Tourism, resilience and sustainability : adapting to social, political and economic change 9781138206786, 1138206784

Table of contents :
Understanding tourism resilience : adapting to social, political and economic change / Joseph Cheer and Alan A. Lew --
Resilience in tourism : development, theory, and application / C. Michael Hall --
Planning for slow resilience in a tourism community context / Alan A. Lew --
Resilience in the visitor economy : cultural economy, human social networks, and slow change in the regional periphery / Joseph M. Cheer --
Tourism and resilience on Jersey : culture, environment, and sea / Christian Fleury and Henry Johnson --
From warrior to beach boy : the resilience of the Maasai in Zanzibar's tourism business / Lauri Johannes Hooli --
Resilience in the face of changing circumstances : Fair Isle, Shetland / Richard Butler --
Threats and obstacles to resilience : insight's from Greece's wine tourism / Maria Alebaki and Dimitri Ioannides --
The sustainability of small business resilience : the local tourism industry of Yogyakarta, Indonesia a decade after the crisis / Heidi Dahles --
Strategies for building community resilience to long-term structural change in the Mackay and Whitsunday regions of Queensland, Australia / Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-lee McLennan and Robyn Keast --
Collaborative capacity building as a resilience strategy for tourism development in indigenous Mexico / Pilar Espeso-Molinero --
Resilience and rural tourism development in rural China : Huangling village in Jiangxi Province / Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew --
Learning from Dabang, Taiwan : sustainbility and resilience in action in indigenous tourism development / Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall --
Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience in the world heritage city of Kandy, Sri Lanka / Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy --
Backpacker tourism in Fiji as a sustainability intervention : will they sink or swim? / Supattra Sroypetch and Rod Caldicott --
Sustainability or resilience? : poverty-related philanthropic tourism as an agent for deliberate slow change / Gary Lacey, Betty Weiler and Victoria Peel --
Between resilience and preservation strategies : traditional villages from Maramures Land, Romania / Gabriela Ilies --
Lessons learned : globalization, change and resilience in tourism communities / Alan A. Lew & Joseph Cheer.

Citation preview

Tourism, Resilience and Sustainability

In a world increasingly faced with, and divided by, regional and global crises, resilience has emerged as a key concept with significant relevance for tourism. A paradigmatic shift is taking place in the long-term planning of tourism development, in which the prevailing focus on sustainability is being enhanced with the practical application of resilience planning. This book provides a critical appraisal of sustainability and resilience, and the relationship between the two. Contributions highlight the complexity of addressing social change with resilience planning in a range of tourism contexts, from islands to mountains, from urban to remote environments, and in a range of international settings. Case studies articulate how tourism is both an agent of social change and a victim of larger change processes, and provide important lessons on how to deal with increasingly unstable economic, social and environmental systems. This is the first book to specifically examine social change and sustainability in tourism through a resilience lens. This much-needed contribution to the literature will be a key resource for those working in tourism studies, tourism planning and management, social geography, and development studies, among others. Joseph M. Cheer is a lecturer at the National Centre for Australian Studies (NCAS), Monash University and directs the activities of the Australia and International Tourism Research Unit (AITRU). His research draws from transdisciplinary perspectives, especially human geography, cultural anthropology and political economy with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. He is focused on research-topractice with an emphasis on resilience building, sustainability and social justice. Alan A. Lew is a professor and chairperson in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Recreation at Northern Arizona University, USA, where he teaches in geography, urban planning and tourism. His research interests focus on tourism in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in East and Southeast Asia. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Tourism Geographies, a Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism and a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners.

Routledge Advances in Tourism Edited by Stephen Page

School for Tourism, Bournemouth University

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/SE0258 33. Wellness Tourism A Destination Perspective Cornelia Voigt and Christof Pforr 34. Dark Tourism and Crime Derek Dalton 35. Knowledge Networks and Tourism Michelle T. McLeod and Roger Vaughn 36. Destination Marketing An International Perspective Edited by Metin Kozak and Nazmi Kozak 37. Tourism and the Creative Industries Theories, Policies and Practice Edited by Philip Long and Nigel D. Morpeth 38. Positive Tourism Edited by Sebastian Filep, Jennifer Laing and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 39. Automobile Heritage and Tourism Edited by Michael Conlin and Lee Joliffe 40. Scotland and Tourism: The Long View 1700–2015 Alastair J. Durie 41. Tourism Resilience and Adaptation to Environmental Change Definitions and Frameworks Edited by Alan A. Lew and Joseph M. Cheer 42. Tourism, Resilience and Sustainability Adapting to Social, Political and Economic Change Edited by Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew 43. Slow Tourism, Food and Cities Pace and the Search for the ‘Good Life’ Edited by Michael Clancy

Tourism, Resilience and Sustainability

Adapting to Social, Political and Economic Change Edited by Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-20678-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-46405-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by HWA Text and Data Management, London

Contents

List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors

viii x xi

Part I

Introduction 1 1 Understanding tourism resilience: adapting to social, political, and economic change

3

J oseph M . C heer and A lan A . L ew

2 Resilience in tourism: development, theory, and application

18

C . M ichael H all

3 Planning for slow resilience in a tourism community context

34

A lan A . L ew

Part II

Social, political, and economic drivers of change

59

4 Resilience in the visitor economy: cultural economy, human social networks, and slow change in the regional periphery

61

J oseph M . C heer

5 Tourism and resilience on Jersey: culture, environment, and sea

85

C hristian F leury and H enry J ohnson

6 From warrior to beach boy: the resilience of the Maasai in Zanzibar’s tourism business L auri J ohannes H ooli

103

vi Contents

7 Resilience in the face of changing circumstances: Fair Isle, Shetland

116

R ichard B utler

8 Threats and obstacles to resilience: insights from Greece’s wine tourism

132

M aria A leba k i and D imitri I oannides

9 The sustainability of small business resilience: the local tourism industry of Yogyakarta, Indonesia a decade after the crisis 149 H eidi D ahles

Part III

Tourism as a socio-economic driver of change

165

10 Strategies for building community resilience to long-term structural change in the Mackay and Whitsunday regions of Queensland, Australia

167

A lexandra B ec , B rent M oyle , C har - lee M c L ennan , and R obyn Keast

11 Collaborative capacity building as a resilience strategy for tourism development in indigenous Mexico

184

P ilar E speso - M olinero

12 Resilience and tourism development in rural China: Huangling Village in Jiangxi province

202

X iaoqing C hen and A lan A . L ew

13 Learning from Dabang, Taiwan: sustainability and resilience in action in indigenous tourism development

222

T sung - C hiung ( E mily ) W u and G eoffrey Wall

14 Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience in the world heritage city of Kandy, Sri Lanka

243

Keir R eeves and S ivesan S ivanandamoorthy

15 Backpacker tourism in Fiji as a sustainability intervention: will they sink or swim? S upattra S roypetch and R od C aldicott

260

Contents   vii

16 Sustainability or resilience? Poverty-related philanthropic tourism as an agent for deliberate slow change

280

G ary L acey, B etty W eiler , and V ictoria P eel

17 Between resilience and preservation strategies: traditional villages from Maramureş Land, Romania

295

G abriela I lies

Part IV

Conclusion 317 18 Lessons learned: globalization, change, and resilience in tourism communities

319

A lan A . L ew and J oseph M . C heer

Index

324

Figures

1.1 Seven principles for building resilience in social-ecological resilience building 1.2 Scale, change, and resilience in tourism 3.1 Linear and non-linear responses by fast and slow variables to external drivers of change 3.2 The general adaptive cycle model 3.3 A panarchy of three nested systems 3.4 Scale, change and resilience in community tourism 3.5 A slow and fast resilience assessment and planning model 4.1 Scale, change and resilience in tourism 4.2 Conceptual framework: human social network and cultural economy nexus 4.3 Great Ocean Road region including Melbourne 4.4 International visitation to Victoria’s regions 2005–2015 4.5 Author with students at the Great Ocean Road Memorial Arch 4.6 Great Ocean Road and the Twelve Apostles near Port Campbell 6.1 The research area in Tanzania 7.1 Plaque commemorating lighthouse keepers of Fair Isle 7.2 Fair Isle lighthouse 7.3 Sheep farming on Fair Isle 8.1 Main challenges/threats to the resilience of wine tourism 10.1 Map of the Mackay and Whitsunday regions 12.1 View of the old Huangling Village after its renovation for tourism 12.2 The Huangling new village and tourist cable car leading to the old village resort area 12.3 Changes in household income structure in pre- and post-tourism at Huangling village 12.4 Tourists and tourist shops on the main road in old Huangling Village Tourist Resort after renovation for tourism 13.1 Location and landscape of Dabang 13.2 Community-based ecotourism 13.3 Considerations in community-based tourism 13.4 Dade-an is an old-growth forest area near Dabang Village, Taiwan

11 12 39 42 43 48 50 63 64 71 72 74 74 107 118 119 120 138 172 203 208 210 211 224 226 227 228

Figures   ix 13.5 Homeyaya harvest festival, Dabang Village, Taiwan 14.1 Kandy, world heritage city and premier Sri Lankan cultural heritage tourism attraction 14.2 Country map of Sri Lanka 14.3 Integrated dimensions of resilience 14.4 Kandyan fire dancers 15.1 Map of Fiji 15.2 Map of the Yasawa group of islands, Fiji 15.3 Fijian Bure 15.4 Kava ceremony 15.5 Sulu and Jaba – expected church attire for women 15.6 Conceptualising resilience thinking as the planning tool to mitigate non-sustainable development of backpacker tourism in the Nacula communities 16.1 SCR in Tourism model (with deliberate slow change) 17.1 The Maramureş region of Romania 17.2 Wooden churches from Maramureş Land: aesthetic norms and features 17.3 Budesti’s vernacular architecture

229 244 246 250 255 262 263 266 266 268 272 289 299 300 302

Tables

2.1 Use of ‘resilience’ in journal article titles, abstracts or keywords (as of August 2016) 2.2 Use of ‘resilience’ and ‘tourism’ in journal article titles, abstracts or keywords (as of August 2016) 2.3a ‘Resilience’ and ‘tourism’ in journal article titles, abstracts and keywords by key themes and foci as of August 2016 2.3b ‘Resilience’ and ‘tourism’ in journal article titles, abstracts and keywords by key themes and foci as of August 2016 3.1 Examples of slow and fast drivers of undesirable change 3.2 Slow and fast system variables (indicators) for selected external drivers of change 4.1 Vulnerability factors in the Great Ocean Road region 5.1 Jersey’s population: 1951 to 2011 5.2 Sea arrivals in Jersey 5.3 Staying leisure and total visitors, 1997–2014 8.1 Questions related to the objectives of the current study (extracted from the initial six-item questionnaire) 9.1 Yogyakarta international and domestic tourism arrivals, 1995–2008 9.2 Strategies of resilience 10.1 Resilience strategies for managing structural change 11.1 Assessment of individual and community resilience 11.2 Building social-ecological resilience 11.3 Designed products 11.4 Principles of TCCB 12.1 Growth of average villager net income in Huangling and nearby villages (RMB) 12.2 Return migrations in Huangling and nearby villages 13.1 Community-based ecotourism actions and resilience principles 14.1 Combined elements of resilience 17.1 Priorities and operational objectives for the local development strategy of LAG Mara-Gutai 17.2 Economic diversity measurements 17.3 Community development projects linked to the vernacular architecture, 2007–2014

21 22 23 24 35 37 77 93 96 97 137 157 159 179 188 189 193 196 209 212 240 249 306 309 310

Contributors

Maria Alebaki holds a Phd in Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology. She is currently serving as an Adjunct Lecturer in three Departments of Greece (School of Agriculture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; Hospitality and Tourism Management, Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki; MSc Tourism Business Administration, Hellenic Open University). Her research interests lie in the areas of special interest tourism, with a focus on rural and wine tourism, as well as on the resilience perspective of tourism development. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. Alexandra Bec recently completed her PhD at the School of Business and Tourism at Southern Cross University and currently works as a researcher at the Griffith Institute for Tourism. Her research interests include resilience theory, change management, community and regional development, emotion, and tourism. Richard Butler is an Emeritus Professor at Strathclyde University, Glasgow, having taught also at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Surrey, and James Cook University (Australia), CISET, (Venice) and NHTV University (Breda, the Netherlands). As a geographer, his research has focused on destination development and associated impacts, particularly in insular and remote regions. He is a past president of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism and of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies and has published twenty books and many articles on tourism and acted as advisor to UNWTO and to the Canadian, Australian and UK governments. He is the 2016 UNWTO Ulysses Laureate. Rodney Caldicott recently completed his PhD at Southern Cross University, Australia in 2017. His primary research focus is toward consumer driven “alternative” tourism accommodations, their associated impacts on local communities, and their politics. As an early career geographer Rod is keen to combine his 30+ years of public and private sector tourism industry practice with his more recently acquired letters in academic policy studies to assist less developed countries (LDCs) in their future development strategies: to coach ‘resilience’ thinking, planning, and acting into their development strategy processes.

xii Contributors Joseph M. Cheer is a Lecturer at the National Centre for Australian Studies (NCAS), Monash University and directs the activities of the Australia and International Tourism Research Unit (AITRU). His PhD is in Cultural Anthropology and his MA (Tourism & Development Geography) examines the intersection between aid and tourism. Joseph’s research draws from transdisciplinary perspectives, especially human geography, cultural anthropology, and political economy with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. As a former practitioner in the international tourism industry, international development sector, and as a management consultant and business owner, he is focused on research-to-practice with an emphasis on resilience building, sustainability, and social justice. Xiaoqing Chen is a PhD student of the Business College, University of Aberdeen. She has research interests predicated on a philosophical perspective investigating the sociological aspects of tourism and hospitality. Particular research interests are in the fields of rural tourism in China, and tourism and hospitality management in different cultural contexts. After studying Tourism Management (Master’s) at the Central South University of Forestry and Technology, and working for three years at the Sofitel Hotel (Dongguan, China), Xiaoqing Chen joined the Central South University of Forestry and Technology in 2008 as a Lecturer in the Tourism Management department. Over the years she has published two textbooks and some articles in the field of tourism and hospitality management in core Chinese academic journals. Heidi Dahles holds a PhD in social sciences (from Radboud University, the Netherlands). Currently she is Professor and Head of the Department of International Business and Asian Studies at Griffith University, Australia. Prior to moving to Australia, she was Professor in Organizational Anthropology at the Vrije University, Amsterdam. Her research interests are in small (tourism) business resilience and the informal economies of Southeast Asia. She has published widely in academic journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, Asia-Pacific Business Review, Culture & Organization, Journal of Entrepreneurial Communities, Journal of Social Entrepreneurship and Journal of Contemporary Asia. Pilar (Pitu) Espeso-Molinero is a faculty member at the University of Alicante (Spain), where she teaches Cultural Heritage and Tourism Anthropology while coordinating the Social Anthropology Department. Her research is concentrated on the potential of Indigenous tourism operators to design and implement tourism products, capitalizing on their own culture and local resources. From a decolonizing and critical perspective, she employs action research methods and creativity tools to explore the integration of traditional and scientific knowledge in the tourism arena. She holds an International PhD (Hons) in Tourism Planning from the University of Alicante, a MSc in Tourism and Travel Management (Hons) from the New York University, and a BA

Contributors   xiii and a MA in Contemporary History and Geography from the University of Valladolid, Spain. Christian Fleury has a PhD in Geography on the subject of “island borders”. He is an Associate Researcher at ESO Caen, a research centre in Social Geography based at the University of Caen, Normandy. His research interests are centred on three fields of study: sea appropriation conflicts, island issues, and border effects. C. Michael Hall is a Professor at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, Docent, Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland, and a Visiting Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Linneaus University, Kalmar, Sweden. He has published widely on tourism, regional development, sustainability, and global environmental change. Lauri Johannes Hooli is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the University of Turku, Finland, Department of Geography and Geology. He is a specialist in Development Geography and the current research project is ‘Knowledge creation processes between the Global North and the Global South’. Lauri has more than ten years’ experience working, researching, and living in sub-Saharan Africa. Gabriela Ilies is member of the Romanian Geographical Society (SGR), Centre for Regional Geography (http://cgr.centre.ubbcluj.ro/en/members.html), International Cartography Association – Commission on Mountain Cartography (ICA-CMC), Mountain Research Initiative – Advancing global change research in mountains, Carpathians (MRI). She teaches Tourism Geography, Applied Geography, and the Geography of Maramureş for undergraduate (Geography of Tourism) and graduate (Tourism and Land Planning, Tourism Planning and Development) programs. Gabriela’s primary research interests focus on the Romanian traditional village (tourism geography, applied geography, thematic cartography), mountain development, integrated assessment, Maramureş. Her research projects (academic grants and third-stream contracts) focus mostly on small communities, in order to substantiate their tourism development strategies, planning, and mapping. Dimitri Ioannides is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Tourism Studies and Geography at Mid-Sweden University and director of ETOUR. Before moving to Sweden he worked for 23 years at Missouri State University. His research interests include the economic geography of tourism, tourism, and sustainable development and the equity dimension of sustainability (particularly the rights of low-level tourism workers). He is series editor for New Directions in Tourism Analysis (Routledge).  Henry Johnson is Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research interests are in Island Studies, Asian Studies, and Ethnomusicology,

xiv Contributors and he has carried out field research in a number of island cultures in Europe, Asia, and Australasia. His books include The Koto (2004), Asia in the Making of New Zealand (2006, co-edited), Performing Japan (2008, co-edited), The Shamisen (2010), and The Shakuhachi (2014). His publications in the field of Island Studies have appeared in Shima, Journal of Marine and Island Cultures and Island Studies Journal. Robyn Keast is currently a Professor in Public Management with the School of Business and Tourism at Southern Cross University. She has extensive experience in community development research and practice covering both physical and social infrastructure development. Her particular expertise is in networked arrangements and collaborative practice, including service delivery and research collaboration networks. Gary Lacey is an adjunct lecturer at both Monash and La Trobe Universities, Australia. He has taught in tourism, events, public policy, and Australian studies for the past 17 years. Gary has been published in several top-tier international tourism journals and has co-authored book chapters, focusing particularly on issues of poverty alleviation, empowerment, and NGO ethics in sub-Saharan Africa. Other research has involved cultural landscapes in Australia, HIV/ AIDS prevention, and female empowerment in Kenya and Botswana. He is a specialist in qualitative, cross-disciplinary research drawing on theories from diverse fields including philosophy, evolutionary biology, behavioural science, human and economic geography, and tourism. Alan A. Lew is a Professor and Chairperson in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Recreation at Northern Arizona University where he teaches courses in geography, urban planning, and tourism. His research interests focus on tourism in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in East and Southeast Asia. He has published over 25 books, including Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts: An Integrated Approach (2009), Tourism Geography (2014), and World Regional Geography (2015). He is the founding editorin-chief of the journal, Tourism Geographies, a Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism, and a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. Brent Moyle is a Senior Research Fellow in Sustainable Tourism at the Griffith Institute for Tourism, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. His research primarily focuses on sustainable tourism, tourism management, sport and tourism and national parks. Char-Lee Moyle is the Executive Consultant at Skholar and Grants Advisor with the Local Government Area of Queensland (LGAQ). Her research focuses on transformation and resilience theory, tourism destination development, regional development, evolutionary economics, and big data.

Contributors   xv Victoria Peel is an Associate Professor and currently Convenor of the Faculty of Arts Postgraduate Coursework Committee and Honours Committee and Deputy Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her research has combined the fields of Australian Studies and Tourism, with particular emphasis on Cultural Tourism as well as the Backpacker and Student Tourism markets. Vicki’s research themes have consistently addressed issues of historical and contemporary educational and youth travel experience and the spatial relationship and dynamic that underpins tourism at heritage places. She recently received funding from Tourism Victoria to study the impact of international Working Holiday Makers on the independent travel market to Australia. Keir Reeves holds a research chair and is the Director of CRCAH at Federation University Australia. Prior to joining Federation University Australia he held teaching and research posts at the University of Melbourne and also Monash University where he was the director of the Australian and International Tourism Research Unit. He has also held visiting fellowships at King’s College London where as part of his fellowship he guest lectured in tourism in Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Clare Hall Cambridge. Keir’s recent research has explored the intersection of cultural heritage, tourism, and history in Asia, Australia, and the Pacific. Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy is a Lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He has also just submitted his PhD in CRCAH at Federation University Australia where he was the recipient of a full postgraduate award. Sivesan’s current research concentrates on Sri Lanka and explores the challenges of sustainable heritage tourism in ancient heritage cities and the development of a national tourism policy framework. Supattra Sroypetch is a Lecturer in Tourism and Management at Khon Kaen University, Thailand. Her specialised area focuses on accommodation management in hotel and hostel operations. Her doctoral research, at the University of Otago, New Zealand focused on backpacker tourism impacts, specifically on the communities of the Yasawa Islands, Fiji. Supattra maintains a strong research interest in sustainable management of tourism and hospitality in LDCs. Geoffrey Wall is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Waterloo. He is interested in the implications of tourism for destinations of different types, especially in Asia. Betty Weiler is Professor and Director of Research in the School of Business and Tourism at Southern Cross University, Australia. Her 150+ publications, many in top-tier international tourism research journals, have centred on the tourist experience, and she is one of the world’s leading scholars on the role of the tour guide, particularly in nature-based settings and zoos. More recently

xvi Contributors Betty’s work has focused on the use of persuasive communication by guides and others to influence tourist behaviour and as a tool for visitor management. Betty is an editorial board member of six international tourism journals and is well known for her collaborative research approach. Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Tourism, Recreation, and Leisure Studies at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. Her current research focuses on sustainable tourism development, community resilience, cultural tourism, rural tourism, and tourism resource management.

Part I

Introduction

1 Understanding tourism resilience Adapting to social, political, and economic change Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew

Complexity of the modern world The UN’s World Population Prospects cite that ‘the world has added approximately one billion people since 2003 and two billion since 1990’ (UN, 2015, p. 3). The UN projects the next billion to be added by 2030, when its Agenda for Sustainable Development is to be realised, bringing the world’s total population to 8.5 billion, and then ‘9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100’ (UN, 2015, p. 3). Such growth has enormous implications for resource and land use, and anthropogenic climate change, in addition to human mobilities (migration, travel, and tourism) and quality of life on the planet. Forecasts for increases in life expectancy and improvements in infant mortality rates further intensify these global changes. The links between population growth and environmental and resources management, including food security, will require adaptive responses, especially in the face of the growing social and spatial impacts of climate change and global warming (Lang & Heasman, 2015). The World Bank’s 2012–2022 environment strategy warns that ‘environmental degradation, pollution, or overexploitation of natural resources hampers economic progress’ (World Bank, 2012, p. 6). The World Bank also contends that the ‘current economic model, driven by unsustainable patterns of growth and consumption, is clearly putting too much pressure on an already stretched environment’. Such pressures signal a greater reliance on governance, at supra-national, national, and local levels and highlights the links between population, environment, and governance frameworks, and the compulsion for integrated approaches that acknowledge that the ‘key to building resilience is the stability of societies’ (WEF, 2016, p. 7). In assessing global risk, the World Economic Forum (2016, p. 8) asserts that ‘the increasing volatility, complexity and ambiguity of the world … only heightens uncertainty around the ‘which’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘who’ of addressing global risks’. This is reminiscent of Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ concept in which he argues that ‘we live in a world that has to make decisions concerning its future under the conditions of manufactured, self-inflicted insecurity’ (Beck, 2009, p. 8). Although highly contextual and therefore somewhat limited (Dingwall, 1999), notions of ‘risk society’ are invariably aligned with the development of adaptive capacities, and as Beck (2009, p. 8) emphasises, ‘epitomizes an era of modern

4  Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew society that no longer merely casts off traditional ways of life but rather wrestles with the side effects of successful modernisation’. In conceptualising resilience, risk mitigation and adaptation are intertwined because ‘[r]isks concern the possibility of future occurrences’ (Beck, 2009, p. 9) and concomitantly, resilience considers responses to such possibilities. The World Economic Forum’s (2016) call for caution and vigilance amidst unprecedented global ‘uncertainty’ is unsurprising and signals that much of what occurs in present-day social, political, and economic contexts makes the task of setting tourism planning and policy frameworks problematic and imprecise. The links between uncertainty and adaptive capacities suggests that developing adequate responses to the vicissitudes of global and local events is key to enabling rapid rebound and at the very least, efficient adaptation. Volatility in the wider global context segues appropriately into issues of resilience, and the application of resilience thinking that is focused on how to build ‘capacity to deal with unexpected change’ (SRC, 2015, p. 3).

