Navigating adaptive cycles to understand destination complex evolutionary process

ABSTRACT

There is a recent surge to unfold the tourism destination's intrinsic nature as a complex adaptive system, such as the dynamic and scale interactions among tourism system components and its environment. As the world gets more uncertain, it becomes more critical to understand how dynamic and complex interactions shape the destination's resilience and its evolution process. Yet, such is under-explored. Taking the East Suburb Coconut Trees scenic area in Hainan (ESCT), China, as a case, this study adopts adaptive cycle heuristics to shed light on the critical evolution mechanisms. This study shows that ESCT had undergone two adaptive cycles, suffered three shocks, and experienced interaction mode from external enterprises-led to interdependent development mode and, finally, local-oriented mode. During this process, the destination's resilience changed from vulnerable to absorptive and, finally, rigid. There is no reorganization stage between the two cycles, which resulted in a limited increase in the destination's resilience. The increasing local involvement built absorptive capability but also locked the destination into a rigidity trap in the long term. This study is the first to reveal the role of resilience in understanding complex system interactions and the destination evolution process. Practical implications for resilient destination management are provided.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism development theory
• social-ecological resilience
• resource-oriented tourism
• complex theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Tourism development plan of East Suburb Coconut Trees scenic area (2002-2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 42271242]; National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 41601611].