Scale, change and resilience in community tourism planning

Abstract

Resilience planning has emerged in recent years as an alternative to the sustainable development paradigm to provide new perspectives on community development and socio-ecological adjustments to a rapidly changing world. Tourism scholars have been somewhat slow to adopt the recent conceptual ideas related to community resilience that have been published in other disciplinary areas, though this situation is also changing rapidly. While most resilience research focuses on major disasters and crises, new frameworks that encompass slow change variables provide a more comprehensive view on resilience. A model for tourism resilience considers this rate of change (transitioning from slow to fast), and the scale of tourism interest (scaling from that of the entrepreneur to those that are community-wide). The resulting 2 × 2 matrix presents four contexts with distinct resilience issues, methodologies and measurements, ranging from entrepreneurs managing daily maintenance needs, to community disaster readiness, response and recovery.

Keywords:

• tourism planning
• resilience planning
• sustainable development
• community resilience
• complex adaptive systems
• sustainable tourism
• socio-ecological resilience

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Notes on contributors

Alan A. Lew

Alan A. Lew, PhD, AICP, is a professor of geography and planning at Northern Arizona University. His teaching and research interests focus on tourism and community planning in East and Southeast Asia. http://AlanLew.com