Tourism and global change David Harvey (1989) articulated the notion of time-space compression (also known as time-space distanciation) by which the emergence of new technologies in transportation and telecommunications since the industrial revolution has made the world increasingly smaller in functional terms. People can travel faster and cheaper; news, information, and ideas cross the planet in seconds instead of months; and products, trade, and economic activity move across an almost borderless globe. Harvey (1999, pp. 117–118), summarises that ‘the conditions of postmodern time-space compression exaggerate, in many respects, the dilemmas that have from time to time beset capitalist procedures of modernisation’, resulting in impacts for which ‘the range of responses differs in certain important respects from those which have occurred before’. Tourism, of course, is both enabled by a smaller, more readily accessible world, and is a major force in spreading the benefits and disbenefits wrought by time-space compression. Globalization, in both its cultural and economic forms, is arguably the most significant impact of a smaller world. Notwithstanding the multivalence and slipperiness of the core concepts, time and space are largely ‘contingent upon the social interpretations’ attached to them and ‘heavily scale dependent’ (Warf, 2008, pp. 4–5). As such, globalization may be interpreted as either a positive force for modernisation and increasing opportunity and well-being for a community, or as a negative force that destroys local sovereignty and uniqueness (sense of place). International tourism, which is often accompanied by the global branding of multinational companies, can be viewed as a symbolic coming of age for an emerging economy. Alternatively, it could be seen as an external assault on traditional and more human-scale norms of behaviour, which needs to be rejected or resisted, sometimes in the form of violent terrorist attacks. In theory, the death of distance leads to increasing connectivity between peoples and places, which should enable resilience in a new ‘glocal’ (global

Understanding tourism resilience   5 + local) knowledge network (Robertson, 1995). For example, the ability to communicate and deal more effectively with the occurrence of a tsunami, the eruption of volcanoes, the outbreak of a disease, or a sudden political upheaval is compressed such that local adaptive capacities can be quickly mobilised (Medd & Marvin, 2005). Similarly, increased contact between different peoples through travel and tourism has the potential to increase understanding and empathy for the plight of others through a sense of shared humanity. While this may be very true for some, the direct encounter with the ‘other’ can also enliven a politics of differentiation that works counter to such lofty goals. The twin issues of uncertainty and resilience are central to tourism where global mobilities are very much contingent on social, political, and economic conditions that can either be a hindrance or help. Over a decade ago, Gössling and Hall (2006) observed that the underpinning interrelationships between ecological, social, economic, and political variables are highly influential on the nature of tourism and global environmental change. In particular, they argued that ‘the scale and rate of change has increased dramatically because of human actions within which tourism is deeply embedded’ (Gössling & Hall, 2006, p. 1). This was arguably a precursor to the contemporary discussion of resilience in tourism, because they reference the extent to which tourism interfaces with change in attendant communities, and the degree to which those communities can adapt and respond favourably. In contexts where tourism is a vital cog in the local economy, the overriding ability to adapt and deal effectively with change frames the nature and extent of resilience (Luthe & Romano, 2014). As Lew et al. (2015, p. 24) outline, communities face the circumstance of having to be sustainable and resilient because community well-being is reliant on having both ‘strength and vision’ in negotiating uncertainty. In examining the dimensions of social, political, and economic change, a wide net is cast by the authors in this book to capture transformations other than, and distinct from, environmental change, climate change, and natural hazards disaster management. (For these issues, see Lew & Cheer, 2017, Tourism and Resilience to Environmental Change.) Lew’s (2014) scale, change, and resilience (SCR) model is a reference point for distinctions where tourism resilience is underpinned by slow and fast change variables. Slow change relates to gradual variations and changes over time, while fast change implies sudden, largely unexpected change, best exemplified by large earthquakes and extreme climate events, but socially akin to the violent overthrow of a government or a sudden economic crisis. Demarcating between slow and fast change is a critical dimension of resilience thinking because in each case, the adaptive capacities and the calls to action that are invoked require tailored responses. In setting the framework for understanding resilience amidst social, political, and economic contexts, Hall, in Chapter 2, describes how the prevailing academic discourses on resilience are still very much in the formative stages, with engineering resilience a predominant theme, and where the key challenge lies in operationalising conceptual understandings that link theory and practice. Defining slow resilience in community contexts is especially pertinent given that all the cases presented in this book speak of the encounter that tourism communities

6  Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew have with slow change, which is articulated by Lew in Chapter 3. Following the introduction and background section of the book, a key distinction is made between how external social, political, and economic drivers of change shape tourism (Part II) and how tourism induces the socio-economic outcomes in the broader contexts in which it operates (Part III).

Social change impacting tourism When it comes to social, political, and economic change, these dimensions tend to unfold gradually making responses dependent on mutable circumstantial and contextual stimuli. This contrasts with fast change where scale, change, and response occur at different speeds but within defined time-space parameters (Agnew, 2015). The three dimensions are inherently linked and any fundamental change to one is very often linked to ripple effects upon the other two. Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 (comprising Part II of this book) demonstrate in very different contexts how changes over the medium to long term have transformed the tourism backdrop. For example, China’s growing influence on the global economy can have wide-ranging repercussions (Overbeek, 2016). This is relevant for tourism where unprecedented heights in Chinese outbound travel now underline the tourism economy in many destinations (Lew & Li, 2016; Li, 2015; Goldman Sachs, 2015). Global social change necessarily drives political and economic transformations, aptly exemplified by advances in telecommunications and transportation that continue to drive time-space distanciation (Keightley, 2013), as well as demographic shifts characterized by ageing populations and low fertility rates in developed countries, contrasted with rapid population growth in less developed contexts (UN, 2015). These changes impact relationships between peoples, seen to some degree through tourism, but even more so in modern-day international migrations in which political, economic, and social drivers of change are deeply intertwined. The recent rise in anti-immigrant populism in many developed Western countries is a political response to such social changes (Polyakova, 2016) and the increasing numbers of refugees to Europe, in particular, reflects persistent and prolonged economic, political, and environmental crises in Africa and the Middle East (Martin, 2016). Collectively, the extant social, economic, and political global context is giving way to what many consider to be potentially more volatile and unpredictable shifts toward protectionism, isolationism, and populism (Kazin, 2016; Zakaria, 2016). The vicissitudes of global affairs raise many questions including whether another global economic recession is imminent and to what extent will this be dependent on perturbations taking place in the Chinese or American economies. And to what degree will the changing face of international affairs influence social relations and mobilities between countries across the globe, especially where borders might become less open? The extent to which wider social change is taking place and the direct influence of this on tourism is central to resilience thinking, whether they are grounded in visitor source market perturbations, supply side deficiencies or changes in

Understanding tourism resilience   7 destination marketing (Cochrane, 2010). Where such change tests adaptive capacities and response thresholds are reached and exceeded, system failures may be experienced (Lew, 2014). Hajj related pilgrimage tourism to Mecca is a case in point where for some time now growing popularity has outstripped the ability to service such demand culminating in severe stresses on the city’s physical and social capacities (Jalabi, 2016). The adaptive response by authorities has been to transform the once spiritual and idiosyncratic place into an emerging cluster of high rise developments far removed from the Mecca of old. Similar occurrences are evident in Spain’s Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route where largely religious drivers have given way to secular and purely leisure driven motivations prompting calls for a halt to its further commercialisation (Minder, 2014). In both situations threshold points have been reached and surpassed resulting in changed conditions that test the status quo. Social change however, need not necessarily lead to pessimistic conclusions about the longevity of destinations and in some cases they can lead to innovation or adaptation that lead to enhancement of local economic and social systems (Cheer et al., 2013; Mbaiwa, 2016; Ruiz-Ballesteros, 2011). This is exemplified in microlevel, indigenous contexts where external-led tourism intensification has led to an economic development impetus, which if otherwise prohibited would be foregone (Cheer, 2016; Espeso-Molinero et al., 2016). The external attraction to what are often regarded as precarious indigenous tourism contexts has always been subject to external interest and this attention is seen as a threat to resilience (CherroOsorio, 2015). Yet as demonstrated, in opposition to fatalistic perspectives, social change can enforce new frameworks that help overcome economic development and socio-spatial deficiencies (Diedrich & Aswani, 2016; Espeso-Molinero et al., 2016) that can potentially lead to stable social and economic contexts. Social change can also lead to movements that promote responsible tourism as exemplified in growing acceptance that climbing atop Uluru, a sacred site for Australian indigenous peoples, is unacceptable (Laughland, 2014).

Tourism as a driver of social change Global changes impact, shape, and form contemporary tourism, and the emerging tourism landscape in turn impacts local destinations and the world. This is typified in Part III of this book where tourism is examined as a driver of slow change (Chapters 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17). A global scan of tourism in practice exemplifies that at a local level, tourism communities are increasingly subject to the repercussions of wider global developments, and that the course of building adaptive capacities, although reliant on local action to some degree, pivots on the extent of global change, as well as particular variations in regional and country contexts (Becken & Miller, 2016). The case of subtle shifts in Chinese tourist demand illustrates this ripple effect as demonstrated in their recent shift away from Macau to Cambodia as a gaming destination due to price sensitivities (Okemoto, 2016). Prolonged conflict in Syria has generated ripple effects that have had negative impacts on international

8  Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew tourist visitation to its neighbour Jordan (Gentleman, 2016), as well as dampening interest in visiting the larger Middle East region as a whole. That tourism drives social change is often made obvious where its manifestation and rapid growth becomes a prominent instigator of change, intertwining with the socio-economic fabric of communities and creating new norms (Lai & Hitchcock, 2016; Hooli, 2017; Cheer, 2016). This is especially evident where tourism is dominant and where few other avenues for economic diversification are available. Indeed, the extent to which Hawai’i has been transformed, in part, as a result of decades of tourism, is an example (Silva, 2004), as is the case of Bali (Cole, 2012; Putra & Hitchcock, 2006). The impacts of burgeoning Chinese tourist mobilities is another example of how tourism is enforcing change to destination communities (Yan, Ryan, & Zhang, 2013; Li, 2015). The economic impacts of tourism tend to underpin perceptions of change in tourism communities (Stylidis & Terzidou, 2014) and where tourism is linked strongly to favourable economic impacts, the assumptions are that this extends toward creating positive change. Sometimes social outcomes are favourable but often times there are a range of intervening factors that shape ends (Sin & Mincha, 2014; Tang & Tan, 2015). As an agent of change, the trade-offs in advancing tourism development may include a decline in the natural resource base, with flow-on effects onto social cohesions and community well-being (Cole, 2102). Additionally, tourism can also enforce inadvertent urban change as is the case in Berlin and other prominent world cities where tourism can exacerbate the tendency to displace longstanding local cohorts, as well contribute to spikes in housing costs and availability (Füller & Michel, 2014).

Key resilience terms and concepts The key terms below have their starting point in the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Resilience Dictionary (SRC, 2016), with adjustments from relevant literature on social-ecological resilience and resilience thinking. Holling (1998) in particular, set the groundwork for much of the contemporary understandings that have shaped resilience thinking. These key terms are presented in alphabetical order. Key terms Adaptive cycle is ‘a powerful and useful metaphor of system dynamics that includes four stages: growth (r), equilibrium (K), collapse (Ω), and reorientation (α)’ (Fath et al., 2015, p. 23). This extends the traditional successional logistic curve (r → K), upon which the Tourism Area Life Cycle model is based (Butler, 1980), to explicitly include the phases collapse and reorganisation. The adaptive cycle is also linked with three key underpinning variables: connectedness among system variables, potential for effective adaptation and change, and resilience to maintain existing variable relationships. Business resilience is also sometimes referred to as ‘enterprise resilience’ and is synthesised by Dahles and Susilowati (2015) as the ‘capacity for an enterprise

Understanding tourism resilience   9 to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of turbulent change’. Unlike social and social-economic systems (SES) resilience, business systems tend to be easier to define both in terms of boundaries and key variables, such as profitability. Community resilience is defined by Norris et al. (2008, p. 131) as ‘[A] process linking a set of networked adaptive capacities to a positive trajectory of functioning and adaptation in constituent populations after a disturbance.’ Community resilience is a form of organisation. Resilience and disturbance can range considerably, resulting in great variation in a community’s adaptive responses. Complex adaptive systems (CAS) are variously described and according to the Stockholm Resilience Centre (2017) are made up of a wide vast range of system potentially significant variables including ‘companies, the weather, our immune systems, the economy, ecosystems, single cells and brains. In these CAS, simple rules of cause and effect do not apply, they are complex, unpredictable and constantly adapting to their environments’ (SRC, 2017). Resilience thinking can be considered a simplification of a more challenging, but more accurate, CAS understanding of social-ecological systems. Ecological resilience is based in the biological sciences and is defined as ‘a measure of the amount of change or disruption that is required to transform a system from being maintained by one set of mutually reinforcing processes and structures to a different set of processes and structures’ (Peterson et al., 1998, p. 10). Additionally, Peterson et al. (1998, p. 10) argue that ecological resilience ‘assumes that a natural ecosystem can exist in equally valid alternative selforganized or “stable” states. It measures the amount and type of change required to move an ecosystem from being organised around one set of mutually reinforcing structures and processes to another.’ Engineering resilience in practice is defined as ‘maintaining efficiency of function’ (Holling, 1996, p. 33) and is mostly associated with emergency management practices related to natural hazard events (such as earthquakes). Theoretically, Peterson et al. (1998, p. 10) outline that ‘[E]ngineering resilience assumes that the behaviour of a system remains within the stable domain that contains [its] steady state’ (Peterson et al., 1998, p. 10). Evolutionary resilience assumes that system stability is an illusion and that steady or stable states cannot exist because all aspects of social-ecological systems are subject to a continual state of change, which requires a constant state of evolution in the system (Davoudi, 2012). Some of these changes are very slow, while others are fast, requiring qualitatively different resilience responses. Boschma (2012, p. 735) describes this as the ‘long-term evolution of regions and their ability to adapt and reconfigure their industrial, technological and institutional structures in an economic system that is restless and evolving.’ Fast change is invariably defined as change linked to sudden and often unexpected events that requires an immediate system response. Characteristics of fast change may include the occurrence of extreme climate events and naturally occurring hazards, such as tsunamis, cyclones, and floods (Lew, 2014). Additionall, the rapid and sudden occurrence of civil disturbance and terrorist attacks among others could also be construed as fast change (Lew, 2014). However, whether

10  Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew an event reaches disaster proportions is highly contextual and dependent on the resilience of the system experiencing it. Fast variables are described by Walker et al. (2012, p. 30) as ‘typically those [characteristics] that are of primary concern to ecosystem users, for example a pest species or (often) ecosystem goods and services, such as crop production, clean water, and favored species’, because they are more sensitive to changing external conditions and are more visible to users when in decline. Slow change is described in Lew (2014, p. 16) as ‘the gradual extinction or relocation of ecosystems in response to long-term climate change, as well as cultural shifts under globalization that may take a generation to become apparent’. It is partly a continuum of slow to fast changes in internal variables as they respond to external drivers. Slow variables are also known as ‘control variables’ and consist of those system characteristics that are highly stable through increasing external pressures (Walker et al., 2012). In this way, they are essential to maintaining system stability in crisis situations, and therefore, require special attention. Unfortunately, identifying slow controlling variables can be difficult in human social systems. For environmental systems, slow variables include annual seasonal rotation of the earth around the sun that underlies weather patterns, and the organic matter in soils that enable crop production. Social capital is roundly described as an essential ingredient in fostering socialecological resilience in communities (Sherrieb et al., 2010) and is described by Magis (2010, p. 407) as ‘the ability and willingness of community members to participate in actions directed to community objectives, and to the processes of engagement’. This is a broader concept than some other definitions, which see social capital as accumulated obligations and understandings that community members can utilize in times of need. Social resilience is described as ‘the ability of human communities to withstand and recover from stresses, such as environmental change or social, economic, or political upheaval. Resilience in societies and their life-supporting ecosystems is crucial in maintaining options for future human development’ (SRC, 2016). There is no normative value here, as the resilient social system may or may not be a desirable one from an environmental or social sustainability perspective. Social-ecological systems (SES) are linked systems of people and nature. The term emphasises that humans must be seen as a part of, not apart from, nature, and that the delineation between social and ecological systems is artificial and arbitrary (Berkes & Folk, 1998; SRC, 2016). While theoretically sound, in practice, defining clear system boundaries is difficult and research and policy tends to emphasise one over the other (as this book emphasises the human system) depending on the needs at given point in time. Conceptual frameworks A key framework that has shaped resilience thinking in this book is the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Seven Principles for Building Resilience in Social-ecological

Understanding tourism resilience   11 Systems (SRC, 2015). As a centred set of principles, it is instructive in showcasing the essential approaches to examining the interacting systems of people and nature (Figure 1.1). In synthesising the broader resilience thinking discourse from Biggs et al. (2015), the seven principles offer critical and practical guidance toward the application of resilience thinking in the construction of resilience in social-ecological systems. Additionally, these seven principles offer a ‘nuanced understanding of how, where and when to apply them, and how the different principles interact and depend on one another’ (SRC, 2015, p. 3). In sum, the merits of using these principles as a reference point to guide the examination of resilience in tourism communities and contexts lies in the identification of key opportunities for ‘intervening in and ‘working with’ social-ecological systems to ensure that they remain resilient and able to provide the ecosystem services needed to sustain and support the wellbeing of people in a rapidly changing and increasingly crowded world’ (SRC, 2015, p. 3).

Manage connectivity Maintain diversity and redundancy

Manage slow variables and feedbacks

Socialecological resilience

Promote polycentric governance systems

Broaden participation

Foster complex adaptative systems thinking

Encourage learning

Figure 1.1  Seven principles for building resilience in social-ecological resilience building Source: adapted from SRC (2015).

12  Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew Lew’s (2014, p. 17) scale, change, and resilience (SCR) model for tourism is another key framework employed in the assessment of social-ecological resilience in tourism communities, and ‘conceptualizes four generalized types of tourism contexts, based on the degree of disturbance and the scale of tourism actors that are involved’ (Figure 1.2). Lew’s model is really a heuristic device that makes an important distinction in that ‘people perceive and manage slow changes in the environment, culture and society in a different manner than they do under sudden major shocks to these systems’. Importantly, the SCR model ‘recognizes that rates of change can be highly variable over time and at different social and geographic scales, which can require different modes of response’. The SCR model (Figure 1.2) defines spatial scales at which resilience operates in a tourism context. These two scales distinguish between community resilience and business resilience, and are directly reflected in almost all of the chapters in this volume. The demarcation between community resilience and business resilience is an important distinction given that the drivers of tourism change and development can have very different aims in either case, as implied in Figure 1.2. Both business resilience and community resilience are forms of organisational resilience. As noted in the definitions above, business resilience is usually more narrowly confined to the ability of an economic sector or individual enterprise to adapt, thrive, and oftentimes innovate in response to the changing business environment using the range of resources and capacities available to them (Orchiston et al., 2016). Business resilience is also related to the extent to which business stakeholders can self-organise and reframe business operating conditions, sometimes through attrition or innovative practices (Dahles & Susilowati, 2015).

Resilience issues /

Tourism scale

2. Resource Slow change impacting community

1. Management Slow change impacting tourism sector

4. Governance Sudden shock impacting community

3. Planning Sudden shock impacting tourism sector

Change rate

Figure 1.2  Scale, change, and resilience in tourism Source: based on Lew (2014).

Indicators 1. Facilities and service decline / Maintenance programs 2. Climate change and globalization / Nature, culture and human resource conservation 3. Major attraction loss / Economic training and diversification, innovation 4. Nature and human disasters / Social and economic support system

Understanding tourism resilience   13 Conversely, community resilience is more inclusively defined as ‘the existence, development, and engagement of community resources by community members to thrive in an environment characterized by change, uncertainty, unpredictability, and surprise’ (Magis, 2010, p. 401). Importantly, the term ‘community’ is aligned to all stakeholders, implying broad breadth of the community at large. As a socialecological system, the environment is not directly represented by a community resilience approach, except through proxy interests of human representatives, which may include non-governmental, environmental and outdoor groups, environmental scientists, government agencies, and others. Social, political, and economic variables are largely moulded and link back to the dual actions of society and the prevailing economic systems and they combine to frame the nature of social capital in situ. Indeed, social capital plays a fundamental role in the development of adaptive capacities to social change, and as Sherrieb et al. (2010, p. 245) argue, ‘policies that influence economic resources, equity, and diversity’ generate robust social cohesion, which is postulated to be a key indicator of adaptive community capacities to respond. The interlinking of social, economic, and political variables provides the foundation for community resilience to emerge, underlined by the consolidation of ‘four primary sets of adaptive capacities – Economic Development, Social Capital, Information and Communication, and Community’ (Norris et al., 2008, p. 127).

Conclusion and goals of the book The principal objective of this volume is to respond to Lew’s (2014) assessment that, unlike other research disciplines, tourism scholars have been relatively slow to adopt resilience concepts. The rise of resilience thinking literature across the social and environmental sciences is an indication that the emergence of new frameworks and applications is pressing, especially where perspectives beyond ecological concerns are put forward (Hall in Chapter 2). Owing to the complexity of the issues involved, this volume has been constructed to primarily, although not exclusively, address the social side of the social-ecological systems. The hallmark of resilience thinking is embodied by the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s (SRC) definition of social-ecological systems as ‘linked systems of people and nature’, which intentionally replaces the view that ‘resources can be treated as discrete entities in isolation from the rest of the ecosystem and the social system’ (Berkes & Folke, 1998, p. 2). This volume is a further contribution to Berkes and Folke’s (1998, p. 9) assertion that ‘scientific concepts of ecosystem are deficient in the description and analysis of such human-in-nature systems’. In examining tourism and resilience, with a focus on social, economic, and political change, the human-in-nature perspective and the ways in which this interaction plays out is emphasised throughout the book. All of the chapters in this book characterize Holling’s (2001, p. 391) argumentation that ‘the complexity of living systems of people and nature emerges not from a random association of a large number of interacting factors, rather from a smaller number of controlling processes’. The tourism system is

14  Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew a complex adaptive system with each part either working to enhance or limit resilience building, thus necessitating a whole-of-system emphasis, rather than tinkering with its individual parts. The two major sections that this book’s chapters demarcates two key questions in understanding the interrelated complexity of a resilience in tourism socialecological system: 1 2

What is the extent to which broader global and local social, political, and economic drivers of change shape resilience building for tourism? What is the extent to which tourism is a socio-economic driver of change influencing resilience building in tourism communities and the world?

The chapters in this volume are mostly case-based and respond to the two questions above by drawing on the nuanced ways by which destinations are adapting (or not) to social, political, and economic change. Adapting to change is a continual, evolutionary process, responding to feedback loops and instituting resilience measures. Hopefully, this is done in deliberate and organised ways, wherein policy makers, community, and industry are cohesive, rather than in ad hoc, unintended ways where the gulf between government, industry, and community is wide. The success of this volume would be to help bring about a more mindful resilience thinking for the tourism sector and the tourism communities in which it is situated.

