In this vein, Moscardo (Chapter 6) notes that “It is the slowness to adopt new approaches that directly threatens the ability to tourism to contribute in any significant way to sustainability” (p. 71). The rapid outbreak of COVID-19, the global travel bans and lockdowns that have brought the world to a standstill demonstrate the volatility, uncertainty, as well as non-linearity of the industry and the need to view the world from a dynamic, impossible to completely understand, complex, and ever-changing perspective (Chapter 1). The tourism industry is assumed to be one of the most heavily impacted industries worldwide, but it also believed a major accelerator of the international spread as the example of the Austrian ski resort Ischgl demonstrates. The dual mandate of tourism and the industry’s positive and negative impacts are thoroughly addressed in this edited book. Some chapters take a theoretical lens and are of broader scale, highlighting general research needs such as more interdisciplinary studies, laboratory-controlled experiments and innovative methods using new technologies (e.g. Chapter 5). Other chapters use practical examples and formulate specific research questions, such as Chapter 4 that uses Vanuatu as an example to demonstrate how context affects resilience or Chapter 12 that evaluates challenges related to monitoring complex river systems using the example of the Flathead River in the USA. The aim of the individual chapters of this edited book was not to describe forms of sustainable tourism or define sustainability, but better understand the outcomes of the dynamic interactions by critically asking “What is it that tourism should sustain?” Alongside Chapter 8, which provides a comprehensive overview of tourism’s contribution to achieving the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), several chapters directly or indirectly address SDGs, for instance with reference to climate change (Chapter 7). Several authors also highlight the importance of community engagement and involvement in destination planning. Saarinen (Chapter 13) notes that previous involvement endeavours remained largely industry-driven putting the community members rather in a passenger seat and calls for more spontaneous and voluntary bottom-up engagement that sees the community as “an active agent and subjective in planning and development” (p. 213). Chapters also discuss some paradoxes related to sustainable tourism, such as the remaining dominance of neoliberal growth models despite claiming holistic sustainability (Chapters 9 and 13) or the technological advancements that have contributed to social media “good news shows” with influences on tourist behaviour. Magro-Lindenkamp and Leung (Chapter 14) summarise that this means that a tourist’s “main concern is to present only happiness and satisfaction, even if those feelings are not truly felt – most are involved in taking pictures rather than experiencing the site itself” (p. 224). These bucket-list approaches to travel and whistle-stop tours not only negatively impact a destination’s sustainability but also the visitor experience, particularly as better access not necessarily implies progress.

In 15 chapters, this edited book demonstrates the complexity of the tourism system and postulates that a new research agenda for sustainable tourism is needed that builds on the foundation of past research yet is more interdisciplinary, integrative and holistic. By providing explicit future research avenues and questions, readers of this edited book will take away inspirations for potential policy-relevant research. However, both the call for more interdisciplinary and integrative research nor some of the particular research questions that are proposed in this book are new, and the ideas remain on the stage of wishful thinking. For future editions of this valuable book, it would be beneficial to see how some of these new research methods and tools are implemented, how they become decisive for policymakers and destination managers, and eventually relevant for a sustainable tourism future. Although the editors advise that the chapters are in no particular order, an improved and more logical structure would have benefited the overall flow of reading. I can highly recommend this edited work to interested postgraduate students and tourism researchers that aim to get inspirations, how to help contribute filling the identified knowledge and research gaps. The book is written in a way that can also be beneficial for tourism practitioners, policymakers and destination managers that aim to understand the complexity of the tourism system and its positive and negative impacts on social and environmental sustainability more holistically. The eBook version is priced from £22/$31 from Google Play, ebooks.com and other eBook vendors, while in print the book can be ordered from the Edward Elgar Publishing website.