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16  Joseph M. Cheer and Alan A. Lew Lang, T., & Heasman, M. (2015). Food wars: The global battle for mouths, minds and markets. London: Routledge. Laughland, O. (2014). People still climbing Uluru despite closure condition being met. Retrieved 2 November 2016 from www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/09/peoplestill-climbing-uluru-closure. Lew, A. A. (2014). Scale, change and resilience in community tourism planning. Tourism Geographies, 16(1), 14–22. Lew, A. A., & Cheer, J. (2017). Tourism and resilience to environmental change. London: Routledge. Lew, A. A., Ng, P. T., Ni, C.-C., & Wu, T.-C. (2016). Community sustainability and resilience: similarities, differences and indicators. Tourism Geographies, 18(1), 18– 27. Li, X. R. (2016). Chinese outbound tourism 2.0. Boca Raton, FL: Apple Academic Press. Luthe, T., & Wyss, R. (2014). Assessing and planning resilience in tourism. Tourism Management, 44, 161–163. Magis, K. (2010). Community resilience: An indicator of social sustainability. Society and Natural Resources, 23(5), 401–416. Martin, S. F. (2016). The global refugee crisis. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 17(1), 5–11. Mbaiwa, J. E. (2016). Tourism development, dispossession and displacement of local communities in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. In J. Saarinen & S. K. Nepal (Eds.), Political Ecology and Tourism (pp. 193–206). London: Routledge. Medd, W., & Marvin, S. (2005). From the politics of urgency to the governance of preparedness: A research agenda on urban vulnerability. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 13(2), 44–49. Minder, R. (2014). Lifting the soul, and the Spanish Economy, too. New York Times Online. Retrieved 7 June 2016 from www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/world/europe/lifting-thesoul-and-the-spanish-economy-too.html?_r=0#. Norris, F. H., Stevens, S. P., Pfefferbaum, B., Wyche, K. F., & Pfefferbaum, R. L. (2008). Community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness. American Journal of Community Psychology, 41(1–2), 127–150. Okemoto. (2016). Cambodia’s casinos pulling Chinese away from Macau. Nikkei Asian Review. Retrieved 11 December 2016 from http://asia.nikkei.com/Markets/Equities/ Cambodia-s-casinos-pulling-Chinese-away-from-Macau. Orchiston, C., Prayag, G., & Brown, C. (2016). Organizational resilience in the tourism sector. Annals of Tourism Research, 56, 145–148. Overbeek, H. (2016). Globalizing China: A critical political economy perspective on China’s rise. In The Palgrave handbook of critical International political economy (pp. 309–329). New York: Springer. Peterson, G., Allen, C. R., & Holling, C. S. (1998). Ecological resilience, biodiversity, and scale. Ecosystems, 1(1), 6–18. Polyakova, A. (2016). The great European unraveling? World Policy Journal, 33(4), 68–72. Putra, I. N. D., & Hitchcock, M. (2006). The Bali bombs and the tourism development cycle. Progress in Development Studies, 6(2), 157–166. Robertson, R. (1995). Glocalization: Time–space and homogeneity-heterogeneity. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, & R. Robertson (Eds.), Global modernities (Vol. 2, pp. 25–45). London: Sage. Ruiz-Ballesteros, E. (2011). Social-ecological resilience and community-based tourism: An approach from Agua Blanca, Ecuador. Tourism Management, 32(3), 655–666.

Understanding tourism resilience   17 Silva, N. K. (2004). Aloha betrayed: Native Hawaiian resistance to American colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sherrieb, K., Norris, F. H., & Galea, S. (2010). Measuring capacities for community resilience. Social Indicators Research, 99(2), 227–247. Sin, H. L., & Mincha, C. (2014). Touring responsibility: The trouble with ‘going local’ in community-based tourism in Thailand. Geoforum, 51, 96–106. Stockholm Resilience Center (SRC). (2015). Applying resilience thinking: Seven principles for building resilience in social-ecological systems. Stockholm: Stockholm Resilience Centre. Stockholm Resilience Center (SRC). (2016). Resilience dictionary. Retrieved 20 November 2016 from www.stockholmresilience.org/research/resilience-dictionary.html. Stockholm Resilience Center (2017). Resilience Dictionary. Retrieved 3 August 2016 from http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/resilience-dictionary.html. Stylidis, D., & Terzidou, M. (2014). Tourism and the economic crisis in Kavala, Greece. Annals of Tourism Research, 44, 210–226. Tang, C. F., & Tan, E. C. (2015). Does tourism effectively stimulate Malaysia’s economic growth? Tourism Management, 46, 158–163. United Nations (UN). (2015). World Population Prospects: 2015 Revision. New York: United Nations. Walker, B., Carpenter, S., Rockstrom, J., Crépin, A.-S., & Peterson, G. (2012). Drivers, ‘slow’ variables, ‘fast’ variables, shocks, and resilience. Ecology and Society, 17(3), 30–33. Warf, B. (2008). Time–space compression: Historical geographies. London: Routledge. World Economic Forum (WEF). (2016). The Global Risks Report 2016, 11th Edition. Cologne/Geneva: WEF. World Bank (2012). Toward a green, clean, and resilient world for all: A World Bank group environment strategy 2012–2022. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yang, J., Ryan, C., & Zhang, L. (2013). Social conflict in communities impacted by tourism. Tourism Management, 35, 82–93. Zakaria, F. (2016). Populism on the March: Why the West is in Trouble. Foreign Affairs, 95, 9–15.

2 Resilience in tourism Development, theory, and application C. Michael Hall

Introduction Resilience is a concept that has been established in the scientific literature since the 1970s. It has also become increasingly popular in tourism studies (Cochrane 2010; Strickland-Munro et al. 2010; Biggs et al. 2012; Lew 2014; Luthe & Wyss 2014; Biggs et al. 2015; Lew et al. 2016; Bec et al. 2016; Buultjens et al. 2016; Ruiz-Ballesteros 2011; Tsai et al. 2016; Tsao & Ni 2016; Hall et al. 2017), which reflects its growth in other academic fields (Pendall et al. 2010; de Oliveira Teixeira & Werther 2013; Johnson et al. 2013; Baggio et al. 2015; Xu & Marinova, 2013; Meerow & Newell 2015; Hall et al. 2016; Sharifi 2016). In addition to its role in scientific studies resilience has become a term that has become widely used by policy-makers to refer to a range of policy fields (Benard 2004; Bastagli 2009). However, its broad application has led to issues as to its definition and meaning. Pendall et al. (2010) note the ‘fuzziness’ of the idea of resilience in social science and urge caution with respect to the rapid and simplistic transfer of an ecological systems concept into the public policy arena. For example, in social policy, resilience is usually characterized as being successful adaptation in the presence of risk or adversity (Luthar & Cicchetti 2000; Olsson et al. 2003; Jenson & Fraser 2015a), and resilience is regarded as the outcome of an interactive process involving risk, protection, and promotion. Thus, adaptation, which is expressed through individual behavior, is interpreted as an interactive product involving the presence or absence of specific risk; level of exposure to risk; and the strength of the specific risk, protective, and promotive factors present in a child’s life. (Jenson & Fraser 2015b: 15) In a community context, Sharifi and Yamagata (2016) suggest that resilience is widely understood in the context of the ‘four abilities’: the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and successfully adapt to adverse events. In business and organizational studies the notion of resilience is usually used with respect to organizational survival in the face of severe shocks (Davoudi et al. 2012; Shaw & Maythorne 2013) and, related to this, its capacity to adapt without

Resilience in tourism  19 losing its identity (Biggs et al. 2014). While, in one of the most widely cited ecological definitions, resilience is ‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks’ (Walker et al. 2004: 6) that existed before the disturbance event. A 2015 report on planetary health defined resilience as, ‘the capacity of any entity – an individual, a community, an organization, or a natural system – to prepare for disruptions, to recover from shocks and stresses, and to adapt and grow from a disruptive experience’ (Whitmee et al. 2015: 1975). Similarly, and not unsurprisingly given their common organizational origins, the Rockefeller Foundation defines resilience as the capacity of individuals, communities and systems to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of stress and shocks, and even transform when conditions require it. Building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events – both natural and manmade – and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger from these shocks and stresses. (The Rockefeller Foundation 2016) Although there are commonalities in these definitions there are also substantial differences raising the prospect that resilience is a polysemic concept that has been defined differently in different disciplines and contexts (Sharifi & Yamagata 2016). The implications of this situation are potentially profound Lingering concerns from the research community focus on disagreements as to the definition of resilience, whether resilience is an outcome or a process, what type of resilience is being addressed (economic systems, infrastructure systems, ecological systems, or community systems), and which policy realm (counterterrorism; climate change; emergency management; long-term disaster recovery; environmental restoration) it should target. (Cutter et al. 2010: 1) This chapter presents a brief examination of the development of the concept of resilience and the way it has been applied in tourism studies and beyond. It is divided into two main sections. The first presents a bibliometric analysis of resilience. The second discusses problematic issues of scale and notions of change in resilience in relation to the main approaches to resilience. The conclusions identify the major findings and note the parallels and relationships to other significant concepts in tourism such as sustainability.

A bibliometric analysis of resilience Although the term ‘resilience’ has come to be widely used in a range of academic fields since the 1990s (Janssen et al. 2006; Janssen 2007; Xu & Marinova 2013; Meerow & Newell 2015; Hall et al. 2016), it has a much longer history as a key

20  C. Michael Hall term and concept. Table 2.1 illustrates the use of ‘resilience’ in journal article titles, abstracts, or keywords in the Scopus bibliographic database. The table covers all use up until August 2016. The term was initially primarily used in engineering and materials mainly to refer to the capacity of materials and structures to withstand physical stress. Work in engineering has also been influential in computer science where resilience is regarded as a capacity or measure of network fault tolerance, including when placed under stress. Even though Holling’s (1973) seminal paper on ecological resilience underlies the vast majority on resilience in environmental science, it was not until a decade later that there was a significant growth in papers published in the area. Research on personal resilience had its origins in the medical and psychology literature, which is now the single largest field of writing on resilience. Publications in social science also started to grow at this time but were primarily influenced initially by research in engineering and psychology rather than environmental science. Furthermore, as noted in the introduction, there are significant differences in approach within the social sciences. Table 2.2 illustrates the use of ‘resilience’ and ‘tourism’ in journal article titles, abstracts, or keywords in Scopus as of August 2016. In comparison with Table 2.1 it is apparent that resilience came relatively late to tourism as a term with no significant growth until the mid-2000s. Early papers on resilience were also clearly focused on its use in an economic context (Selya 1978; Holder 1980; Rensel 1993; O’Hare & Barrett 1994). Holder (1980), for example, uses the term in the context of tourism adding to the diversity and therefore strength and resilience of the Caribbean economy. The first paper to draw tourism into the ecological dimensions of resilience was Lovejoy (1994) in relation to the value of biodiversity, while arguably the first paper to bring in ecological resilience as a means of tourism oriented resource management was Tyler and Dangerfield (1999) in an ecotourism context. However, Tyler and Dangerfield’s paper is also significant because it is also one of the first to contribute to the substantial and ongoing confusion that exists in tourism studies with respect to the relationships between resilience and sustainable development (Lew et al. 2016). Tables 2.3a and 2.3b indicate further aspects of the thematic matter of journal articles that use ‘resilience’ and ‘tourism’ in titles, abstracts, or keywords in Scopus. As the tables illustrate almost half of the papers relating to tourism and resilience have been in relation to the economic aspects of tourism. This has been both specific to the resilience of tourism as sector or of tourism destinations and how tourism affects the resilience of economies and places. The next most significant areas are with respect to communities, policy and planning, and sustainable development. About a third of the papers relate to conservation and ecosystems while coastal regions and islands account for almost a quarter (Hall 2012). Despite the broad significance of the theme, issues of crisis, disaster and security in tourism are arguably less connected to the resilience literature, which is extremely significant for natural disaster, natural hazard and global environmental change research, than more general studies of disaster management and vulnerability (Hall et al. 2004; Birkmann 2006; Cutter & Finch 2008; Hall 2010a, b; Yoon 2012; Hayward 2013; Cutter et al. 2014).

1,939 3,893 2,146 847 356 122

183 94 110 88 31 10 30 9,849

Years

1985–89 1980–84 1975–79 1970–74 1965–69 1960–64 2015 2010–14 2005–09 2000–04 1995–99 1990–94

Environmental science

Table 2.1  Use of ‘resilience’ in journal article titles, abstracts or keywords (as of August 2016)

Computer sci.ence, mathematics 14 5 6 – – – 6 9,728

1,836 4,506 2,386 628 230 48

Other, undefined, multiscplinary 3 2 – 2 2 – 1 602

160 238 93 67 31 2

469 272 248 164 48 22 51 50,967

11,539 22,856 9,385 3,673 1,599 642

Total

2

2

–

–

–

–

–

14

2005–09

2000–04

1995–99

1990–94

1985–89

1980–84

1975–79

Total

Materials science

1

–

–

–

–

–

–

1

–

–

Medicine

13

–

–

–

–

–

–

3

8

2

Physics and astronomy

2

–

–

–

–

–

–

1

1

–

Social sciences 149

–

–

–

1

3

5

14

71

55

Agricultural and biological science and veterinarty 64

–

–

–

1

1

5

6

31

20

Business 107

–

–

–

1

1

3

12

49

41

Energy 4

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

3

1

Environmental science 153

1

–

–

1

3

9

20

81

38

Psycholgy, neuroscience 1

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

1

–

Arts and humanities 15

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

12

3

3

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

3

–

Earth and planetary science 53

1

–

–

1

2

1

4

33

11

Source: Hall (2016b)

9

–

–

–

–

–

–

4

2

3

Computer sci.ence, mathematics

Analysis undertaken via Scopus 21 August 2016 Medicine = Medicine, dentistry, nursing, health professions, immunology and microbiology, pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceutics Business = Business, management, accounting, economics, econometrics, finance, decision Science

6

2010–14

Years

4

Engineering, chemical engineering

>2015

Biochemistry, genetics, adnd molecular biology

Table 2.2  Use of ‘resilience’ and ‘tourism’ in journal article titles, abstracts or keywords (as of August 2016)

Other, undefined, multidiscplinary 5

–

1

–

–

1

–

–

3

–

337

1

1

–

3

6

18

45

166

97

Total

8 12 16 9 10 6 2 2 3 2 1 – 2 1 – 1 1 1 77

Rural

2 4 9 4 2 1 4 – 1 1 – – – – 1 – – – 31

2 10 3 3 3 2 – – 1 1 1 – 3 – – – – – 29

Urban

Year

Source: Hall (2016b)

Note: Analysis undertaken on Scopus 23 August 2016

Coastal

2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 2000

Total

6

Conservation

73

1

1

–

1

2

–

3

1

1

3

2

7

5

4

8

14

14

Crisis

34

–

–

1

–

–

–

–

–

2

2

2

1

1

2

3

9

6

4

31

1

–

–

–

1

–

1

–

–

1

–

3

2

2

6

5

6

3

Culture

Source: Hall (2016b)

Note: Analysis undertaken on Scopus 23 August 2016

Adaptation

2016

Disaster 41

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

2

3

3

–

–

4

6

4

5

8

6

Economy 166

5

–

2

1

1

2

2

7

7

8

8

9

5

14

15

34

26

21

Policy / planning 115

2

–

–

2

–

1

3

1

2

5

2

8

3

16

15

20

19

16

Risk 58

–

–

–

1

1

–

–

1

3

2

1

2

5

7

9

10

7

9

Sustainability / sustainable development 107

4

–

–

1

1

2

2

2

4

6

2

8

4

6

10

20

16

19

Vulnerability 57

–

1

–

–

–

–

1

–

2

2

4

4

5

7

6

11

4

10

Climate Change 69

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

2

1

2

6

5

10

8

15

6

14

37

2

–

–

–

–

1

1

–

2

2

1

4

2

5

2

8

6

1

Biodiversity

Table 2.3b  ‘Resilience’ and ‘tourism’ in journal article titles, abstracts and keywords by key themes and foci as of August 2016

Water 53

1

–

–

2

2

1

3

–

4

1

3

1

3

5

9

8

4

6

9

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

3

–

–

–

–

1

1

–

1

–

3

Supply Chain

Resilience in tourism  25 The dominant scales of analysis by far in the tourism papers identified in the Scopus search are those of communities and regions and a focus on organizations has only really developed post-2010 (Orchiston et al. 2016). There is little direct analysis of individuals whether as tourists, community members, or as entrepreneurs (Biggs et al. 2012). Also of note is that a citation analysis of the references for the journal articles suggests that approximately only a quarter of publications are connected to the ecological and socio-ecological resilience approaches, at least with respect to citation of key authors and papers, for example, works of Carpenter, Folke, Hollings, or Walker. Nevertheless, these issues raise significant questions with respect to the conceptualizations of resilience in tourism studies and their implications for the further development of the literature.

Approaching resilience One of the commonalities in writings on resilience in tourism is that they are related to an actual or potential response to change. In writings on tourism and crisis this may be a natural disaster or a crisis event (Hall 2010a). Yet as research on tourism and change suggests (Hall & Lew 2009), variability over time is the norm rather than the exception. Indeed, disturbance is assumed under most notions of resilience (Walker et al. 2004). In ecology the portrayal of ecosystems as inherently stable, in equilibrium and predictable has given way to an understanding of ecological system dynamics that embraces complexity and has become a ‘framework for understanding how complex systems self-organise and change over time’ (Anderies et al. 2013: 3). Such notions were integral to the seminal work of Hollings: Resilience determines the persistence of relationships within a system and is a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist. … Stability… is the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium state after a temporary disturbance. (Holling 1973: 17) Ecosystems are therefore complex adaptive systems, that potentially have multiple states in which, post-disturbance, they can be fully functional without returning to their previous equilibrium. When ecological understandings of resilience are transferred to the social world this means that uncertainty, variability in the environment, and surprise are inherent to socio-ecological systems (Folke 2006). While a number of studies in tourism have embraced the dynamic nature of complex socio-ecological adaptive systems of which tourism is a part (Schianetz & Kavanagh 2008; Schianetz et al. 2009; Rescia et al. 2010; Biggs et al. 2012, 2014; Lew 2014), the majority of work that connects tourism and resilience does not and instead utilizes equilibrium models that reflect research in disaster management, economics, and engineering. Unlike ecological resilience approaches, engineering resilience seeks to create ‘fail-safe’ systems that are stable, efficient, and predictable and assume ‘bounce back’ to the pre-existing equilibrium state following disturbance (Holling 1996;

26  C. Michael Hall Meerow & Newell 2015). Ecological thinking does not transfer very well to dominant modes of engineering and economic thought that focus on efficiency and return time as being the key characteristics of resilience, and that usually seek to remove any perceived system redundancies or inefficiencies (Hall 2016a). Indeed, in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes and rebuild, Hayward observed the rhetoric of resilience is used to justify authorities making decisions quickly and measuring their impact on recovery by the speed with which the city returns to a ‘new normal’ or experiences ‘certainty’ as firm centralized decision making, the drive for efficiency is all too frequently used to justify expert command-and-control decision making with little or no meaningful local scrutiny or community leadership in decision making. (Hayward 2013) The assumptions of equilibrium models of resilience and Hayward’s critique raise at least three related critical issues: scale, assumptions surround scale linkage and the normativity of resilience thinking. Ecological scales are regarded as context-sensitive and difficult to define in practice, but are generally viewed as hierarchically and dynamically linked, where interactions between parts of a system are nonlinear and local and constrained by larger scales, but where local interactions could have emergent effects influencing other scales and the system as a whole (Hall 2016b). The ontologies of emergentism, organicism and, at its most extreme, holism, suggest that the emergent novel properties of the whole can be understood with limited or no consideration of the parts and their relationships, that is, wholes are independent of parts (Keller & Golley 2000). This stands in stark contrast to the reductionist approach of engineering resilience, under which the properties of wholes are always found among the properties of their parts (Keller & Golley 2000). The different implications of such perspectives may be profound for considering how tourism responds to change. For example, Hall (2016a) argued that if resilience is concerned with the dynamic relationships within a system, that is ‘adaptive renewal’, then the survival (resilience) of a particular organization may not be particularly relevant. A tourism organization is neither a positive or a negative to the tourism system per se. Instead, what is significant from a system perspective is adaptation and self-organization in the tourism system as a whole as it moves between states. From such a perspective there is no intrinsic relationship between organizational resilience and improving the resilience of a community per se. Not all organizations need to survive for a community to be resilient. Instead, the focus needs to be on identifying which ones are the most significant (Biggs et al. 2015). In contrast, other studies that have examined disasters in tourism from an engineering resilience perspective have put greater emphasis on organizational survival given assumptions that resilience at the organizational level can translate to resilience at the community and/or destination scale (Orchiston et al. 2016). The underlying ontologies of different conceptualizations of resilience are also strongly linked to normative assumptions with respect to resilience as a policy and

Resilience in tourism  27 planning goal (Reed 1999; Hudson 2010; Biggs et al. 2012). Hall (2016a) argues that if resilience is translated as a normative goal of being the capacity to generate ecosystem or economic services, it raises significant issues as to how resilience is to be maintained. For example, depending on how defined, it is possible to envision a notion of economic resilience which is maintained through an inequitable social and economic system in which the distribution of services falls unevenly among the population. Indeed, White and O’Hare (2014) comment that there is a lack of clarity in policy, where the differences between engineering and ecological resilience are not acknowledged by authors and policy-makers, with resilience mainly being discussed as a singular, vague, but optimistic aim, applies well to the growing number of studies of tourism policy and planning that note the importance of resilience (d’Angella & Go 2009; Orchiston 2013), or the role of supranational organizations such as the World Economic Forum that position tourism resilience in terms of greater competitiveness (Ringbeck & Pietsch 2011; Crotti & Misrahi 2015). According to White and O’Hare (2014) such a situation means that the often opaque political treatment of resilience has privileged equilibrist interpretations over more transformative measures of resilience, meaning that resilience within spatial planning is usually characterized by a simple return to normality that is more analogous with planning norms, engineered responses, and dominant interests, leaving wider sociocultural concerns unaddressed (for examples see Hayward 2013; Amore & Hall 2016a, b). It is perhaps therefore no surprise that there is an increasingly critical response to the resilience literature (Cretney 2014; Rigg & Oven 2015; Biermann et al. 2016; Meerow & Newell 2016). A more criticallyformulated definition of resilience would therefore suggest that resilience is the capacity of a system to sustain a certain set of services, in face of disturbance, uncertainty, and change, for a certain set of humans meaning that there is a need to analyse not just how systems are managed, but also the priorities of the system and who benefits from it (Hall 2016a).

Conclusions As this chapter has suggested, resilience is an extremely resilient concept. It has adapted and changed to suit different circumstances and demands. It has not only survived but has grown with respect to its use and application. However, this is not necessarily a good thing in terms of actually being able to understand how it is being used and why. Indeed, the concept of resilience may share the same fate as ‘sustainability’ in that, though widely adopted, including in tourism, the range of its application may affect its utility in that if it comes to mean everything, then it potentially means nothing (Hall 2016a). A major challenge for the operationalization of the concept, especially when used in a normative sense, is that knowing what the stressors of a system are does not necessarily lead to appropriate intervention to reduce disturbance and improve the likelihood of desired change in system properties. There are numerous cases, especially from the disaster management and public policy literature, that suggest that the same mistakes get repeated because they do not match the paradigms

28  C. Michael Hall or perspective of the viewer, including policy-makers (Hayward 2013; Amore & Hall 2016a, b), or that the time between crisis or change events are such that change is regarded as economically or politically undesirable (Hall & Veer 2016). Having stakeholders more aware of the nature of adaptive systems, especially with respect to emergent properties, may be helpful, but policy learning and paradigm change would seem to be necessary to overcome the limits of more reductionist approaches to resilience (Lew 2014). However, this is likely to be extremely difficult given their dominance in engineering, business, economic and political framing of resilience. For example, reductionist belief systems that regard business and organizational survival as inherently good for the resilience and wellbeing of the community and region in which they operate serve to inform much resilience policy making because resilience is regarded as an efficient equilibrium state. This has practical effects for justifying public policy austerity measures, downsizing public services, and greater openness to the global economy as resilient policies that help prepare individuals and communities for change, improved ‘competitiveness’, and taking greater ‘personal responsibility’. In contrast, the more dynamic socialecological resilience approach questions which organizations contribute system maintenance, and should therefore be supported to survive, and the characteristics and values of new organizations to replace those that have died in order to maintain or enhance desirable system properties (Hall 2016a). In the case of the latter, the perspective from more critical assessments of resilience is that this undoubtedly includes ensuring that a system is able to accept change and unpredictability and is designed to be safe to fail, as well as being able to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable. Issues of system redundancy, diversity, and connectivity, that are significant for ecological resilience do not fit well with political-economic approaches that stem from assumptions of ‘bounce back’ to equilibrium states. Engineering resilience is an extremely useful attribute for the survivability of built things, including the building in which I am located and the computer on which I write this. It is not very useful for describing self-organizing systems. Much of the writing on resilience in tourism is not from an ecological or socio-ecological resilient perspective as would be commonly recognized. Engineering resilience dominates, even if it is not called as such. The issue of resilience therefore raises fundamental issues with respect for the need for greater transparency and understanding in the use of core concepts and how they are translated into recommendations and even teaching. Whether this actually happens will be debatable as tourism studies begins its journey on the resilience bandwagon. However, these are not just academic issues, as words and concepts are powerful things and, ultimately, words have affect.

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3 Planning for slow resilience in a tourism community context Alan A. Lew

Undesirable change Change is a fundamental common experience. However, distinguishing between fast change and slow change can be a challenge because measures of time and space vary enormously. At human scales (individual, organizational, and social), we recognize sudden and large change events, and label these as a ‘crisis’ or ‘disaster’ when their impacts are negative and extreme (Brand, 2008). Examples of these include major earthquakes, extreme weather events, and terrorist attacks. Most human scale changes, however, are not disasters. Instead they occur on a regular and persistent basis and are barely perceptible, although they can also result in major cumulative transformations over time. ‘Slow resilience’ encompasses the different aspects of slow change, including how we define slow change, what drives slow change in a system, what variables behave in a slow manner, what types of systems behave slowly, and why slow change and slow changing variables are important to understand. Examples of slow change include climate warming, biodiversity losses, and the loss of languages and other cultural traditions. For example, the impacts of the industrial revolution and the more recent (an ongoing) internet revolution also occurred at a gradual rate, but in retrospect have been recognized as massive social transformations. Table 3.1 lists some common undesirable fast and slow drivers of change, along with the impacts these drivers have on natural environments and human societies. Additional slow change drivers include ageing populations and their impact on social and human capital (a socio-demographic variable); de-industrialization leading to unemployment and enterprise shutdowns (an economic variable); the impacts of robotics replacing humans (a technology variable); and long running political conflicts that seems to be an enduring condition in many regions (a political variable). The ‘change driver system’ and the ‘change driver variables’ in Table 3.1 are considered external to the system because they are not inherent in a system’s structure. A system, whether desirable or not, can have a high degree of resilience that enables it to remain unchanged for a very long period of time. Gender inequality in work places, for example, is a type of system that continues despite considerable conscious effort to regulate and educate it away. Externality, in this

Table 3.1  Examples of slow and fast drivers of undesirable change Change driver system

Slow change driver variables and Fast change driver variables and system variable impacts system variable impacts

Atmospheric condition

Global warming/climate change leading to: disruption of historical climate and weather patterns; increasing temperatures, drought and flooding; ecosystem shifts; decline in biodiversity

Extreme weather events (typhoon rains & winds; droughts & high temperatures) leading to: flooding, soil erosion, natural resource losses, infrastructure collapse, and housing losses; increased forest and rangeland fires; destruction of flora, fauna and human settlements

Biodiversity condition

Land cover changes due to human encroachment leading to soil chemistry imbalance and nutrient cycle disruption; decline in biota health

Introduction of invasive species leading to: biodiversity species loss; loss of climax ecosystem regime

Landscape condition

Human landscape change (urban expansion; built infrastructure decline) leading to: loss of croplands, natural vegetation and soils, and rural societies; less efficient infrastructure; decline in quality of life

Natural landscape events (earthquakes & landslides) leading to: infrastructure (transportation, water, sanitation, electricity) destruction; building collapse and human deaths

Public health condition

Chronic health, wellness and quality of life issues leading to: social instability; poverty; loss of sense of security and safety; distrust of government

Acute disease epidemics leading to: human illness and death; quarantine closures and travel restrictions

Social condition

Government corruption and ineffectiveness leading to: low levels of public safety, public health and government trust; poorly managed natural and cultural resources

Illegitimate governance and governments leading to: civil unrest, riots and terrorism; wars; forced migrations; poverty and deaths

Economic condition

Neoliberal policies leading to: loss in local traditional livelihoods and knowledge; local disempowerment; placelessness; over exploitation of natural and cultural resources

Poorly regulated financial markets leading to: financial crises; rapid loss of property and wealth

Cultural condition

Acculturation leading to: loss of languages, belief systems, social cohesion, and cultural authenticity and diversity

Rapidly changing popular product fads leading to: unpredictable and unstable cultural values and beliefs; short product life cycles; increased pollution and waste

Source: Lew, Ng, Wu, & Ni (2016).

36  Alan A. Lew context, means any agency that attempts to change the system, whether from above it, from below it, or from a space that is lateral to it. Within tourism, this could be efforts to address gender inequality through government regulation (from above), union organizing of employees (from below), or through a company’s use of standard corporate educational programs and guidelines (lateral influences). All three of these are external agents acting upon the system. Change can also be perceived as good and desirable, while still being extreme, such as winning a lottery (for an individual) or creating a breakthrough innovative product (for a corporation). It is also possible to have desirable change drivers and variables, along the lines of those in Table 3.1, that have positive impacts on the system. Responses to positive change are qualitatively different from undesirable change responses. Good change events, however, are far less understood in comparison to bad events, with most of the meager literature on this topic coming from psychology (Lyubomirsky, 2011). The most commonly recognized disaster events are those driven by undesirable natural phenomena impacting human social systems and creating rapid declines in, for example, housing conditions, transportation infrastructure, or local food and water supplies. However, human-driven changes, such as financial crises and the rapid overthrow of a government, can also take on disaster proportions, resulting in chaotic fast variable changes in a social system. Most social-ecological resilience research has focused on community responses to both natural and human disasters, as well as recognizing how natural events may be spawned or made worse by human actions (Gould, Garcia, & Remes, 2016). While an appreciation of resilience as a response characteristic to slower change processes is a growing area of interest (Adger, 2000; Davoudi, 2012), there is need for a better conceptualization of the relationship between slow and fast change in social-ecological contexts (Lew, 2014). Slow change driver variables have been better conceptualized in ecological sciences than in the social sciences (Ludwig, Walker, & Holling, 1997; Crépin, 2007; Nelson, Adger, & Brown, 2007; Walker, Carpenter, Rockström, Crépin, & Peterson, 2012). Thus, the hydrological cycle, climate patterns (but not weather events), and soil chemistry have all been cited as examples of slow variables that act as systemic controls on faster changing environmental phenomena (or variables). The ‘slow drivers’ and ‘slow system variables’ in Table 3.1 tend to change more gradually than the fast drivers and variables. As a result, their small shifts are more likely to be considered a nuisance or source of public anger, rather than a crisis, at least over the short term (Walker et al., 2012). Carpenter, Walker, Anderies, and Abel (2001: 777) further note that ‘[w]e can conceive of the slow variables as defining the underlying structure of the system, while the fast variables reveal the dynamics of this underlying structure’, although this proposition is also somewhat controversial because of the difficulty in identifying slow controlling system variables and their change threshold values (Brand, 2008). While caution must be taken in applying ecological models to human conditions (Adger, 2000; Walker et al., 2006; Martin 2012), Table 3.1 also suggests how slow, controlling variables seem to be apparent in human systems. Other examples of

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   37 human system slow variables include land use and street patterns, laws and norms of behavior, and social values and cultural traditions (Walker, Abel, Anderies, & Ryan, 2009; Daskon, 2010) (Table 3.2). Brand (2008) suggested that the concept of ‘critical natural capital’, as defined in various ways in critical capital theory in economics (Turner, 1993), could be useful in defining slow controlling social and natural variables that are essential to the resilience of a society. ‘Criticality’, however, can vary at different points in time and at different scales of analysis, as well as among different interest groups (Walker et al., 2012). Two significant issues arise in the traditional resilience literature presented here. First is the combining of independent and dependent variables in the definitions of slow and fast change indicators. This might make sense from a systems perspective, in which each element has an equal impact on every other element. However, it creates difficulty in trying to assess correlations and impacts among system and subsystem elements. To address this problem in this chapter, when a variable is considered independent, then it is referred to as a ‘driver variable’ of change that is impacting the system; when a variable is considered dependent, Table 3.2  Slow and fast system variables (indicators) for selected external drivers of change Change driver system

Slow controlling system variables

Fast changing system variables

Natural resource condition: Ecosystem services

Continued presence of a healthy local natural ecosystem resource at a minimum level for community services

Current level of local ecosystem resource for both local and export uses, with good quality and healthy supply

Landscape condition: Physical infrastructure

Continued presence of acceptable water, transportation system, waste disposal and electric services

Current level of waste disposal and electricity; safe water; effective transport system

Public health condition: Health care access

Continued presence of basic health care services for those most in need (elderly, children, mothers)

Current level of quality health care facilities that attract regional and international patients

Social condition: Political governance

Continued presence of some form of political decision making structure

Current level of direct public participation in decision making

Economic condition: Tourism economy

Continued presence of base Current level of local attractions available integrations in the for tourism and recreation global tourism economy (investments and visitors)

Cultural condition: Local culture

Continued presence of traditional values, practices and close social relationships

Source: Lew, Ng, Wu, & Ni (2016).

Current level of local product integration within global market systems

38  Alan A. Lew then it is referred to as a ‘system variable’ that is changing in correlation with the external driver. Thus, the slow and fast ‘change driver variables’ listed in Table 3.1 are more refined definitions of what have been referred to as ‘slow variables’ or ‘slow changing variables’ and ‘fast variables’ or ‘fast changing variables’ in the traditional resilience theory literature (Carpenter et al., 2001; Walker et al., 2012; Becken, 2013). A second issue is the very close relationship that exists between many of the variables in Table 3.1, both within the fast and slow columns, and across the two. For example, currency values are likely to drop when unemployment rates increase. This close relationship is natural because many, but not all, of the slow change driver variables are underlying or controlling indicators of fast change. Similarly, biodiversity loss (fast change variable) is closely associated with soil chemistry imbalance and the effective functioning of the nutrient cycle (two slow change variables), the decline of which could come from a variety of sources, including the introduction of invasive species. The boundary, therefore, between a slow variable and fast variable can sometimes be contested in the struggle to determine cause and effect relationships. This observation is directly related to the ‘bistability model’ of how fast and slow variables relate to each other from a resilience perspective.

The bistability model Resilience thinking suggests that slow changing phenomena are the underlying internal variables that maintain stability within a system because they are less likely to change over a longer period time (Ludwig et al., 1997; Brand & Jax, 2007). That stability allows less resilient variables to build more complex systems on top of these underlying control features. In ecological resilience theory, these are known as ‘slow system variables’, but have also be referred to as ‘slow drivers’ of change when their gradual change causes changes in other systems (Walker et al., 2012). Against this are ‘fast system variables’, which are internal structure and entities that change their conditions swiftly in response to external pressure. These are also referred to as ‘fast drivers’ of change when they trigger fast change in other variables in the system. As noted above, understanding the dependent and independent variable relationships requires a clear definition of the spatial and temporal scales (boundaries) of the system under examination. A ‘bistability’ model (also known as a ‘bifurcation’ model) has been suggested as one way to understand the relationship between fast variables and slow variables in an ecosystem (Brand & Jax, 2007; Walker et al., 2012) (Figure 3.1). In Figure 3.1, an external driver is causing changes to a system, which impacts the slow controlling variable (1a) in a steady manner. The fast variable may respond in a direct linear correlation (usually negative) with the slow variable (1b). Alternatively, the fast variable may demonstrate two different states of stability (1c), depending on its historical context and resilience. ‘Regime 1’ represents a system that is dominated by the fast variable, whereas ‘regime 2’ shows a system with a much weaker fast variable that is dominated by the slow variable. Regime

Linear, positive and stable response Slow variable level

a)

External driver level

b)

Fast variable level

Linear, negative and unstable response

External driver level

Non-linear, negative and bistable response

Regime 1

Fast variable level

c)

Regime 2

External driver level

Notes: An external driver is associated with either a positive (a) or negative (b) linear response, which can be relatively stable (a) or more unstable (b) in magnitude. An external driver results in a non-linear response (c) with two overlapping regimes of relative stability (bistability or bifurcation) with an unstable threshold between them.

Figure 3.1  Linear and non-linear responses by fast and slow variables to external drivers of change Source: Lew, Ng, Wu, & Ni (2016); modified from Walker, Carpenter, Rockström, Crépin, & Peterson (2012).

40  Alan A. Lew 1 has a higher level of diversity and a more complex state of relationships, having been built over time on top of regime 2. The threshold where regime 1 collapses into regime 2 may be reached through a sudden fast event (a disaster) or through gradual and incremental stages (slow change). The arrows in Figure 1c indicate that regime 2 can give way to regime 1 under the right external driver conditions. Humans may prefer regime 1 in some situations (such as a coral reef ecosystem, or a community that is rich in cultural diversity), but may prefer regime 2 in other contexts (such as an industrial agriculture system). Natural processes tend toward greater complexity, but can support either regime 1 or regime 2 over the long term and under the right external conditions. In this model, the slow system variable is present throughout. If the more fragile fast system variable experiences a collapse a lower state (from regime 1 to regime 2), then the slow variable continues to maintain the overall system in some functional state. In this way, it ‘control[s] the position of the whole ecosystem within state space’ (Brand, 2008: 3). Other terms that have been applied to the same idea are life support functions (Ekins et al., 2003), regulation functions, regulation services (De Groot et al., 2002; MEA, 2005), and ecosystem services (Collier, 2015). Slow variables may, in some circumstances, also be treated as a surrogate indicator of the overall general resilience of a system because they tend to be more integrated with the system overall than are fast changing variables (Brand, 2008; Walker et al., 2012). For some, resilience is defined as the study of how system variables behave at the boundaries of thresholds, which is where they must demonstrate their capacities for persistence and adaptation (Ludwig, Walker, & Holling, 1997; Pascual & Guichard, 2005; Brand & Jax, 2007). Fast change system variables are usually easier to observe in such a context because they are more obvious. This also makes them potentially easier to manage. Slow change system variables are more difficult to recognize and manage because they require careful, long-term observation and can be more easily overlooked (Carpenter et al., 2001). Extreme weather events (a fast variable), for example, catch the attention of the news media as they happen, whereas locational shifts in flora and fauna due to changing climatic conditions (a slow variable) are usually detected only by scientific observation. Coral reef ecosystems provide a good example of natural system bistability (Crépin, 2007; Hughes, Graham, & Steneck, 2010). A living coral dominated ecosystem has a high level of diverse organisms in complex symbiotic relationships with one another. Most coral reefs, however, are very sensitive to high water temperatures (resulting in coral bleaching) and human disturbances from overfishing and recreational activities. These impacts can rapidly reduce coral dominance to a point where it collapses into a low diversity algae dominated system, with algae and microalgae covering the dead coral structures. Forms of algae had existed alongside the coral in the original system, but became dominant when the coral system reached a threshold of collapse. Coral may still be present in the algae dominant system, as well, and it is possible for the low diversity algae systems to reverse collapse back into the higher diversity coral system. To do so, however, requires a considerable level of recovery to pre-existing levels of the external driver. In Figure 3.1, the threshold

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   41 leading to the collapse from healthy fast variable (regime 1) to an unhealthy one (regime 2) occurred when the external stimulus had reached more than 70 percent of its increase from left to right. However, for regime 2 to collapse back to regime 1, the external variable would need to be reduced to about 10 percent of its increase. In the bistability model (Figure 3.1c), researchers are able to monitor the state of the system by measuring the predominance of one variable (e.g., coral communities) against another variable (e.g., algae communities). If one of these two variables shifts into dominance over the other, then a threshold transformation has been reached, and correlated changes in external drivers (water temperature) can be assumed to have been the cause. In reality, this is complicated because the external driver of change is likely come from multiple sources, including atmospheric conditions (weather and climate) or economic conditions (human resource exploitation). In addition, it is rare for a single variable to have so much control over the system state, as the admittedly simplified model implies (Strunz, 2012). The challenges of the bistability model are even more difficult to apply to human social systems (Brand, 2008). Religion, for example, is most likely a slow changing variable that has a controlling influence over how the culture of a society will change over time. However, few would suggest that religion is not highly complex in its social organization, meaning and forms. As such, the slow variable of religion would probably not be evident in the outward forms of religious practice. Instead, it might be better seen in a community’s moral behavior that is based on their religious belief system. This example points to potential complexity of the many different influences involved in how a system changes over time. In resilience theory, this complexity is addressed through the ‘adaptive cycle’ and ‘panarchy’ models.

The adaptive cycle and panarchy The adaptive cycle (Holling, 2001, 2004) is a central element in contemporary resilience theory and has significant implications for understanding slow change processes. The cycle postulates how a system (including both ecosystems and human social systems) moves through stages of exploitation (or growth, r), conservation (or consolidation of resources, K), release (or disruption of energy and resources, Ω) and reorganization (or recovery, α) (Figure 3.2). The forward loop moving through the exploitation stage is considered an expansive period, whereas the backward loop moving through the release stage is considered a period of contraction. From the forward loop, the system can move in any direction, including cycling through consolidation and growth, or conservation and reorganization, without entering a disruptive release phase (Walker & Salt, 2006). Change takes place throughout the cycle. However, a collapse (Ω) is considered to be a relatively large and abrupt (fast) change that occurs when a certain threshold is passed, beyond which the system is not able to maintain its previous functions and a state of chaos ensues. Elsewhere in the cycle, change is more incremental. Change is slowest in the consolidation period (K) before the collapse, when

Fo r

e

lo o

p

42  Alan A. Lew

Consolidation

(r)

(Re)Organization

(K)

Collapse (Ω)

Ba

ck

lo

(α)

op

Exploitation

αr KΩ-

(re)organization, mobilization exploitation, growth consolidation, institutionalization, conservation collapse, release

Based on Walker & Salt, 2006

Figure 3.2  The general adaptive cycle model Source: Lew, Ng, Wu, & Ni (2016); based on Walker & Salt (2006).

resources gradually become monopolized by an entrenched and inflexible system. Systems spend most of their time in this forward loop, cycling through smaller reorganizations and exploitations, while doing their best to avoid a collapse (Walker & Salt, 2006). Resilience (the capacity to respond to change) is strongest in the reorganization and early growth or exploitation stages when opportunities for innovation are greatest, and weakest at the peak of the conservation and release phases (Holling, 2001; Gunderson & Holling, 2002; Folke et al., 2010). Social-ecological systems (SES) contain multiple interconnected subsystems, including both parallel and nested systems. A system is comprised of a set of variables that have a higher degree of correlation to one another than they do to variables outside of the system. A system includes both slow change variables that give it stability and fast change variables that give it dynamism (Table 3.1). It is crucial to clearly identify the spatial and temporal scale (or boundaries) of the system to know which variables are dependent within it and which variable are external and independent. Each system operates through its own adaptive cycle. Systems impact one another through a complex structure referred as a ‘panarchy’ (Figure 3.3)

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   43 Large-scale system and adaptive cycle Medium Fore loop

Small

Fore loop

Fore

Back

loop

loop

Back loop

Back loop

Memory (path dependence)

Revolt (path divergence)

Figure 3.3  A panarchy of three nested systems. This panarchy of three nested systems shows each with its own adaptive cycle, and having cross-scale influences. Larger systems have a memory (path dependent) influence on smaller systems in fore loop (growth and consolidation) and back loop (collapse and reorganization) contexts. Smaller systems have a revolt (path divergent) influence on the larger systems in these contexts Source: Lew, Ng, Wu, & Ni (2016); modified from Walker & Salt (2006).

(Gunderson & Holling, 2002; Holling, 2004; Allen et al., 2014). Adaptive cycles that are higher in the panarchy hierarchy are larger, meaning they have a greater impact on smaller systems and the system overall. Within a tourism system, we can think of the overall tourism economy as a large, higher level adaptive cycle, and the individual tourism enterprises within it as smaller adaptive cycles. The various functions within each enterprise are even smaller cycles within this panarchy of nested systems. Slow and fast change variables in a larger system will have stronger influences throughout the panarchy than will slow and fast change variables in smaller systems (also known as subsystems) within it. The primary difference between compared to the bistability model, introduced previously, is that it deals with a single system state variable responding to a single driver state variable. (A state variable is a variable that acts as a surrogate for the state of the entire system.) The adaptive cycle, on the other hand, models an entire system as an integrated set of slow and fast variables. That being said, from a panarchy perspective, it is also possible to conceptualize a subsystem as a state variable within the larger system. The idea that there is a hierarchy of higher order systems points to a multiplicity of slow and fast change variables, some of which may be more important than others in different contexts. Larger and slower adaptive cycles impact smaller cycles through the ‘memory’ of prior processes (Figure 3.3), which is also referred to as path dependence in evolutionary economics (Brouder, 2014). This can also be seen as a top-down

44  Alan A. Lew management approach to resolving smaller scale problems (Woods, 2006; Pelling & Manuel-Navarrete, 2011). In addition, a collapse in a larger system’s cycle can reverberate throughout all of the systems that it is connected to. Smaller system cycles can, on occasion, influence a larger cycle through ‘revolt’ against dominant trajectories, which is the introduction of path divergence (changing policies) or path creativity (introducing innovations). Memory and revolt can occur both within a system and between systems, with larger systems often forcing more conservative behavior on smaller systems, and changes in smaller systems sometimes triggering a change in a larger system, as depicted in Figure 3.3. Humans can anticipate potential declines and avoid or forestall them by directly moving from a conservation stage to a reorganization stage (through strategic planning) or a new growth phase if new resources become exploitable (Walker et al., 2006). Such actions occur on a regular basis across a multitude of human subsystems in the form of small and fast adaptive cycles, with the cycle of response happening very quickly. The rapid cycling of these small and fast subsystems help to reorganize the larger and slower system without it needing to go through a collapse experience to adapt to a changing condition (Dearing, 2008). Alternatively, a system may be trapped in a loop that never leaves the collapse realm of the adaptive cycle, resulting in, for example, entrenched poverty and self-defeating patterns (Allison & Hobbs, 2004). The collapse phase in the adaptive cycle is defined as a loss of complexity and integration, and is usually perceived as an undesirable state in which the capacity to influence and change conditions for the better is limited. Higher up in a nested hierarchy of adaptive cycles the larger and slower processes act as controls on smaller subsystem cycles that operate within it. This again points to the possibility of equating a subsystem to a variable in the context of the larger panarchy. The legal system, the monetary system, the culture of a place or region, the health care system in a place, and the built environment of a community are all examples of large systems that are relatively slow and difficult to change. Some of these are often measured by a single indicator, such as the unemployment rate for an economy. In addition, when these systems collapse we are more likely to refer to the event as a crisis or disaster (Holling, 2004), which further indicates their association with slow controlling system variables. Tourism applications Applying the bistability model to a tourism economy context would first require identifying the system boundaries. This alone has been a topic of considerable debate in tourism studies (Leiper, 2008) due to the marginal relationship of many business activities that are not part of the core of tourism, such as transportations systems and restaurants. Farrell and Twining-Ward (2004) placed a local core tourism system as one of several parallel subsystems nested in a more broadly defined regional tourism system, that itself was nested within a global system. Assuming an acceptable system can be identified, then it becomes necessary to identify the complex state variable (regime 1) and the simple state variable

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   45 (regime 2). The Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) model (Butler, 1980) is probably the most widely accepted definition of how a destination transitions from early and simpler states (regime 2) to more complex and mature states (regime 1). This occurs through stages of exploration (discovery by independent tourists), initial local involvement in development, external investments, and industrial consolidation. The development and investment stages of the TALC correspond to the growth and exploitation phase (r) of the adaptive cycle model in resilience theory, while the industrial consolidation stage is comparable to the adaptive cycle’s conservation phase (K) (Walker, Holling, Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004; Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004). In the latter phase of development, tourism resources become locked-in to path dependencies, decreasing their flexibility and, in resilience terms, ‘net growth slows and the system becomes increasingly interconnected, less flexible, and more vulnerable to external disturbances’ (Walker, et al. 2006:13). Lew (1987) defined the two extremes suggested by the TALC as separate and unstructured development at the simple level (regime 2) and collective and integrated at the more complex level (regime 1). From an economic standpoint, many destinations see the complex regime 1 form of tourism as more desirable because it supports more workers in a greater variety of trades. Exceptions to this preference, however, also exist, especially if cultural or nature protection is the primary development goal. In general, however, from a tourism economy perspective, we can consider these two state conditions (undeveloped and developed) as the slow controlling system variable and the fast changing system variable, although they actually represent a complex set of variables. The goal of the system is to successfully maintain the fast changing complex regime 1, while recognizing the fundamental importance of the underlying slow controlling regime 2. Unfortunately, support for the slow controlling variable is often lost in the headlong rush for developing mass tourism support systems (regime 1). The TALC model has its primary focus on the state condition of the complex system regime 1. Like the adaptive cycle model, it envisions the increasing vulnerability of the conservation (industrialization) phase, but it does not describe in detail the cyclical stages of the adaptive cycle. The TALC model implies that some form of collapse is possible, but suggests that this may be either a large event or just a mild bump on the path toward growth. As noted above, the adaptive cycle model allows for a full collapse (Ω) from the consolidation stage (K), or a direct return to the reorganization phase (α), which might involve strategic planning or destination rebranding. The system can also move directly to the exploitation and growth stage (r), based on successful rebranding or the exploitation of new resources (attractions) or markets (customers). The fast change system variable of the tourism destination system cannot stand still, but must be in a constant state of innovation and evolution to successfully compete for tourist dollars. The adaptive cycle provides a model of the key components of how this is done at the level of the complex system regime 1. As noted previously, the slow controlling system variables are often more difficult to discern. Using the TALC model as a guide, indications of that

46  Alan A. Lew underlying control might best be seen in the early historical development of a destination. Aspects of the destination that drew the original independent explorer tourists and that prompted the first tourism entrepreneurship are most likely still present in the destination, and still have a role to play in marketing, branding, and tourism economic activity. The protection and strengthening of these original resources, which can be overwhelmed by outside investment driven growth, should not be underestimated. As both the bistability model and the adaptive cycle model show, external pressures for change provide opportunities for individual and social learning as systems absorb, learn from, adapt to, or otherwise reorganize themselves around change (Holling 2001, 2004). In a tourism economy, such disturbances can include the gradual introduction of new and upscaled accommodations, restaurants, transportation systems, and tourist attractions. Each of these would trigger a smaller adaptive cycle adjustment to a subsystem within the larger tourism economy system. While generally considered positive developments for a destination overall, some older facilities may be abandoned as they succumb to declining tourist interest as both the destination and its markets evolve. On the other hand, the loss of a major anchor accommodation or tourist attraction could result in a crisis situation for the tourism system, leading to a collapse that is never overcome if the system lacks sufficient flexibility and innovative resilience. This could indicate the transformation of the destination from a complex regime 1 state to a more basic regime 2 state. Increasing competition from other places is another slow and persistent change driver variable for many tourism systems. Stagnation and decline in a tourism destination is usually measured in terms of tourist arrivals, but may also be reflected in tourist expenditures or industry profits, or in terms of the authenticity and sense of place of the attraction base. Tourist arrivals may decline in response to changing market interests, deteriorating infrastructure, competition, the loss or degradation of an attraction, and either human or natural disasters. Disaster events usually result in only temporary declines in tourist arrivals. For most destinations, however, any decline in arrivals is considered a crisis that must be managed, with the response reflecting the nature of the cause, along with a large amount of marketing and public relations (Ritchie 2009). In the tourism economy scenario described above, the slow controlling system variable is the maintenance of a base attraction level for tourists (see Table 3.2). This is often either culturally based (including built environments, heritage and entertainment) or nature based (which can often be difficult to separate from culture). If the base attraction is completely lost, then the system will need to redefine itself. A destination may, for example, transition from a more complex international destination to a relatively simpler domestic destination if the quality of its attraction base is not able to continue to compete internationally. This shift can be difficult when the tourism support infrastructure is overly committed to a single attraction base and market. The attraction base and the tourism support infrastructure are both slow, controlling system variables that act conservatively on the overall tourism economy. The level of international investment and visitation in the tourism economy would be one of several potential fast system

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   47 variables that indicate the degree to which the destination is integrated into the global tourism system. On the other hand, these could also be considered external fast driver variables, if the intention is to measure how internal system variables change under their influence. For a tourism destination or place, the most commonly monitored indicator is the external fast driver variable of the total number of visitors, as measured on either a seasonal or annual basis. For specific tourism facilities, this number may be measured on a daily or monthly basis. If the number of visitors is too high, this could cause a collapse the local system’s ability to maintain a highquality experience for visitors and local residents, including a loss of authenticity and sense of place, and a deterioration in facilities and services. Alternatively, if the numbers decline, they could reach a point where they cannot support the built tourism infrastructure, resulting in low accommodation rates and a decline in tourism employment and the maintenance of facilities across the destination. Carrying capacity related management schemes, such as the Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC), have been proposed as a way to prevent an excessive threshold event from occurring. They have, however, proven less successful in cultural contexts than for mostly natural environments (Hall & Lew, 2009). Part of the problem is in using a single variable to monitor a complex range of changing systems and subsystems that have different, and often conflicting, goals. In addition, capacity focused approaches do not address the challenge of declining arrival numbers. Space and time As discussed above, larger adaptive cycles are a metaphor for systems that are higher in the spatial hierarchy, change more slowly over time, and have controlling influences over those that are nested below them. Lew (2014) suggested an alternative framework specifically for understanding community resilience from an applied perspective, with a focus on tourism (Figure 3.4). The scale, change, and resilience (SCR) model is built on a spatial scale continuum and a slow to fast change continuum. It generalizes two approaches to slow change drivers and two to fast change drivers. For slow change, at the level of the tourism site or individual tourism enterprise (cell 1 in Figure 3.4), the primary concerns of resilience are the maintenance of facilities and services. Both of these will decline over time if they are not regularly maintained, improved, and changed to meet the desires of changing markets. The broader level of tourism interest is that of the larger community (cell 2), beyond separate individual interests. A tourism economic sector might be situated between these two levels. At the community level, the major challenges are in addressing the slow change driver impacts of climate change and economic and cultural globalization, which have the potential of destroying local tourism resource. These resources include natural environmental features and the traditional culture and sense of place that makes each place special in its experience. The form of resilience that involves community interests addressing slow change drivers and their impacts is where

48  Alan A. Lew

Tourism scale

Resilience issues /

2. Slow change impacting community/ collective tourism

1. Slow change impacting entrepreneur/ individual tourism

4. Sudden shock impacting community/ collective tourism

3. Sudden shock impacting entrepreneur/ individual tourism

Change rate

Indicators 1. Facilities and service decline / Maintenance programs 2. Climate change and globalization / Natural and socio-cultural conservation 3. Major attraction loss / Economic training and diversification 4. Nature and human disasters / Social and economic support system

Figure 3.4  Scale, change and resilience in community tourism Source: Lew (2014).

traditional sustainable development approaches are most apparent in the SCR model. In this way, sustainability becomes one of the tools in the way a resilience approach manages slow change impacts within the context of different scales of time and space. Slow change drivers are often responded to with slow, methodical, periodic, and incremental responses. Where the community is concerned, this may involve considerable analysis and debate in the formulation of policy and practice. This stands in contrast to fast change drivers, which, when they occur, require quick responses and autocratic decision making. Planning for fast change events, as depicted in Figure 3.4, however, is often more of an unseen activity because it can involve mundane details that do not draw the attention of users, clients, and the public until the event occurs. From the broader topic of slow change, the SCR model points more specifically to the importance of system scales and time scales in understanding pressures for change and system responses. System (or spatial) scale defines the boundaries of the system of interest. Resilience theory is based on systems science, and therefore it only works if we assume that subsystems exist and that their boundaries can be clearly identified. From a social science perspective, defining system boundaries allows for the development of applied policy solutions, but also needs to recognize the permeability of those boundaries. Time scales are also problematic because what is a slow change from one perspective, can be considered a very fast change from another. Time, therefore, is the most important variable that needs to be defined before we can determine if an indicator of change is occurring slow or fast. Many of the slow change processes in Tables 3.1 and 3.2, for example, could be considered fast events when viewed

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   49 from a millennium perspective. In addition, elements of time and frequency can change over time, as seems to be the case of climate change in recent decades (Nelson et al., 2007). Focusing on human time scales from the individual to the society, as Figure 3.4 does, is appropriate for a social science approach to resilience and change, although even here there are gray areas. For example, a disease epidemic can reach crisis levels over an extended period of time, with the definition of ‘crisis’ being influenced by human perception and popular media. In this way, fast and slow change become highly context specific, requiring clearly defined parameters when making comparative analyses and developing broader inferences. A further consideration of system and time scales is that ‘resilience in one time period or at one particular scale can be achieved at the expense of resilience in a later period or at another scale’ (Carpenter et al., 2001: 278). Short-term resilience responses, such the building of sea walls to prevent beach erosion (a form of engineering resilience), can make long-term ecological resilience responses to the same problem more difficult. Woods (2006) suggests that managing resilience in complex social systems is in the art of balancing trade-offs among parallel and competing subsystems.

Assessing and planning for slow change Slow resilience remains one of the less conceptually developed and understood areas of resilience theory and thinking. However, it is probably the most important because of its close association with the slow, controlling system variables that are likely to be the most influential in determining the overall general resilience of a system. Based on the definitions and discussion above, an understanding of the slow change processes that impact tourism communities could be undertaken through the process illustrated in Figure 3.5. Fast change drivers and system variables are included in the model due to the close relationship that often exists between slow and fast variables. In general, however, the greater challenge is in identifying and measuring the slow variables. Before discussing Figure 3.5 in detail, a few additional concepts need to be clarified. An applied context also raises the issue of which variable are controllable by humans in a system. ‘Controllable’ variables are not the same as ‘controlling’ variables, so some caution must be taken when using these concepts (Walker et al., 2012). Climate change is a slow, controlling variable that is near impossible to control, though humans seem to have some influence in making it worse. The commodification of natural resources, as in the construction of a private resort or theme park in a scenic area, is a variable that can be controlled by regulatory policies and enforcement actions. Some variables, such as the use of illicit drugs or the hiring of illegal immigrants, are likely to be somewhere in between controllable and uncontrollable. In most instances, resilience is the ability of a system to maintain health or continuity in its fast changing system variables under the pressure of external drivers of change. Change drivers, however, can come from many sources (Table

50  Alan A. Lew System context

Variables

Driver of change

Specific change drivers

Spatial scale

Time scale

Slow

|

Fast

Slow

|

Fast

Resilience assessment

Policy formulation

Changing system variables Re-define system context

Figure 3.5  A slow and fast resilience assessment and planning model Source: Lew, Ng, Wu, & Ni (2016).

3.1) and a system may be very resilient to one of these, but not to others. In resilience theory, this is known as a ‘specified resilience’ – resilience to a specific change driving variable (Folke, Carpenter, Walker, Scheffer, Chapin, & Rockström, 2010; Resilience Alliance, 2010; Redman, 2014). Specific resilience is what is typically considered when asking ‘resilience of what and to what?’ (Carpenter et al., 2001). The overall level of resilience of a system to all drivers of change is known as ‘general resilience’, and is assumed to be roughly equated to some accumulated sum of specific resilience indicators. Some forms of specific resilience, however, are likely to be better indicators of general resilience than others. These are usually closely related to slow controlling system variables and have strong positive or negative correlations with other variables in the system, making them appropriate proxy variables for assessing general resilience.

System context The system context (Figure 3.5) requires defining the driver of change that is the focus of concern, the spatial scale of the system of concern, and the temporal or time scale against which change will be measured. These are listed as three steps below, however, as each step is taken it will impact the other two, creating an iterative process. Step 1: define the spatial scale of the system Spatial scale distinguishes the level and boundaries of the system of interest, ranging from individual entities through larger geographic and social scales, and with some subsystems being nested within larger systems and others existing in parallel. For tourism this is a continuum from small-scale, independent entrepreneurs to larger conglomerates (e.g. hotel chains), to the entire tourism sector in a local economy, and to the entire community within which tourism resides and depends upon, as seen in the SCR model (Figure 3.4). Defining the

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   51 boundaries of the system also implies a definition of the large system that the system of interest is a part of, along with possible parallel systems and subsystems. Step 2: define the change driver system The change driver system is the larger context that is the source of either longterm, persistent pressure (slow change driver variables) leading to gradual change responses within the system, or sudden and unanticipated pressure (fast change driver variables) leading to an immediate change response within the system. The change driver system context can be a positive or negative influence, although resilience theory focuses on the latter. For tourism, common systems that drive change include the economic, socio-cultural, and environmental conditions that are impacting a destination. Step 3: define the time scale of change Time (or temporal) scale must be defined to distinguish between slow and fast drivers of change. While this may seem obvious and unnecessary, careful consideration must be made to properly evaluate change variables and indicators, as these can vary for different types of system processes and system elements. For tourism this is a continuum that ranges from slow, incremental, and entropic decline to sudden and unanticipated political and economic crises and naturebased disasters, as seen in the SCR model (Figure 3.4). Defining the time scale is also necessary to know the parameters of how the driver of change is changing the system variables. Hotter/colder, larger/smaller, growing/shrinking and expanding/contracting, for example, are all relative measures of change variables that require a baseline for comparison. The system boundaries, the driver of change, and the time scale of change are all required to determine the independent variables (change drivers) from dependent variables (those that are controlling and changing).

Variables The variables in the model (Figure 3.5) are measurable characteristics of the selected system that indicate either how a driver of change is putting pressure on it (change drivers) or how the system is responding to pressure(s). It is important to maintain spatial and temporal scale in the selection and measurement of variables, because the same variable could be a driver (independent variable) in one instance and a responding indicator (dependent variable) in another, depending on how the system context was defined. Step 4: identify the slow and fast external change driver variables Slow and fast change driver variables are variables that cause a response in the system. Slow Drivers occur either incrementally or persistently over a relatively

52  Alan A. Lew long period of time. For tourism, a slow driver could be a gradual increase in tourist arrivals or international restaurant chains. Fast Drivers are singular events that are external to the system and impose a sudden and often unexpected change that requires an immediate response by the system. For tourism this could be any event, from terrorism to a natural disaster that causes people to cancel their trips to a destination. These are considered independent variables. We can measure how much they are changing, and use that information to correlate and project how much dependent variables (which are mostly internal to the system) are changing. These are also the variables that we seek to manage and control, through regulations and planning, to lessen their potential impact on the system. Step 5: identify the slow and fast internal system variables Slow controlling system variables are internal to the system, have less complex structures, and support the system by being more resistant to external pressures, although their collapse could be an indicator of the extinction of an entire system. For tourism this could be the traditional cultural values, practices and sense of place in an ethnicity-based destination. Fast changing system variables are internal to the system, have more complex structures, and are more sensitive to external pressures and potential collapse than slow controlling system variables. For tourism this could be a sensitive biological ecosystem with rare flora and fauna that are easily threatened by human development or climate change. These are the dependent variables that respond to or co-change with changes in the independent variable. These variables also represent the characteristics of a system that we are most interested in maintaining in a healthy state. It is important that the selected variables represent the entire system that was identified in the system context stage, and not a subsystem of it. For tourism, these variables could be the major attractions and attractive features that people seek in visiting a destination, and could be measured by total visitor arrivals to the systems, for example. We can monitor feedback responses in these variables to gauge or model the potential impacts of independent variables (slow and fast change drivers). In defining the drivers and change, and the internal system variables that respond to change, it may become necessary to redefine the system context that is being assessed and planned for. This is because the available data may not be at the same scale as the originally selected system, which would result in inaccurate feedback. The selection of internal variables might also better clarify system parameters, resulting it a redefinition.

Resilience assessment and policy formulation Assessing resilience as a basis for policy formulation (Figure 3.5) is never an easy process because it can only be guessed from the indicators that are available (Lew et al., 2016). In addition, existing models for such assessments are relatively weak

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   53 and seldom tested in a social system context. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are appropriate, depending on the nature of the variables involved. Public and stakeholder involvement is most relevant in this stage of the resilience planning process, although they could be incorporated more selectively in earlier stages, as well. Step 6: assess system resilience Using either the bistability model or the adaptive cycle model, we can attempt to assess the current resilience of the system within the context of the defined system boundaries (spatial and temporal scales) and drivers of change, through correlations between the change drivers and the slow and fast system variables. Narrowly defined system boundaries make this an example of a specific resilience to a specific fast or slow driver of change. For tourism this could be the introduction of a new form of entertainment (e.g. location-based gaming), or a new marketing technique (e.g. a phone-based app), or a new food or drink item to attract tourists. A specific resilience correlation may be a good indicator of overall general resilience if it is closely associated with slow controlling system variables. Therefore, modeling several slow system variables might provide a good indicator of overall general resilience to unknown future changes. Tourism resilience could, for example, be one indicator (among many) of the overall economic health of a community, since tourism is largely an economic activity. Step 7: formulate slow resilience policies Slow resilience policies and actions primarily consist of efforts to address pressures on slow controlling system variables by enhancing the adaptive capacities of communities and individuals. For tourism this could include efforts to diversify an economy by teaching tourism entrepreneurial skills to farmers, or introducing new tourism products to an existing destination. Which policies to adopt requires an understanding of how a community adjusts its slow controlling variables to its changing context (drivers of change). Policies can then be adopted that attempt to influence the drivers of change to bring about more desired responses in the system. This is a political process that will result in winners and losers, but hopefully a fully informed resilience perspective can assist the decision makers. Step 8: reassessment and redefinition As with any traditional planning approach, the implementation of policies should be reassessed to gauge their effectiveness. In a resilience planning framework, this reassessment would be an ongoing process of monitoring and evaluating the feedbacks of variables identified in Step 4 and 5. Through this process the variable indicators may be determined to no longer be effective in the changing context of concerns faced by the community. In that situation, the policy option is to redefine

54  Alan A. Lew the context and start a new planning process. As with traditional community and urban planning, a return to the initial stages of defining the driver of change, and the spatial and temporal scales of the system would most likely occur about every five to ten years.

Conclusions Independent variables that indicate fast and slow drivers of change are relatively easy to comprehend and identify within complex human social systems, especially if temporal and spatial scales are clearly defined. Discussions of fast and slow change events in popular media and political debates are almost always in reference to change drivers and the apparent impacts that they are having on our world. On the other hand, dependent indicators of fast and slow system variables are more difficult to identify with certainty. This is especially true for slow system variables that control and regulate faster processes and relationships within human social systems. Both fast changing system variables and natural, nonhuman ecosystems are easier to model than slow controlling system variables and human social systems. This greater difficulty may be due the unpredictability of human agency, including innovation and creativity (Adger, 2000; Holling, 2001; Weichselgartner & Kelman, 2014). Culture, for example, is very likely a key slow system variable in every human social system. Cultural values, beliefs, and norms of behavior are mostly stable over short periods of time, and they change only gradually over longer periods of time through both internal culture drift and external influences. Acculturation is the dominant external influence, whereby an acculturated society changes its social structures and norms to become more aligned with a more dominant society. Societies under pressure to change through acculturation may respond in one of three ways: (1) cultural diffusion – adopting the practices of the dominant society, which would be an extreme resilience approach that may result in the extinction of the acculturated society; (2) cultural resistance – protecting itself against most of the influences from the dominant society, which would be a sustainability approach; or (3) cultural adaptation – selectively taking advantage of some aspects that the dominant society may offer, while also maintaining a degree of resistance and conservation of traditional ways. Most communities will pursue an adaptation approach (3), which involves both sustainability (conservation) and resilience (innovation). Some will lean more toward diffusion (1), while others will favor resistance (2). Such decisions are policy oriented and will change as political power changes. Economic and cultural globalization places communities in a similar context in which they must make diffusion, resistance, and adaptation responses. At some point, every community will develop some mechanism for making decisions on what cultural resources to protect and conserve, and which to change and innovate. The critical issue for slow resilience is to identify the core cultural elements (slow controlling system variables) that must be protected to ensure a continued sense of personal, social

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   55 and place value. This is not easy to do, and once identified, the core variables may change over time as both the internal and external context of the society evolves. In 2006, Walker et al. suggested five major slow change questions that require greater research attention. These research questions are still relevant today, and include: 1 2 3 4 5

Are slow controlling system variables as important in human social systems as they appear to be in environmental systems? Do fast and slow drivers of change and system variables interact in human social systems as they do in environmental systems? How do thresholds between slow and fast system variables occur in social systems? Are they measurable as they appear to be in environmental systems? Are there direct links between slow social system variables and slow environmental system variables that need to be better understood? How do slow system variables respond to changes in spatial and temporal scale, and how does this influence resilience?

A largely overlooked question is the political ecology of resilience planning (Adger, 2000; Weichselgartner & Kelman, 2014). Humans see themselves as being able to manipulate social-ecological systems that they are a part of. Such manipulations, however, are mostly (if not always) structured by the social, economic, and political values that they are embedded within, rather than by any intentional agency on the part of an individual. Thus, a layer of reflexivity is required to view a coupled human and natural system from the inside out, to see how the political ecology of human actions is a way that the system self-organizes itself. Carpenter et al. (2001: 778) noted that ‘(e)cosystems are ever-changing, and they are embedded in a world in which many other things are also changing continuously at various spatial scales.’ This applies at least as much, if not more so, to human social systems. Such a constantly moving target requires conceptual understandings and practical applications that are equally flexible and adaptive to dynamically changing circumstances. Whether this can be accomplished with the highly static measurement tools and policy frameworks that dominate the culture of contemporary research and politics is questionable. A better understanding of resilience thinking, and of slow resilience in particular, might help us to move in the direction that is necessary to meet the challenges of our contemporary world.

References Adger, W. Neil. (2000). Social and ecological resilience: are the related? Progress in Human Geography, 24(3), 347–364. Allen, C. R., Angeler, D. G., Garmestani, A. S., Gunderson, L. H., & Holling, C. S. (2014). Panarchy: Theory and application. Nebraska Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit, Staff Publications. Paper 127. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from http:// digitalcommons.unl.edu/ncfwrustaff/127.

56  Alan A. Lew Allison, H. E., & Hobbs, R. J. (2004). Resilience, adaptive capacity, and the ‘Lock-in Trap’ of the Western Australian agricultural region. Ecology and Society, 9(1): 3. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art3. Becken, S. (2013). Developing a framework for assessing resilience of tourism sub-system to climatic factors. Annals of Tourism Research, 43, 506–528. Brand, F. (2008). Critical natural capital revisited: Ecological resilience and sustainable development, Ecological Economics, 68(3), 605–612, DOI:10.1016/j. ecolecon.2008.09.013. Brand, F. S., & Jax, K. (2007). Focusing the meaning(s) of resilience: Resilience as a descriptive concept and a boundary object. Ecology and Society, 12(1), 23. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art23. Brouder, P. (2014). Evolutionary economic geography: A new path for tourism studies? Tourism Geographies, 16(1), 2–7. DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2013.864323. Butler, R. W. (1980). The concept of a tourist area cycle of evolution: Implications for management of resources. Canadian Geographer, 24(1), 5–12. Carpenter, S., Walker, B., Anderies, J. M., & Abel, N. (2001). From metaphor to measurement: Resilience of what to what? Ecosystems, 4, 765–781. DOI: 10.1007/ s10021-001-0045-9. Collier, M. J. (2015) Novel ecosystems and social-ecological resilience. Landscape Ecology, 30, 1363–1369. Crépin, A-S. (2007). Using fast and slow processes to manage resources with thresholds. Environmental & Resource Economics, 36, 191–213. Daskon, C. D. (2010). Cultural resilience – the roles of cultural traditions in sustaining rural livelihoods: A case study from rural Kandyan cillages in central Sri Lanka. Sustainability, 2, 1080–1100. DOI: 1080-1100; doi:10.3390/su2041080. Davoudi, S. (2012). Resilience: A bridging concept of a dead end? Planning Theory and Practice, 13(2), 299–333. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1 4649357.2012.677124. Dearing, J. A. (2008). Landscape change and resilience theory: A palaeoenvironmental assessment from Yunnan, S.W. China. The Holocene, 18(1), 117–127. De Groot, R., Wilson, M. A., & Boumans, R. M. J. (2002). A typology for the classification, description and valuation of ecosystem function, goods and services. Ecological Economics, 41(3), 393–408. Ekins, P., Simon, S., Deutsch, L., Folke, C., & De Groot, R. (2003). A framework for the practical application of the concepts of critical natural capital and strong sustainability. Ecological Economics, 44, 165–185. Farrell, B. H., & Twining-Ward, L. (2004). Reconceptualizing tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 31(2), 274–295. Folke, C., Carpenter, S. R., Walker, B., Scheffer, M., Chapin, T., & Rockström, J. (2010). Resilience thinking: Integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. Ecology and Society, 15(4), 20. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/ vol15/iss4/art20/. Gould, K. A., Garcia, M. M., & Remes, J. A. C. (2016). Beyond ‘natural-disasters-are-nonatural’: The work of state and nature after the 2010 earthquake in Chile. Journal of Political Ecology, 23, 93–114. Gunderson, L. H., & Holling, C. S. (Eds.) (2002). Panarchy: Understanding transformation in human and natural systems. Washington, DC: Island Press. Hall, C. M., & Lew, A .A. (2009). Understanding and managing tourism impacts: An integrated approach. London: Routledge.

Slow resilience in a tourism community context   57 Holling, C. S. (2001). Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems. Ecosystems, 4, 390–405. Holling, C. S. (2004). From complex regions to complex worlds. Ecology and Society, 9(1), 11. Retrieved from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art11. Hughes, T. P., Graham, N. A. J., & Steneck, R. S. (2010). Rising to the challenge of sustaining coral reef resilience. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 25(11), 633–642. Leiper, N. (2008). Why ‘the tourism industry’ is misleading as a generic expression: The case for the plural variation, ‘tourism industries’. Tourism Management, 29(2), 237–251. Lew, A. A. (1987). A framework of tourist attraction research. Annals of Tourism Research, 14(4), 553–575. Lew, A. A. (2014). Scale, change and resilience in community tourism planning. Tourism Geographies, 16(1), 14–22. DOI:10.1080/14616688.2013.864325. Lew, A. A., Ng, P. T., Ni, C.-C., & Wu, T.-C. (2016). Community sustainability and resilience: Similarities, differences and indicators. Tourism Geographies, 18(1), 18–27. DOI:10.1080/14616688.2015.1122664. Lew, A. A., Ng, P. T., Wu, T.-C., & Ni, C.-C. (2016). Some new resilience figures and diagrams. Collaborative for sustainable tourism and resilient communities blog (30 September). Retrieved 15 January 2017 from www.tourismcommunities.com/blog/ some-new-resilience-figures-and-diagrams. Ludwig, D., Walker, B., & Holling, C.S. (1997). Sustainability, stability, and resilience. Conservation Ecology, 1(1), 7. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from www.consecol.org/ vol1/iss1/art 7/ and www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol 1/iss1/art7/. Lyubomirsky, S. (2011). Hedonic adaptation to positive and negative experiences. In S. Folkman (Ed.), Oxford handbook of stress, health, and coping (pp. 200–224). New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, R. (2012), Regional economic resilience, hysteresis and recessionary shocks. Journal of Economic Geography, 12, 1–32. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA). 2005. Ecosystems and human well being: Synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. Nelson, D. R., Adger, W. N., & Brown, K. (2007). Adaptation to environmental change: Contributions of a resilience framework. The Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 32, 395–419. Pascual, M., & Guichard, F. (2005). Criticality and disturbance in spatial ecological systems. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20(2), 88–95. Pelling, M., & Manuel-Navarrete, D. (2011). From resilience to transformation: The adaptive cycle in two Mexican urban centers. Ecology and Society, 16(2), 11. Retrieved from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss2/art11/. Redman, C. L. 2014. Should sustainability and resilience be combined or remain distinct pursuits? Ecology and Society, 19(2), 37. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from http://dx.doi. org/10.5751/ES-06390-190237. Resilience Alliance. (2010). Assessing resilience in social-ecological systems: Workbook for practitioners (revised version 2.0). Retrieved 15 January 2017 from www.resalliance. org/files/ResilienceAssessmentV2_2.pdf. Ritchie, B. W. (2009). Crisis and disaster management for tourism. Bristol: Channel View. Strunz, S. (2012). Is conceptual vagueness an asset? Arguments from philosophy of science applied to the concept of resilience. Ecological Economics, 76, 112–118. Turner, R. K. (Ed.). (1993). Sustainable environmental economics and management: Principles and practice. New York: Belhaven Press.

58  Alan A. Lew Walker, B. H., Abel, N., Anderies, J. M., & Ryan, P. (2009). Resilience, adaptability, and transformability in the Goulburn-Broken Catchment, Australia. Ecology and Society, 14(1), 12. Retrieved from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss1/art12/. Walker, B. H., Carpenter, S. R., Rockström, J., Crépin, A.-S., & Peterson, G. D. (2012). Drivers, ‘slow’ variables, ‘fast’ variables, shocks, and resilience. Ecology and Society, 17(3), 30. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05063-170330. Walker, B. H., Gunderson, L. H., Kinzig, A. P., Folke, C., Carpenter, S. R., & Schultz, L. (2006). A handful of heuristics and some propositions for understanding resilience in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 11(1), 13. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art13/. Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R., & Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 9(2), 5. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience thinking: Sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Washington, DC: Island Press. Weichselgartner, J., & Kelman, I. (2014). Geographies of resilience: Challenges and opportunities of a descriptive concept. Progress in Human Geography, 39(3), 249–267. Woods, D. D. (2006) Essential characteristics of pesilience. In E. Hollnagel, D. D. Woods, & N. Leveson (Eds.), Resilience engineering: Concepts and precepts (pp. 21–33). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Part II

Social, political, and economic drivers of change

4 Resilience in the visitor economy Cultural economy, human social networks, and slow change in the regional periphery Joseph M. Cheer

Introduction Questions concerning regional resilience have risen to prominence as the downstream impacts of local and global change, including globalization effects, socio-demographic transformations, economic restructuring and decline of traditional industries (such as agriculture and mining), are more marked in peripheral settings (Bailey & Turok, 2016). This occurs at a time when regional and local governments have had a tendency to experience diminishing authority over planning, regulating, and shaping their immediate social, economic, and environmental contexts (Pike, Rodríguez-Pose, & Tomaney, 2017). The aim of this chapter is to review and compartmentalize the ‘social’ in social-ecological resilience thinking via a regional case, explicating slow change and drawing on two key underlying variables regarding resilience in the regional visitor economy: (1) the cultural economy and (2) social human networks. This highlights the generally poor acknowledgement of both variables in the discourse on resilient regional tourism. In tandem, both variables exemplify resilience theory as a framework (Cochrane, 2010), especially social resilience and the adaptive capacities of tourism-centred regional communities. In particular, the question why some tourism-focused regions are able to develop greater community resilience then others frames this study. Ongoing fieldwork conducted in the in the Great Ocean Road (GOR) region of southern Australia for a broader study concerning strategic tourism development informs the perspectives in this chapter. The multi-modal nature of this research is comprised of longitudinal surveys, in-depth interviews, and community stakeholder consultations. The latter was made up of stakeholder briefings, informal conversations and attendance at regular meetings with two key organizations: the Twelve Apostles Tourism and Business Association (TATBA) and the Lorne Business and Tourism Association (LBTA). Additionally, local government stakeholders including the Surf Coast Shire and Corangamite Shire as well as Parks Victoria, the state’s authority over national and marine parks are key participants.

62  Joseph M. Cheer

Conceptual framework Contextualizing the burgeoning resilience discourse with the visitor economy in the Great Ocean Road (GOR) is central to this study that adopts Kneafsey’s (2001) cultural economy conceptualization as the underpinning framework. In confronting the issue of the visitor or tourism economy in regional contexts, Kneafsey’s (2001: 762) assertion that ‘the countryside is increasingly viewed as both a commodity in itself and as a set of commodifiable signs and symbols’, epitomizes the utility of such places for the visitor economy (Frisvoll, 2013; Jepson & Sharpley, 2015) and this is central to the chapter. The use of the term visitor economy, as distinct from tourism, implies that of relevance are the wider intersectoral linkages that occur between tourism and other allied sectors such as agriculture and services – this is especially relevant in regional settings. Furthermore, slow change variables enmeshed in the cultural economy and human social networks provide enablers to resilience building in the visitor economy. The term regional is used here in an Australian context to align with similar descriptors for non-urban, places including peri-urban, rural, peripheral, satellite, coastal, bush, outback and countryside (it is understood that the term regional may differ in its meaning elsewhere). Distance from the metropolitan centre (capital city or main commercial and government centre generally) is argued to be one of the most prominent limitations of regional locations (Young, 2006) and a barrier to competitiveness, services provision, and lifestyle. The classic term ‘tyranny of distance’, evoked by Geoffrey Blainey (1966) alludes to the limitations of peripherality that has shaped non-metropolitan places over time, especially their development trajectories and underlying adaptive capacities. By being located at the periphery, such places as evoked by Christaller (1963), overcome some of their limitations by activating enablers for tourism development including natural and cultural landscapes, and in doing so provide visitors with a vigorous contrast to urban settings. Although resilience at a regional level is shaped by local and global forces (Adger, 2000) the mechanisms to cope and adapt productively are often dependent on centralized governance structures outside regional jurisdictions. The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s (SRC) definition of resilience as the capacity of a system or individuals to deal with change, adapt, and innovate, underlines this discussion. When it comes to social-ecological systems resilience, that human and nature are inextricably aligned is a tacit acknowledgement. Particular attention is given to the second of SRC’s seven principles for building resilience, ‘managing connectivity’. Connectivity as part of ‘human social networks’, ‘can build resilience of ecosystems services through enhanced and improved governance opportunities’ (SRC, 2016). A critical element in the analysis of connectivity is the complex and often adversarial or cooperative nature of human social networks in regional settings that manifest as stakeholder and actor relations – most often framed by aligned or competing interests that hinder or enhance resilience building. Moreover, the rate and pace of change as well as the scale of tourism development and the associated links to human social networks and the cultural economy are critical reference points.

Resilience in the visitor economy  63

Tourism scale

Lew’s (2014: 17) assertion that ‘rates of change can be highly variable over time and at different social and geographic scales, which can require different modes of response’ is a central tenet where the focus is on community adaptive capacity, and the nature of connectivity of human social networks. Direct reference is made to quadrant 2 of Lew’s (2014) scale, change, and resilience (SCR) in tourism model (Figure 4.1) that focuses on community tourism and slow change, especially that driven by developments within evolving regional macro and micro political economy contexts. The nature of human social networks and their attendant connectivity, and the extent to which they encumber or drive resilience in the regional visitor economy is a key emphasis. In reporting on slow change in regional tourism, this chapter develops quadrant 2 of Lew’s model by aligning the cultural economy and human social networks – both are arguably fundamental components of what Lew terms ‘community tourism’. In contextualizing resilient regional tourism, this accords with Lew’s assessment that where the emphasis is on ‘slow change challenges that a community or collective must address’, that this is ‘beyond the interests of any one individual or enterprise’ is a vital distinction (2014: 18). For Courvisanos, Jain and Mardaneh (2016: 641) the key to building regional resilience lies in reconciling that ‘broad resilience strategies developed in public and private policy mediums arise out of a deep understanding of causal

2. Community tourism – slow change

4. Community tourism – sudden shock

1. Entrepreneur tourism – slow change

3. Entrepreneur tourism – sudden shock

Change rate Figure 4.1  Scale, change and resilience in tourism Source: Adapted from Lew (2014).

64  Joseph M. Cheer mechanisms’. Here, it is argued that optimizing the connectivity of social human networks and reinforcing a robust cultural economy in regional contexts is critical to building resilience in the regional visitor economy. Although ecological systems concerns are clearly an intrinsic aspect of promoting social-ecological resilience, this can only be effective if robust social systems are maintained (Walker, Abel, Anderies, & Ryan, 2009). Cochrane’s (2010: 183) point that ‘identifying the factors of tourism system resilience’ is key to the development of pragmatic strategies towards building resilient regional visitor economies. In particular, that community resilience is part of a broader system within which tourism features prominently is an acknowledged position. Moreover, where community resilience to slow changes is concerned, it is argued that the twin concerns of robust social human network variables and reinforced cultural economy variables are pivotal (Figure 4.2)

Human social network variables • Social capital • Self-organisation • Localized control • Innovation systems • Local planning and vision setting

Cultural economy variables Sense of place Cultural landscape Lifestyle dimensions Sociodemographic makeup Infrastructure and servicces

Intervening context for community resilience • Macroeconomic change • Political economy framework • Vulnerability to extreme weather events • Sociodemographic transformation • Contested socio-political environment

• • • • •

Figure 4.2  Conceptual framework: human social network and cultural economy nexus Source: Author.

Resilience in the visitor economy  65 In constructing the context for this discussion, attention is drawn to integrating human social networks and cultural economy variables as key underpinning moderators that shape the establishment of the intervening context for community resilience (Figure 4.2). Human social networks are people and context centred and focused on the capacity to leverage social capital towards, enabling selforganization, exercising local control, initiating innovation and establishing local planning and vision setting. Robust, tightly knitted and unified communities exhibit such traits. Conversely cultural economy variables are place centred drawing on sense of place that is intimately linked to cultural landscapes, lifestyle, socio-demographic makeup and extant infrastructure and services. All of these support the underlying cultural economy that is unique and intrinsic signifiers of people and place. This sets up the intervening context for community resilience and the adaptive capacities to deal with a slow change regimen as exemplified in the development of prevailing macroeconomic and political economy contexts. Additionally, the transformation of adaptive capacities to vulnerability to extreme weather events, socio-demographic transformations and the contested socio-political environment help shape the particularities of regional communities. Where tourism is central to such communities, reinforcing the place of human social networks and cultural economy footings can provide insight into resilience building in tourism-centred regional contexts.

Regional resilience and human social networks The lexicon of regional resilience and the ideas that underline it are drawn from regional development research that Yamamoto (2011: 723) argues may be ‘interpreted as a reflection of the rising awareness of increased socio-economic and environmental uncertainties, as well as a reaction to the disproportionate theoretical focus on regional growth’. One of the most critical questions when it comes to regional resilience and the wider regional economic geography discourse is the question ‘Why do some regions manage to overcome short-term or long-term economic adversity to maintain a high quality of life for regional residents while others fail?’ (Christopherson, Mitchie & Tyler, 2010: 3–4). More importantly, visible and enduring evidence of ‘rural decline’ is emblematic of the changing context and why enhancing the adaptive capacities of communities in regional settings is ever more pressing (McManus et al., 2012). Multivalent conceptualizations of regional areas are often juxtaposed alongside distance largely as an inhibitor of progress at the periphery. However, Young (2006: 264) argues for a rethink suggesting that a ‘re-conceptualization of distance understands it to be a key site of both opportunity and inequality in complex rural economies’. The implications for the framing of regional resilience makes certain that enhancing the capacity of local social human networks (i.e. local level actors) can pave way for optimizing opportunities, despite the limitations inherent in distance from metropoles (Lun, Pechlaner, & Volgger, 2016). Moreover, it is the networks within which actors cohabit and collaborate where resilience momentum

66  Joseph M. Cheer can come but this is often reliant on overarching mechanisms (planning and policy) that support regional capacity building (Eraydin, 2016). Self-organization within human social networks is critical to resilience building and in particular mechanisms that foster local control and agency (Adger, 2003). In regional contexts, such agencies tend to be curtailed by policy and planning that centralizes rather than localizes controls making human social networks in situ redundant and consequently at odds with each other. Thus, self-organization becomes an ideal that local and regional authorities set out to achieve in the development of the visitor economy but unless policy and planning frameworks foster the agency of decentralized social human networks, cohesion and cooperation is curtailed. In situations where populations and economic sectors are in decline, or where underlying composition of social human networks are changing, self-organization gives way to Darwinian conceptions of survival and conflict, thus hampering local level resilience building (McHenry, 2011). Examining regional resilience has therefore become ever more urgent given the tendency for peripheral areas to experience more intense effects from internal and external shocks generated by the vicissitudes of the broader national and global economies, as well as wider climatic and environmental changes. The term regional resilience is argued to have become ‘popular because of its association with regional adaptation’ (Christopherson, Mitchie & Tyler, 2010: 3). Notwithstanding definitional limitations, regional resilience presents as a complex combination of factors, processes, and responses (Clarke, Huang, & Walsh, 2010: 1). The place of humans and human agency and their institutions in the examination of regional resilience is key to examining the nature and extent to which a region’s adaptive capacity can be mobilized (Chapin et al., 2004: 344). This is so for regional destinations where tourism is integral to economic stability of townships and is a key pillar of intersectoral linkages. The links between regional resilience and innovation systems is especially pertinent when it comes to illuminating the way regional tourism persists in practice given the focus on growth and competitiveness as a mark of successful regional economies (Clark, Huang, & Walsh, 2010). Inter and intra-regional competition also influences regional resilience but leadership in economic development planning is argued to be most fundamental (Cowell, 2013). Innovation capacity is another determinant of regional resilience and ‘policies that encourage small-firm innovation have broad benefits for regional economies’ (Clark, Huang, & Walsh, 2010). This is especially pertinent for the visitor economy in regional settings where small businesses proliferate across intersectoral boundaries – from services to farm gate and artisan enterprises (Sidali, Kastenholz, & Bianchi, 2015). The resilience of regional economies is a corollary to evolutionary economic geography discourses that give emphasis to reinforcing institutional capacities, especially innovation as a marker of optimizing adaptive capacity (Clark, Huang, & Walsh, 2010). For typical sectors in regional settings like agriculture, fisheries, and tourism, a dependence on one sector or another heightens vulnerability to change, especially to competition, changing terms of trade, policy changes, and wider macro and micro economic pressures. Regional areas that have become

Resilience in the visitor economy  67 locked into particular development paths must develop adaptive capacities to such change, however reshaping well established trajectories is a formidable task requiring considerable structural change (Tonts, Plummer, & Argent, 2014). Evolutionary economic geography thinking and social resilience are abiding constructs on account of the connectedness between regional and small-town economies, and community resilience and the development of social capital (Brouder 2014; Brouder & Eriksson, 2013; Imperiale & Vanclay, 2016). This is especially pertinent given discernible trends in the slow decline of rural townships because of structural economic changes that tend to take place, especially the decline of longstanding industries, as well as the rationalization and corporatization of small holdings into large corporate entities (McManus et al., 2012). Typically the shift has been away from traditional family-based agricultural enterprises including livestock and crops towards niche, high value alternatives, and very often these are linked into tourism’s fledgling gastronomy and wine connections. This can serve to build regional resilience through the development of unique comparative advantage (Lee, Wall, & Kovacs, 2015). The importance of local social human networks in resilience building assumes that particular ‘local conditions and processes are critical in moulding development’ (Tonts et al., 2014: 373). This is especially pertinent, if as McManus et al. (2012: 21) argue, that ‘a sense of belonging and social participation can mitigate against such decline’. Indeed social human networks have long been reified as a distinguishing quality of peripheral communities; however in the midst of significant structural socio-economic changes, the underlying social human networks are prone to disintegrate. Alberti and Giusti (2012) propose the notion of ‘social clusters’ or social human networks by another name, whose express goals are to optimize regional competitiveness underlined by a sense of belonging of cluster actors. When it comes to harnessing regional human social networks for resilience, the social capital of stakeholder cohorts is critical to optimizing collaboration and harnessing of political goodwill (Saxena & Ilbery, 2008). However, in practice as evidenced in the GOR region, this is an abiding constraint that has hindered resilience building in the visitor economy. More often rather than offering binding and cohesive drivers for positive progress, it has often manifested as conflict or ambivalence impeding the building of capacity in the visitor economy. Perhaps this is an in inherent weakness in regionalism that tries to foster inclusivity and consensus amongst competing constituents (Iyer, Kitson, & Toh, 2005). Nurturing effective human social networks in regional contexts must then realize inclusive vision setting that promotes shared values and aspirations (Fox et al., 2015).

Cultural economy, regional tourism, and resilience Through assuming a cultural economy perspective, the particular aspect of the resilience discourse addressed here ruminates on social dimensions of people and place, including nuanced socio-economic, cultural, and political contexts. While Gibson and Kong (2005) argue that the term cultural economy is multivalent,

68  Joseph M. Cheer it is principally situated at the juncture where dual terminologies of culture and economy intersect, and where the visitor economy pivots, thus exemplifying its particular nuance. Further, the discourse on cultural economy is acknowledged as a critical plank of human and tourism geographies and ‘part of a wider set of complex relationships which is the economy’ (Gibson & Kong, 2005: 542). Gibson’s (2012: 282) assertions that the terms ‘“culture” and “economy” were questioned as “natural” categorical orderings, and geographers sought to examine how the boundaries between them were in fact more blurry than first presumed’ underpins the alignment of cultural economy and community resilience referenced. In principle, though, the term cultural economy assumes notions of ‘sense of place’ of which cultural capital and its links to the political economy is central. Sense of place embodies historical and contemporary inheritances as well as sense of identity and ownership. In the case of the GOR region, the cultural economy is dominated by a ‘sense of place’ that is underpinned by twin idylls of the seaside or coast, as well as that of the countryside or bush, to use Australian parlance. Sense of place here is intrinsically linked to notions of quality of life, and the maintenance of values linked to natural and cultural landscapes (Jepson & Sharpley, 2015). This describes the complex web of human social networks, all of which are tied into settler histories largely dominated by agriculture, timber, and pastoral narratives initially, and now more about innovation in the services (tourism in particular) and high value primary industries sectors (for example wine, dairy, and niche produce). The cultural economy of the region has come to be defined by the ambience and pristineness of the region, typified by sparsely populated townships, expansive national parks, and stringent control of built structures and public infrastructure. However, this context is changing rapidly in response to growing populations, migration, and associated demands for economic expansion and infrastructure development. The resilience of the cultural economy in the GOR has traditionally depended on the vitality of the local agricultural commodities-based economy, and on effectively negotiating the vicissitudes in the value and prices of primary production. With the pressure of fluctuations in commodities prices, established corporatization of agricultural holdings, dwindling and aging local populations and increasing demands for economic diversification, the propensity for tourism development is propelled by the drive to forge stronger intersectoral ties (for example in agritourism) and develop what unique natural and cultural values there are. This is what Hall et al. (2013: 74) refer to when they argue that ‘vulnerabilities to contingent marginality are generally regarded as relatively amenable to amelioration by making places more “competitive”’. Consequently, segueing the cultural economy alongside tourism is often deployed to optimize shortfalls in competitiveness elsewhere (Sidali, Kastenholz, & Bianchi, 2015). In recent times, impending change driven by the ushering in of new people as holiday home owners or part-time residents, and the shift from primary industries or agrarian-based local economies to more diversified contexts dominated by the visitor economy is imposing pressure on the cultural economy – defined by townships and communities in the GOR region. This is exemplified by growing

Resilience in the visitor economy  69 numbers of itinerant residents during peak summer periods (December to January) as contrasted with unoccupied or vacant houses during the quiet winter (June to September) periods. The implications for basic services including schools and hospitals has been dire with the gradual diminishments of such services occurring over time in accordance with dwindling numbers of permanent residents. These changes have been propelled by economic and demographic transformations following several decades of structural shifts in the wider state context. Such developments are central to the changing nature of community resilience and the cultural economy, and test the adaptive capacities of what are typically tightknit groups (Bell & Jayne, 2010; Carneiro, Lima, & Silva, 2012). While the term community resilience can be defined variously, Imperiale and Vanclay’s (2016: 205) definition that this encompasses ‘social survival processes that occur within places and that are put into action by local communities to address the negative social and economic impacts experienced during crises’ is adopted. Such a definition articulates the critical role that human social networks play in determining social-ecological resilience. This can be extended to not only infer resilience in response to crises, but resilience that is predicated on proactive community action with the intention to plan for and mitigate the impacts of crises that originate within the region, or as a result of broader shocks outside. In regional and small-town contexts, community resilience tends to be underpinned by the quality of social capital and adaptive capacities in times of crises (Cooke, Clifton, & Oleaga, 2005). In turn, this shapes the cultural economy, and the extent to which the visitor economy is allowed to proliferate. In paying particular attention to the juncture between the cultural economy and regional resilience in the Great Ocean Road region, that the visitor economy is a key feature underlying broader socio-ecological resilience is fundamental. The notion of panarchy (Holling, 2001), insofar as resilience in a regional context is concerned, ‘envisions a stylized set of interrelated, complex adaptive systems where smaller-scale systems are nested within larger-scale ones’ (Yamamoto, 2011: 726). In a sense, this describes the relationship of the visitor economy to multifarious sectors, constituents, and cooperatives that typically underpin regional contexts, as well as links to external modulating factors that impinge on the success or failure of regional tourism such as community cohesion, depth of the local economy and state of tourism infrastructure. The question raised by Christopherson et al. (2010) is pertinent because when it comes to examining the visitor economy in regional contexts, why some destinations have a tendency to flourish while others fade despite possessing cultural and natural landscapes that are amenable to development is fundamental. Furthermore, to what extent can intra-regional cooperation be facilitated given that so much about regional resilience is not only external to it, especially the extent to which stakeholders band together for region-wide benefit or conversely set out to entrench their positions? This is illustrative of the problematic nature of regionalism based on the general assumption that the entire region is in lock step and rowing in largely the same direction. The implications for the cultural economy are varied, however the essential consequence is that stakeholders in the region become fragmented

70  Joseph M. Cheer in their approach to the visitor economy and economic development pathways in general (Saxena & Ilbery, 2008). Inertia, ambivalence, and opposition are often the outcomes that result culminating in diminished adaptive capacities. Rather than intellectualize resilience in regional community settings, a ‘phenomenological observation of the social reality of resilience as it emerges and is activated in real situations’ is needed (Imperiale & Vanclay, 2016). A cultural economy perceptive to resilience emphasizes that central to social or community resilience is the extent to which social human networks are in synchrony. When it comes to the visitor economy, for regionalism to be supported, this assumes mutual advancement for stakeholders within extant social human networks. However, this is challenging, for when it comes to the visitor economy, open competition for visitor nights is prevalent between townships across the region, thus inhibiting the nurturing of enhanced social human networks. Special interest groups exacerbate this further with divergent views about the most appropriate development trajectory for the region. A cultural economy perspective emphasizes that peripherality need not only be a weakness to contend with: instead it seeks to exemplify the extent to which aspects of regional cultural landscapes may be negotiated as countervailing forces that draw on unique attributes. Conradson and Pawson (2009: 77) draw attention to the way peripheral areas have capitalized on the twin values of isolation and peripherality in a more positive light as ‘scenic and unspoiled’ instead. Underpinning the reframing of the cultural economy for greater community resilience is what Conradson and Pawson (2009: 85) describe as the shift from ‘conventional imaginaries of a resource frontier region are now accompanied, if not in some cases displaced, by an emphasis on scenic environments and Edenic otherness’. Such conceptualizations recasting localized cultural economy signifiers are instructive especially where the visitor economy is poised to complement primary sector production or make up for structural shifts from one sector to another. Slow change in the cultural economy of the GOR region is best exemplified by the socio-demographic changes taking place that underpin the nature of permanent residence in the region. Much of the demographic change is characterized by the following: 1 2 3 4

5

Aging profile of permanent residents – this has implications for services provision. Home-owner profile showing an increase in itinerant holiday home owners occupying homes only during peak holiday periods. Increase shift towards sharing economy in the leasing of holiday homes to tourists – this includes Airbnb and other similar online portals. Investor-driven demand for holiday houses underpinned by a favourable tax regime for investors is having an inflationary impact on real estate values. This is also exacerbated by the rigidity with which new building developments are allowed. Displacement of tourism industry workers who live outside the region because of poor housing affordability.

Resilience in the visitor economy  71 The implications of shifting socio-demographic frameworks for resilience in the visitor economy are profound not only in terms of place making and space, but also in terms of economic or business resilience. In evoking economic regional resilience, Martin et al. (2016: 581) emphasize that ‘regional cyclical resistance and recoverability’ underpins regional development, and the current cycle of socio-demographic change suggests an aggregation of resilience risk factors that may undermine the GOR region’s adaptive capacities.

The Great Ocean Road: a situation analysis The Great Ocean Road (GOR) region is situated in the southern Australian state of Victoria. Characteristic of Australia’s coastal geography, the region covers a vast expanse of the southwestern flank of the state and wedged in between Victoria’s capital city Melbourne to the east and neighboring state South Australia to the west. Melbourne serves as the centre in core-periphery contexts, with the GOR region serving as the epitome of peripheral coastal locations. Situated around 100 kilometres from Melbourne, the region’s boundaries stretch from the seaside town of Torquay to one of the key regional towns in the west of the state, Portland. The Great Ocean Road is one of twelve designated tourism regions in the state of Victoria and is by far the most visited insofar as international visitation is concerned (excluding the Melbourne metropolitan area as it not considered to be in regional Victoria). At the end of 2015, it recorded unprecedented arrivals that comprised of around 30 per cent of all international visitation to regional centres outside of Melbourne (Figure 4.4). This reflects the dominance of the Twelve

Melbourne West Gate Bridge Lake Colac

Geelong

Torquay (Bells Beach) ay R Anglesea Otw London d a Lorne Bridge Port Campbell n Ro a Wye River Oce t Loch Ard a Kennet River Gre Gorge Twelve Apollo Bay Apostles Cape Otway The Shipwreck Coast Colac

es ang

Figure 4.3  Great Ocean Road region including Melbourne Source: Tourism Australia Image Library.

Port Phillip Bay

72  Joseph M. Cheer 200 180 160

International visitation 000s

140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 2004

2006

2008

2010

2012

2014

2016

Daylesford and Macedon Ranges Geelong and the Bellarine Gippsland Goldfields Grampians Great Ocean Road Mornington Peninsula Murray Phillip Island Victoria's High Country Yarra Valley and Dandenong Ranges

Figure 4.4  International visitation to Victoria’s regions 2005–2015 Note: This data excludes the Melbourne metropolitan region and central business district. Source: Tourism Victoria, 2015

Apostles and Great Ocean Road to regional tourism in the state. The GOR region is inclusive of two tourism zones including Surf Coast and Shipwreck Coast. In terms of its spread across development regions, the GOR region principally encompasses two development zones, Barwon South and Barwon South West regions. The region’s history is steeped in its foundational role in the settlement of southern Australia where vast agricultural and pastoral operations were based as well as the once thriving fisheries sector. The focus on primary industries continues to dominate the region’s economy and in recent decades the growth in domestic and international tourism has added greater economic diversification to the region. Formerly a predominantly holiday-based destination, the region’s settlements closest to Melbourne have slowly developed into outlying ‘suburbs’ with many residents commuting to Melbourne or other regional centres for

Resilience in the visitor economy  73 work. The shift from being a resort and/or second home location to an emergent suburbia has meant a rapidly changing demographic with flow-on demands for infrastructure and services development. The challenges confronting the region are to a great extent archetypal of regional areas. This includes a steady increase in the numbers of aging cohorts and stagnant or declining populations. The departure of major employers and industries (especially manufacturing and extractive resource-based) in the region, including closure of the Ford automotive manufacturing plant and Alcoa aluminium smelter have reduced employment opportunities for job seekers in the region. In particular, youth unemployment rates remain stubbornly high creating incentive for outward migration of younger cohorts from the region. Essential public infrastructure has also been slow to develop and business and community groups have a tendency to be fragmented and divergent in attitudes towards change in the region. As a consequence of this backdrop, the visitor economy has risen to prominence. For the most part, tourist imaginaries and their actual experiences of the GOR region are dominated by the Great Ocean Road itself – a coastal highway of around 240 kilometres linking the region’s eastern flank with the west and traversing through key coastal settlements including Torquay, Lorne, Apollo Bay, and Port Campbell (Figure 4.1). The Great Ocean Road is lauded as one of the world’s foremost coastal roads with stunning seaside vistas adjacent to a backdrop of native Australian flora and wildlife. Developed as a memorial to Australian soldiers killed in World War One, the road was carved out of the rugged coast by returned servicemen. Now an Australian National Heritage listed site, the road is a single lane, dual carriageway that has struggled to keep pace with increasing traffic flows and is prone to closure as a result of landslides and bush fires. Where tourism and destination branding is concerned, the region’s iconography is dominated by the Twelve Apostles, naturally forming limestone rock stacks situated along the wilderness beaches of Bass Strait (Figure 4.2) (TRA, 2013). The Twelve Apostles are located within the bounds of the Port Campbell National Park and the offshore Twelve Apostles Marine National Park. While on the one hand the Twelve Apostles are tremendously effective in promoting visitation to the region, its proximity within three hours’ drive of Melbourne means that it has become subject to being viewed as a day-visit destination only. Unlike many regional destinations where the lack of an icon is often the case, the Twelve Apostles offer the region outstanding iconography that is intensely mobilized in marketing for the region, state, and nation (Huang et al., 2016). However, the predominance of a singular icon leads to a disproportionate focus on it at the expense of other sites in the region. This has had the perverse effect of enhancing single-mindedness in visitors about the region’s offerings. Three key townships dominate the visitor economy in the GOR region: Lorne, Apollo Bay, and Port Campbell. In all three cases, the peak period for visitation occurs from December to February during the warmer summer months coinciding with annual school holidays. This generates a surge of activity and accommodation is typically at maximum occupancy levels. As is the case with holiday destinations

74  Joseph M. Cheer

Figure 4.5  Author with students at the Great Ocean Road Memorial Arch Source: Author.

Figure 4.6  Great Ocean Road and the Twelve Apostles near Port Campbell Source: Tourism Australia Image Library.

during peak periods, the complexion of the townships is transformed from docile coastal locales into vibrant coastal hotspots teeming with visitors and temporary residents. Long-term residents tend to be perturbed and annoyed about the change in the ‘sense of place’ that they cherish and value, and see tourism development as antithetical to maintaining their intrinsic amenity and ambience.

Resilience in the visitor economy  75 Lorne township Lorne is around two-hour’s drive from the Melbourne central business district putting it within easy reach of day-trippers. Its proximity to Melbourne explains its historical trajectory, first as a site for the Gadubanud people before the arrival of Europeans, then after European settlement, as a resort town for Melbournians and others during the Gold Rush of the 1800s. During the Gold Rush era, with the gold mining region north east of the GOR region and the city of Ballarat, the state was considered one of the wealthiest per capita in the world. In more recent times, this longstanding history as a resort town has driven its popularity as a site for beach houses and second homes owned by out-of-town expatriates from the capital Melbourne. Apollo Bay The township of Apollo Bay is a further fifty kilometres west along the Great Ocean Road towards the Victoria-South Australia state boundary. The township owes its establishment to the vast timber harvesting industry of the past, as well as a once thriving fisheries sector. The construction of the Great Ocean Road was pivotal to its emergence on account of it being the largest township in close proximity to the Twelve Apostles. It has also become a more affordable (relative to Lorne) site for the purchase of beach houses by Melbournians and as the first stop on day tours en route to the Twelve Apostles. Port Campbell The little seaside hamlet Port Campbell stands in close proximity to the Twelve Apostles. At around twelve kilometres from the Twelve Apostles it is favourably located as a staging point for visitors to the iconic attraction. Its history is underlined by its central location to the Shipwreck Coast whose name is derived from the scores of ships that were destroyed on its coast in the early years of the state. Its links are most prominently drawn to the vast agricultural and grazing areas in Western Victoria. However, tourism has emerged in recent decades given its picturesque location and subdued development. The major binding constraints on the expansion of the visitor economy in the GOR region are centred around the contested nature of new development, especially the implication of any such developments on maintaining the region’s ‘natural’ amenity by upholding optimum natural values (Parks Victoria, 2015). This is epitomized at Apollo Bay and Port Campbell where tourism development has become subject to acrimonious politicking where long-term conservative political representation in the region has largely favoured a ‘do nothing’ approach to development in response to lobbying from constituents against change (McColl, 2014). Consequently, the stymieing of socially and economically progressive initiatives, especially that are focused on visitor economy development in and around what are considered green conservation zones have blunted the expansion of infrastructure and relative competitiveness. This has had adverse implication for visitor length of stay and associated expenditures in the region.

76  Joseph M. Cheer The uneven attention on the Twelve Apostles hampers efforts to retain tourist expenditure in the region and discourages wider visitation on account of common perceptions that this is the only thing worth seeing. As a consequence, a burgeoning day tour market has developed framed around a morning departure from the Melbourne CBD with an early evening return. This has meant that the dispersal of visitation beyond the Twelve Apostles and the Great Ocean Road itself has been seriously constrained. Additionally, this is exacerbated by destination marketing that has generally focused on the Twelve Apostles iconography at the expense of promoting stronger emphasis and a variety of other opportunities in the region, including food and wine, agritourism, and nature-based and adventure related products. The key vulnerabilities for the Great Ocean Road centre on the frequency of extreme climate events especially instances of unseasonably hot summers that have led to serious bushfire emergencies. The occurrence of bushfires is a particularly grave risk given the dense undergrowth and forests widespread throughout the region. Additionally, recent flash floods have led to sections of the Great Ocean Road becoming prone to landslides and rock falls and having to be closed off to all road traffic. Given the limitations of a singular coastal highway (one way in and one way out), closure of the Great Ocean Road due to such incidents often result in lost visitation and serious inconvenience, especially to time critical tour operators. The importance of the visitor economy in the Great Ocean Road region is exemplified by the attitude of the state’s governing organization for regional and rural development, Regional Development Victoria (RDV) is highlighting it as a key driver of peripheral area development. However, despite supporting political rhetoric for expansion of the visitor economy, negotiating the roadblocks of development resistant constituents and conservative political governance frameworks continue to hinder capacity building efforts. This has meant that GOR region communities that have developed a great reliance on tourism are vulnerable to competition for the international visitor from other regions (Fox et al., 2015). Additionally, the outdated and often inadequate tourism infrastructure has diminished visitor satisfaction and discouraged expansion of overnight stays in the region. Negotiating the political economy and the inherently political nature of the visitor economy is fundamental to attaining outcomes that strengthen the sector’s capacities and resilience. The fact that attitudes towards growing the visitor economy is contested and reflected in political outcomes (Lew, Ng, Ni, & Wu, 2016) is a truism in the region. Statewide and local level politics are key drivers of investments in the visitor economy and in many cases tourism is presented in opposition to some of the more traditional sectors like agriculture and timber on account of its competition for space and budgetary support. Political influence is also pervasive in the contestations that centre on development or conservation of areas prized for their high natural values and more often than not, the present political climate has led to staving off development. In an effort to enhance the resilience of the region’s tourism sector, its peak industry body, Great Ocean Road Regional Tourism (GORRT) is driving

Resilience in the visitor economy  77 advocacy that seeks to knit together region-wide stakeholder sectoral cohesion. Much of its emphasis is in building greater resilience in the visitor economy, centred on optimizing two key variables: visitor yield and dispersal throughout the region. However, this has encountered significant barriers given the inherent challenges in initiatives to build regional cooperation, especially the competition for visitor nights amongst several townships in the region. As a consequence, broad consensus is that the region’s visitor economy infrastructure will fail to meet significant growth projects if the status quo remains unchanged (Urban Enterprise, 2015). Additionally the experience of objections to development plans to enhance visitor economy infrastructure has meant that GORRT spends a great deal of effort building political consensus to underpin urgently needed change.

Conclusion: on resilience in regional tourism and slow change in the GOR region Regional tourism development, like regional development in general, is argued to require a bottom-up approach, where small firms drive innovation and entrepreneurship and decentralization, away from national and state governance to local models of control and management (Ateljevic, 2009). Yet as evidenced in the GOR, in practice, regional tourism capacity building is still very much dependent on centralized mechanisms for decision making especially planning, policy, infrastructure development, and destination marketing. Furthermore, centralized institutions end up serving multiple regional ‘masters’ who have a tendency to be direct competitors for the same pool of visitors, thus creating dissonance regarding which of the regions have the greatest comparative advantage and resilience to market fluctuations, and therefore the predisposition for tourism expansion. Table 4.1  Vulnerability factors in the Great Ocean Road region Vulnerability factor

Description of vulnerability factor

Extreme climate events

Mud slides Rock falls Bush fires

Road infrastructure

Road signage limitation (in English language only) State authority hampered in efforts to prioritise road maintenance and improvement

Political economy inertia

Predominance of conservative political perspectives Sense that agriculture should be prioritised above tourism Planning schemes limited Development-conservation deadlock

Economic restructuring

Decline of traditional sectors – fisheries and forestry

Socio-demographic change

Ageing population High density of ‘holiday homes’ Rationalisation of rural and farming allotments

78  Joseph M. Cheer In rural and regional political economy settings where slow, incremental shifts from agriculture and other primary industries to service-based economies such as tourism have taken hold, they have proved to be unsettling and disruptive to established community social and economic systems (Srisomyong & Meyer, 2015). This is especially so for families and communities who have been engaged in the region-forming industries such as agriculture, fisheries, and timber. While the latter two sectors have diminished in their importance, agriculture, especially dairy farming and shifts to high value processing, has endured. These shifts compound community uncertainties, ambivalence, and at times outright hostility to the demands of the visitor economy. This is especially so where disruption to established norms are prevalent including the construction of new tourism infrastructure, intensification of development in coastal zones, increased prevalence of ‘out of towners’, and overcrowding. Three key townships that dominate the visitor economy in the GOR region, Lorne, Apollo Bay, and Port Campbell vary in their adaptive capacities because each is subject to varying practical constraints, especially because of their distance from the metropolitan centre and the extent to which they support tourism infrastructure facilitates growth opportunities. The key constraint to enhanced resilience in the region’s visitor economy is the enhancement of the product and experience portfolio for the region, in particular, moving beyond the emphasis on the iconic Twelve Apostles towards promoting the region’s wider experience spectrum. In the main, several emergent themes are clear in the drive towards enhancing the resilience of the visitor economy in the GOR region. Balance between development and conservation Striking the balance between tourism expansion into the mostly undeveloped coastal environs and maintaining the prized natural values of the region is an ongoing tussle between stakeholders, either side of this debate (Lew et al., 2016). This is especially troublesome when vocal stakeholders are itinerant holiday home owners who seek to maintain the coastal idyll at the expense of expanding available tourism infrastructure. This is limiting given the need for a wider range of accommodation and experience options across the region. Very often, objections to expansion of tourism infrastructure comprise appealing against development plans and building local groundswells against such initiatives. This is a constraint to making the tourism sector more competitive and resilient against competitive pressures from other regions. Vulnerability to extreme climate events persists The threat of bushfires in the region is an annual threat especially during the peak warmer months from November to January. The success at remediating formerly logged areas into thriving forests, coupled with vast areas of National Park coverage have presented fertile grounds for such events, albeit unintentionally. Similarly, flood and rock slides featured prominently in 2016 and have had

Resilience in the visitor economy  79 the same effect of closing the region off with dire consequences for the visitor economy. Fundamental to dealing with resilience against extreme climate events is the development of coherence amongst government agencies and visitor economy stakeholders. Accessibility to the region is easily compromised The incidence of extreme weather events has meant that the inherent vulnerability of reliance on the Great Ocean Road as the main access to the heart of the region is a binding constraint to greater resilience in the visitor economy. While there are other non-coastal road routes that lead to the various townships from inland, they do not epitomize the grandeur of the Great Ocean Road and are just as vulnerable to closure given their proximity and location to steep escarpments and heavily forested areas. The consequence of closing the Great Ocean Road has been exemplified in recent times resulting in lost visitation and damaging publicity. This also raises the risk premium for future developers and investors towards investing in the region and acts as a dampener to associated infrastructure development, especially to making improvements to the Great Ocean Road itself. The state of visitor economy infrastructure is limiting The tendency is for planning provisions to favour ‘do nothing’ at the expense of bolstering the range and standard of accommodation in the region. Partly responsible for this is the insistence on maintaining optimum natural values (Parks Victoria, 2015) as well as political reluctance to engage in developments on a large scale. Initiatives including the encroachment into national parks for environmentally friendly infrastructure have bolstered defences against such developments and citing them as entry points to larger, less sustainable developments. Consequently, the state of limbo that exists in relation to visitor economy infrastructure continues to persist. Sense of place is multivalent and therefore contentious For many in the GOR region, sense of place is typified by the coastal idyll embodied in seaside holiday villages. Moreover, the so-called sense of place is tied into social capital and human social networks that react adversely if the essence of the place is undermined. However the pragmatics of regional development concerns has meant that for others, giving up some aspects of sense of place for developments that build on community and economic resilience is a far greater imperative than maintaining the status quo for the sake of it. In the GOR, this has had the effect of constraining the development of the visitor economy and curtailing visitor length of stay and expenditure. The multi-valance of what is assumed to be sense of place has so far failed to find the sweet spot that enables expansion and development of the visitor economy while providing reassurance that amenity and natural values will not be overly compromised in the long run.

80  Joseph M. Cheer Curse of the icon Icons such as the Twelve Apostles offer rare competitive advantage especially when they are intrinsically tied into the branding of destinations and the development of tourist imaginaries. For icons to underpin greater resilience in the visitor economy, focus should be refracted to shed more intense light on a wider portfolio of experience variables. This is largely a visitor economy governance issue that must exploit cultural economy variables and ensure that social human networks are aligned to leverage icons, but not have disproportionate focus on it. In conclusion, the call is for a more interventionist approach to building social resilience in regional tourism contexts beyond what governance and policy frameworks presently allow. Davoudi’s (2012: 305) point that ‘the adaptive cycle seems overly deterministic, not allowing for human intervention to break cycles through their ingenuity, technology and foresight’ is central to the fostering of greater resilience in the GOR region’s visitor economy. It seems that political oversight in the GOR region has sought to placate vociferous demonstrations in favour of maintaining the status quo. Thus rather than ‘slow change’, when it comes to building resilience in the region’s visitor economy, what is more apparent is ‘no change’. This has had massive implications and has served to undermine increasing visitor length of stay and optimization of visitor expenditures. It has also undermined community resilience where tourism offers the best prospects for economic specialization and diversification away from formerly important productive sectors. It is this type of inertia that arguably undermines resilience in the visitor economy, especially where competitive pressures are such that the lure to stay longer and spend more is diminished on account of underperforming infrastructures and unaligned human social networks. The implications for further research suggest the urgency for longitudinal actor-network analysis to comprehend just how social human networks can be best engaged is overdue. Overcoming ambivalence and objection to change is a vital starting point. Furthermore the identification of regional development measures (Luthe & Wyss, 2014) and mechanisms that effectively address feedback loops without getting mired in regional politics is another area in need of greater attention, especially approaches to overcoming ineffectual governance frameworks and timidity with the way required changes are put forward, discussed, and implemented. Prosser and Hunt (2000) also stated that when it comes to understanding what the drivers of a more resilience visitor economy are, promoting more research into destination development and economic modelling is fundamental. Above all, the key sentiment is that in seeking to define and reframe resilience of the visitor economy in regional contexts, social dimensions that determine overall resilience cannot be underestimated. In particular, the development of effective and cohesive social human networks that align with the cultural economy are critical variables in building social resilience and are both constructs underpinned by communities. As Davoudi (2012) and others have exclaimed, the resilience

Resilience in the visitor economy  81 discourse has long recognized the eco in socio-ecological resilience but have been slow to take up the social and its influence on slow change. This is especially pertinent in regional locations where the drive for regional development is putting pressure on both the social in terms of the demands on social capital, but also the ecological by way of looking to deploy natural capital that may potentially withdraw some of the natural values that have held pride of place.

Acknowledgements Special thanks are extended to key tourism sector organizations including Great Ocean Road Regional Tourism Pty Ltd, Lorne Business & Tourism Association, Twelve Apostles Tourism & Business Association, Parks Victoria, Cumberland Lorne Resort, Lorne Bush House Cottages, Portside Motel, Port Campbell Tourism Company, Apollo Bay Hostel, Popes of Timboon, Corangamite Shire and Surf Coast Shire. Individuals in the aforementioned partner organizations include Bill Fox, Liz Price, Peter Spring, Chris Tutungi, Ian Stewart, Clive Goldsworthy, Lee Gordon, John and Josie McInerney, David Pope, Ian Gibb, and Michael Emerson. I would also like to thank the group of Monash University Masters researchers including Rakshith Ramesh, Xuejiao Han (Eugena), Wantong Li (Winnie), Juan Ortiz-Reyes, Rida Hakeem, Julian Leysen, Syifaa Novianti, Celina Dos Anjos Fernandes Sousa and Miu Yin Cheung (Rebecca).

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5 Tourism and resilience on Jersey Culture, environment, and sea Christian Fleury and Henry Johnson

Introduction In an era of changing leading economies for the island of Jersey (from agriculture to tourism, and then to financial services – each having ebbs and flows over time), we identify the notion of resilience in the construction of a local brand for economic gain. The Stockholm Resilience Centre notes seven principles for building resilience, and we draw on aspects of this framework as a way of showing some of the ways that the island has adapted to a changing tourism environment. Jersey’s resilience in the tourism industry is especially noticeable in terms of maintaining diversity, where some niche tourism ventures are particularly visible. With its planning for the future, Visit Jersey (Jersey’s public-private tourism agency) explores other points that are noted in this list, such as managing connectivity, but in terms of what actually takes place. It is with diversity in such spheres as cultural, environmental, and sea tourism that the island has consolidated or developed in recent decades and continues to use in its current branding as a way of promoting the island to tourists.  This chapter contributes to theoretical and case-study discourse on tourism and resilience by analysing how Jersey has developed in terms of these three themes, and shows how resilience is intertwined in many spheres of island life. While some of the scholarly literature that has influenced the writing of this chapter is introduced throughout the work, it is important first to define some of the key ideas that permeate the discussion as a whole, especially in connection with ‘resilience’ and the field of Island Studies that considers islands on their own terms (McCall, 1994). Our use of the term relates to sustainable tourism and follows a definition that emphasizes such notions as ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptability’, and, just as Brand and Jax (2007) call for a descriptive definition of this notion, we use the term ‘island resilience’ to stress the geographically based heightened aspects of this notion that are so often part of everyday life when living on a small island (see also Cochrane, 2010; Davoudi, 2012; Lew et al., 2016; Shaw, 2012; Walker et al., 2012). Indeed, while drawing on Winnard et al. (2014) in connection with resilience and sustainability, we are influenced by the idea that ‘resilience involves the capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future’ (Jackson, 2006, p. 218).

86  Christian Fleury and Henry Johnson Similar perspectives have been stressed by scholars including Jackson who notes: ‘islandness can be a source of resilience in terms of shaping identity and sense of place’ (2006, p. 218). There is often a sense of heightened vulnerability for many islanders as a result of small island settings, particularly in terms of external influence, internal limitations, and sudden changes to the local economy. After several decades of a rapid decline in its tourism industry, Jersey is showing distinct tourism sustainability and regrowth by re-thinking its strategies for attracting staying tourists to the island and diversifying from a previous model of mass tourism to one of niche markets and a variety of specific offerings that are distinct to the island. In this context, tourism decline has been a driver for change that is reflected in island resilience and especially visible in the spheres of culture, environment, and sea. We approach the case studies from the perspective of discourse pertaining to business and economic resilience, which are both inherent in the context of the tourism industry on Jersey (including bottom-up and top-down strategies in the promotion of the island). Taken as a whole, business resilience for Jersey tourism relates to its objective of maintaining and growing the industry in a context of changing markets. In other words, sustainability and resilience should be viewed collectively as interconnected processes (Winnard et al., 2014). In terms of economic resilience, as a social science it should be viewed as a top-down process that comprises a part of Jersey’s economic planning, especially in terms of balancing diversification versus specialization (Pike, Dawley, & Tomaney (2010, p. 68). Exploration through the case studies helps show how island resilience on Jersey is locally defined and influential in shaping the island’s future as part of its ‘regional economic evolution’ (Martin 2012, p. 29). Islands are often the sites of much fascination, whether within the tourism industry or for other reasons (Baldacchino, 2010, 2012; Royle, 2001). In connection with tourism, many factors within this industry can have far-reaching influences on islands (e.g., Baldacchino, 2015; Baldacchino and Niles, 2011; Royle, 2001). Unlike some island tourist destinations that are influenced by the government in a mainland setting (e.g. Hamzah and Hampton, 2013), for the Channel Islands (the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey), and because they exist as almost de facto countries, resilience is observed as a result of influences that are predominantly because of changes either in local industries or external influences. In tourism theory, Butler’s (1980) concept of the ‘Tourist Area Life Cycle’ ‘puts forward five stages of resort evolution: ‘“exploration”, “involvement”, “development”, “consolidation” and, finally, “stagnation”’ (Hamzah and Hampton, 2013, p. 44). When applied to islands, such as in the work of Choy (1992) or Weaver (1990), the Tourist Area Life Cycle suggests a linear progression of change. However, the resilience theory offered by Holling (1973) prefers a model of adaptive cyclic resilience theory in four phases: ‘“reorganisation”, “exploitation”, “conservation” and “release”’ (Holling, 2001; Hamzah and Hampton, 2013, p. 45). Our study, however, focuses on a multidimensional adaptive cycle of resilience in terms of the reorganization of the local tourism brand, exploitation of local resources, and conservation of the environment. Each is seen underpinning the three case studies

Tourism and resilience on Jersey  87 that comprise the main part of the discussion: cultural tourism, environmental tourism, and sea tourism. The methods used in collecting data are primarily through a critical studies approach, drawing on literature in the fields of Island Studies, tourism, and resilience theory. In writing this chapter the authors offer an analysis of the content of the tourism literature on Jersey, and provide a critical discussion enhanced by personal experience living and conducting fieldwork on the island. Following a short outline of Jersey’s changing economies, the main part of the discussion focuses on three key themes of local concern that often interconnect with the tourism industry and exhibit resilience at their core: culture, environment, and sea.

History and changing economies History The Bailiwick of Jersey is a British Crown Dependency and functions much like a nation (Figure 5.1). The island of Jersey is 112 km² and has a population of about 100,000. There are several uninhabited reefs and islets, which have an important place for fisheries, conservation, and more recently for tourism. Jersey is not part of the United Kingdom, whose government is nonetheless responsible for its external affairs and defence, nor is it a part of the European Union. Apart from this, and in the same way as neighbouring Guernsey, the Bailiwick enjoys full political and economic independence with its own government, called the States of Jersey. This archipelagic location, which has been a ‘playground’ for different types of tourism over many decades, provides an island focus for discussing how resilience underpins the tourism industry in the contemporary era at a time of change, especially in terms of the culture of this small island setting, its fragile environment, and its relationship with the sea. In terms of Jersey’s resilience in response to a rapid decline of ‘staying visitors’ (i.e. not day trippers) in recent decades, as defined by Visit Jersey, this chapter shows how the tourism industry has responded to changing island economies and visitor preferences by developing new initiatives and managing connectivity to help realize the island’s vision for ‘a vibrant sustainable tourism industry’ (Visit Jersey, 2015b, n.p.), which is defined in this chapter as ‘sustainable development’ and ‘island resistance’ as part of a conceptual framework for exploring how Jersey has been re-branding its tourism industry. Since the conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy, in 1066, the Duchy of Normandy, including the Channel Islands, became part of a territorial unit extending to both sides of the English Channel. In 1204, King John (Lackland) lost mainland Normandy to King Philippe Augustus of France. However, for reasons that are unclear, there was then no mention that the Channel Islands should be returned to France, and it wasn’t until 1259 that Henri III officially surrendered his claim on Normandy. The paradoxical presence of foreign islands within a pronounced indentation of the French coastline contributed to an antagonistic relationship between France and England since the loss of the Norman mainland

88  Christian Fleury and Henry Johnson to France at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Jersey is located just 22 km off the French coast and this contributed to long periods of conflict between England and France, which eventually ended in 1815. However, there were further disputes over sovereignty of two reefs, the Écréhous and Minquiers, situated approximately midway between Jersey and the French mainland (Fleury & Johnson, 2015). One positive way of ensuring the loyalty of those living in the Channel Islands to the English Crown was by granting them the same rights and privileges they had enjoyed under previous dukes of Normandy. While retaining a tax system and legal regime quite different from those in England, Jersey and Guernsey gained broad autonomy on political and economic matters. When the Channel Islands split into two main political entities in the late thirteenth century each passed its own laws, held elections, and established representative political and legal bodies independent of those in England but loyal to the Crown. Jersey has made much of its geographic proximity in relation to its mostly UK visitor market. In this discussion, focus is given to the importance of resilience in the tourism industry in terms of not only how it has changed direction over the decades, but also in connection with the many ways it continues to underpin much island life and government priorities. Economies The Channel Islands have been, and continue to be, in-between territories for the direct benefit of many of their inhabitants. Their border situation has been for a long time a source of profit. Between 1689 and 1815, during what some historians call the Second Hundred Years’ War (Seeley, 1883), Jersey and Guernsey were especially well-placed to play a role in the naval competition between France and England. Around the same time, smuggling became an important source of income for those living on the islands. The immediate vicinity of France, where protectionism guided economic policy, offered excellent opportunities for smuggling, as did the binding regulations issued by the English government whose goal was to prevent the islands becoming a gateway for French goods. The Anglo-Norman maze, with its many islands, islets, reefs, rocks, and sandbanks surrounded by dangerous currents was a very convenient hub where both British and French goods and operators were able to trade (Ingouf-Knocker, 2000). Both privateering and smuggling provided a significant contribution to the emergence of a wealthy business class in the Channel Islands. Beside these activities, which ceased when peace came with France, the geographical footprint of the Anglo-Norman entrepreneurs extended over longer horizons. In the 1760s, the Jersey entrepreneur Charles Robin (1743–1824) founded the Charles Robin and Company firm that organized the control of the lucrative cod fisheries of Gaspesia in Canada (Lepage, 1983; Ommer, 1991). At the same time, connections were reinforced between Jersey and Guernsey merchants by familial and business links, and numerous sea routes led ships from the Channel Islands towards the five continents (McLoughlin, 1997, pp. 101, 118–119), hence introducing them as places integrated in global financial and trade networks.

Tourism and resilience on Jersey  89 In the nineteenth century, agriculture and tourism gained a growing role in the Anglo-Norman economies (Thomas, 2006). The development of agriculture stemmed from a combination of favourable cultivation factors (temperature, sunlight, rainfall, soil) (Monteil, 2005). Founded on a widespread pattern through Great Britain, the local corporation societies – named Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society, and Royal Guernsey Agricultural and Horticultural Society – were dedicated to crop management from seed breeding to commercialization. Along with potatoes, the cattle industry has been the other most iconic production they dealt with. The high point of their action was the early publication of herd books, respectively in 1866 in Jersey and 1881 in Guernsey. From the middle of the nineteenth century, tourism was another pillar on which the Anglo-Norman economies relied. In the British context, the Channel Islands were well-placed to benefit from the emerging craze for sea-bathing. The Southampton steamers brought tourists into the islands to enjoy the AngloNorman exoticism and benefit from a better climate attributed to both their insularity and the Gulf Stream. This traditional tourist trade stayed high until the last few decades of the twentieth century, when it changed due to increasing competition from cheaper sunshine destinations now served by low-cost airlines and to which many British tourists had shifted. This fall of competitiveness led to a drastic decrease of accommodation capacity on the two main islands, and the authorities began to focus on niche-oriented tourism as a way of redeveloping and upgrading the local tourist industry. At the same time as agriculture and tourism were at their peak, the finance industry soon developed due to the local banking-friendly environment. The local tax system is particularly suited to the demands of rich people and companies seeking to optimize both the yield and the taxation of their assets. Together with all business services, the finance industry contributed around 42 per cent GVA (gross value added) in 2013 of the GDP (gross domestic product) (States of Jersey Statistics Unit, 2015, p. 2). It is in this context of integration in global financial networks that Jersey launched a proactive strategy to promote local identity.

Resilience Visit Jersey (2015a) has produced a destination plan for the island. Along with 21 recommendations, the organization notes four drivers of tourism growth that fit within its plan: market development; image development; access development; and destination development (Visit Jersey, 2015a, p. 7). Such a plan is important for the island, but especially because of the decline of the tourist industry in recent decades. That is, the number of staying leisure visits from the UK (70 per cent of the market) has halved since 1992 (Visit Jersey, 2015a, pp. 10, 16), and in 2014, tourism, which includes hotels, restaurants, and bars, produced income worth 3.8 per cent of the island’s total GVA with 701,000 visits (Visit Jersey, 2015a, pp. 8, 10). The rise of tourism in the post-World War Two era is noted by Hampton (1995, p. 1), who points out that in 1947 Jersey had 224,000 arrivals, and by 1961 the number was 560,000.1 Between 1992 and 2014 the number of accommodation

90  Christian Fleury and Henry Johnson establishments dropped from 393 to 139, and bed spaces from 24,770 to 11,554 (Visit Jersey, 2015a, p. 19). However, it was only in 1971 that tourism was Jersey’s main industry and financial services contributed just 9 per cent of GDP and 3.3 per cent of employment – agriculture contributed 10 per cent of GDP and 12 per cent of the workforce (Hampton and Christensen, 2007, p. 1003). Today, the island, through Visit Jersey, has an aim of increasing visitor numbers and visitor spending over the next few decades, with a target of 800,000 by 2020 and 1,000,000 by 2030 (Visit Jersey, 2015a, p. 26; Visit Jersey, 2015b, n.p.; see also Oxera, 2012). In 2016, for instance, visitor numbers had risen to its highest January figure for six years with 5228 tourists (Jersey Evening Post, 2016b). Visit Jersey has implemented a plan that uses a three-pronged approach: nurture, grow, and make (Visit Jersey, 2015a, p. 36). The idea of ‘nurture’ concerns existing visitors: ‘These are our existing loyal segments of typically more mature travellers. But they have not delivered growth over the past decade. Visitors typically rely heavily on travel intermediaries for holiday itineraries and book with travel agents’ (Visit Jersey, 2015a, p. 37). ‘Grow’ relates to a potential growth area for the island, including mid-week and short breaks, occupation (or dark) tourism (Lennon and Foley, 2000), and weddings (Visit Jersey, 2015a, p. 38). Lastly, ‘Make’ refers to attracting long-haul visitors from across the globe. Resilience in the tourism industry is now discussed in this part of the chapter in connection with three spheres of island life that show distinct traits of contributing to sustaining tourism as an integral part of Jersey’s economy. That is, the discussion focuses on a distinct island resistance in connection with cultural tourism, environmental tourism, and sea tourism that are shown as developing parts of Jersey’s businesstourism interconnections. Cultural tourism Jersey makes much of its cultural heritage in its tourism branding. In a context of several decades of declining tourism, there has been a distinct emphasis placed on niche tourism in terms of foregrounding aspects of Jersey’s unique history, heritage, and culture. In other words, focus is given to offering visitors aspects of Jersey that differ distinctly from other destinations and includes older and more recent features found on the island. While the island’s heritage sites such as castles, occupation history, and Neolithic tombs have long been promoted to tourists through a paradigm that espouses heritage learning, more recently a number of events have been foregrounded, expanded, or invented that offer new ways of promoting Jersey to a niche tourist market (Thomas and Thomas, 2012). As well as the island’s Battle of Flowers carnival (held since 1902), Liberation Day events (commemorating the island’s liberation in 1945 after five years of German occupation), and many other attractions, Visit Jersey (2016) actively promotes several events that emphasize local cultural traditions such as Black Butter (Le Niere Buerre) making and the Cider Festival (La Faîs’sie d’Cidre). The former event was once a local tradition amongst apple growers and, although apple growing has declined

Tourism and resilience on Jersey  91 much over the decades as agricultural crops have changed, the National Trust for Jersey nowadays holds a heritage event each year that has framed tradition in a present-day celebration of past agricultural importance. The Cider Festival is a similar event, which is promoted by Jersey Heritage and includes music, poetry, and various activities (Jersey Heritage, 2016). In addition to such neo-traditional events, the promotion of Jersey’s indigenous language, Jèrriais, has been the focus of several local organizations, educators, and cultural activists over the last few decades, which has been inspired as a result of the language (a Norman language) going into rapid decline and becoming severely endangered with fewer than 100 fluent speakers on the island (States of Jersey Statistics Unit, 2012, p. 56). In this context of niche tourism, Visit Jersey’s (2015c) tourist brochure for the island brands Jersey with a number of terms and images that are typical of this sphere of tourism promotion. Even the title of the brochure itself, ‘pureJersey’, which is placed on the front cover of the booklet with a sunset picture and a young couple venturing into the sea, has a primary purpose of portraying distinct images of the island: beaches, sun, water, environment, and tranquillity. The terminology of the brochure’s title adds to the meaning and offers a concept that implies that other places might not be as pure as Jersey. The opening text on the inside cover helps brand the island in ways that are intended to make it appealing to a broad client base: ‘Its diverse attractions and natural beauty offer something for everyone and make it an ideal destination for short breaks, romantic weekends, active experiences, foodie getaways and family summer holidays’ (Visit Jersey, 2015c). Here, Jersey is shown to have much to offer and is especially ‘natural’ and ‘romantic’. The opening statement is reinforced by a quasi-contents page that highlights some of the brochure’s main features: Coast with the most Green scene We’ve got history We’ve got taste Activity Island Family memories Suite dreams.

(Visit Jersey, 2015c, p. 1)

Each of these themes builds on the ‘pure’ idea by offering an aspect of the island along with an accompanying concept, such as taste, memories, or dreams. Further, and connecting to the idea of ‘pure’, later in the brochure the brand ‘Genuine Jersey’ is introduced: ‘To enjoy the best of what Jersey has to offer, visitors should look for the Genuine Jersey Mark – a guarantee of local provenance’ (Visit Jersey, 2015c, p. 28). Genuine Jersey is a government sponsored private association of local businesses that promotes local produce (Johnson, 2012). Its inclusion in tourism marketing helps add to the metaphor of pure Jersey (i.e. genuine and authentic) and contributes to the branding of local tourism operations that help make Jersey distinct.

92  Christian Fleury and Henry Johnson Cultural tourism in connection with Jersey’s heritage and niche markets is further found with some types of accommodation on offer. For example, Jersey Heritage has developed a number of heritage sites where visitors can experience first-hand some of the island’s heritage buildings that are far different from the more usual accommodation of hotels, guest houses, and self-catering apartments. While Jersey Heritage will not attract mass tourism such as that experienced by the island in its heyday of package holidays in the 1970s or 1980s, what such an enterprise offers is twofold. First, it adds to a niche tourism market in terms of the type of accommodation that is on offer; and second, it further highlights the importance of heritage for the island in the promotion of tourism more broadly. A brief look at some of Jersey Heritage’s niche accommodation sites will help show the scope of the type of site on offer: • • • • • • • • • • • •

Radio Tower: Built by German occupying forces during World War Two. Barge Aground: Built in the 1930s and the last of a number of seaside follies that were once a feature of St Ouen’s Bay. Fort Leicester: A nineteenth-century fort. Hamptonne: A restored farmhouse offering several self-catering apartments. Kempt Tower: A Martello tower built in 1834. La Crête Fort: A sixteenth-century fort.  Fisherman’s Cottage: An eighteenth-century cottage. Seymour Tower: A defence tower built in 1792 and two miles offshore. Archirondel Tower: A defence tower built in 1792. Lewis’s Tower: A defence tower built in 1835. L’Etacquerel Fort: A nineteenth-century fort. Elizabeth Castle: Dating from around 1590, this fortification is one mile offshore from St Helier. (Jersey Heritage, 2016)

Each of these sites has heritage value for Jersey that covers many years of history, including defences against the French, defence during German occupation, and leisure. By developing such accommodation options, Jersey Heritage not only adds further choice for visitors, but it also contributes by consolidating local heritage within the tourism sphere and promoting such sites more broadly as part of the island’s brand. Environmental tourism The environment forms a significant part of Jersey’s tourism resilience. As noted in the States of Jersey Island Plan (2011b), there are several types of environment identified for the island: natural, historic, and built. In this part of the discussion focus is given to the natural environment. In 1821, at the time of Jersey’s first census, the island’s population was 28,600, although by 1851 it had doubled to 57,000 (Kelleher, 1991, pp. 311, 449). After several decades of little growth, in the post-World War Two years Jersey’s

Tourism and resilience on Jersey  93 population grew rapidly from 55,224 in 1951 to over 100,000 in 2016 (States of Jersey, 2016; States of Jersey Statistics Unit, 2015, p. 39). The steady increase in population, as shown in Table 5.1 for the last seven censuses, helps indicate the exponential growth that the island has experienced and links to the growth of the financial services industry in more recent years at the same time as the decline of tourism. Further, it relates directly to political, media, and community concerns about the ideal size of the population for the size of the island (Jersey Evening Post, 2015). How this links with environmental tourism is twofold, and particularly significant when considering the fragile context of a small island culture (Baldacchino, 2006). First, as the population has increased the island has experienced considerable pressure on building properties, especially for first-time buyers, thus helping to foreground tension between urban development on the one hand and environmental protection on the other (after all, in tourism terms, the island’s natural environment is one of Jersey’s main attractions). Second, with the foregrounding of environmental concerns locally, and along with a global awareness of the planet’s fragile environment in a context of climate change and global warming, environmental tourism more broadly has grown as a further niche area of tourism for the island. As a result of such population growth, which was primarily to help resource the ever-growing financial services industry from the 1960s, the island has urbanized in many ways and in many locations. While the capital, St Helier, has expanded during these years, with it overspilling especially into the neighbouring parishes of St Clement and St Saviour, a number of smaller urban developments have taken shape at various locations around the island. As a reaction to urbanization’s encroachment of rural areas on the island, there have been a number of activities that have aimed to protect the island’s natural environment from further or unwarranted development.2 Such action has contributed to Jersey’s niche tourism industry, and offers a way of showing resilience in the face of the decline of mass tourism (Hampton, 1995). The government has noted clearly the importance of the island’s natural environment as an attraction to visiting tourists: Table 5.1  Jersey’s population: 1951 to 2011 Year

Population

1951

55,224

1961

59,489

1971

69,329

1981

76,050

1991

84,082

2001

87,186

2011

97,857

Source: Adapted from States of Jersey Statistics Unit (2012, p. 5).

94  Christian Fleury and Henry Johnson The countryside and coast form a significant part of the Island’s attraction to visitors and residents alike. The changes in the tourism industry towards catering for a more environmental or ‘green’ form of tourism are already being felt in the Island and will influence land-use planning in the countryside and along the coast in the future. (States of Jersey, 2011b, p. 56) Further, Visit Jersey has emphasized the importance of being a ‘green’ location in its marketing. As it notes: Going green comes naturally in Jersey. After all, we’ve been doing it for long enough. We were the first destination in the world to be awarded Green Globe destination status in recognition of our environmentally friendly work. From coastal footpaths to cycle tracks weaving across an inviting landscape of valleys and Green Lanes, come and explore our sustainable sanctuary (Visit Jersey brochure, 2015c, p. 13) Also, several Ramsar environmental wetlands sites of international importance were designated in 2005 (this UNESCO convention dates from 1971), thus offering a policy-driven commitment to preserving significant parts of the island’s coastal environment and contributing to the island’s engagement with eco-tourism in an era that has seen a rapid growth in this sphere of travel (Ramsar, 2015; States of Jersey, 2011a; 2011b, p. 58; 2012a, b). Several offshore reefs are included in the Ramsar sites. The Minquiers and Écréhous are locations that have been promoted in the adventure tourism and eco-tourism industries in recent years, especially with the development of high-speed craft offering short excursions to these locations midway between Jersey and France. Such travel helps increase domestic and inward tourism, yet in a context where the environment is simultaneously protected as an eco-tourism attraction, any increase in visitors offers a potential threat to the environment that is being protected in the first place. As a policy report regarding the Écréhous notes, ‘the sheer volume of general visitors to the reefs can be a potential threat if appropriate management steps are not taken. Up to 80 vessels have been reported on some days with several hundred people on land’ (States of Jersey, 2012a, p. 14). After all, in a context of trying to promote tourism after several decades of decline, the government points out that ‘the Island’s coast, countryside and historic environment are what make Jersey unique’ (States of Jersey, 2011b, p. 25).  Sea tourism Jersey’s tourism industry has engaged with the sea in several ways. In close proximity to France and Great Britain, the island has attracted visitors by sea for many decades. When we speak of the Channel Islands and even of small islands in general, the comprehension of their marine dimension may sometimes seem paradoxical. As in the historical outline above, their ability to project onto

Tourism and resilience on Jersey  95 overseas regions is often emphasized while little is said about their immediate marine environment. It is a truism to write that the sea surrounds the islands, but it has other functions as protection or linkage with other islands and with mainlands, as well as sometimes being a source of conflict in a context of increasing intensification and diversification of maritime issues. This discussion is even more relevant due to the situation of the Channel Islands as border islands. This part will thus focus on the role of the sea in our general reflection on AngloNorman tourism resilience. Fisheries are not necessary connected with tourism, but providing fish to local markets and restaurants can be considered in the promotion of tourism, along with the exploitation of the sea around the island, which is a major concern for which fisheries management is central. Several sea-related agreements and treaties between France and Jersey have been signed over the years, with the first dating from 1839, and the latest finalized in 2000 (Fleury and Johnson, 2015). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the maritime issues are more diverse and crucial due to the intrusion of new stakeholders. The Channel Islands only cover 195 km² of terrestrial area while about 6,000 km² of sea. The need for managing their surrounding waters has become a major concern for the authorities of both Bailiwicks, France, and the UK (Fleury, 2011). There is a balance to find between the protection of marine resources and their diversified exploitation. This issue is no longer that of the fisheries industry, but also applies to the developing use of the sea environment for tourism. The importance given to Jersey’s coast and marine environment was noted above in connection with the Ramsar sites, but the island also has a Green Zone (States of Jersey, 2011b) and a Coastal National Park, which was designated in 2011 and includes the offshore reefs already discussed (States of Jersey, 2011b, p. 71): One of the Park’s purposes, to promote opportunities for understanding and enjoyment of its special qualities, is likely to create tensions with its other purpose: the conservation and enhancement of natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage. Managing this requires that new or extended cultural and tourism development is sensitive and proportionate to the fragility and vulnerability of its landscape setting. (States of Jersey, 2011b, p. 78) In 2014, Jersey’s official sea and air passenger arrivals were around 1,134,000, which was up from the previous year by about 43,000 or 4 per cent (States of Jersey Statistics Unit, 2015, p. 71). Sea arrivals represented 393,000, which was up slightly from previous years but down from the previous decade (Table 5.2). Commercial passenger craft from Jersey to France have usually been to St Malo (car ferry), with smaller boats visiting from other nearby ports. To the UK, the island has been serviced over the decades with boats to various ports, including Weymouth, Poole, Plymouth, and Portsmouth. There have been passenger sailings from Weymouth to Jersey since 1794 (Smith, 2012, p. 15), but

96  Christian Fleury and Henry Johnson Table 5.2  Sea arrivals in Jersey Year

Arrivals

2002

460,000

2003

436,000

2004

405,000

2005

427,000

2006

366,000

2007

384,000

2008

360,000

2009

366,000

2010

378,000

2011

393,000

2012

362,000

2013

372,000

2014

393,000

Source: Adapted from States of Jersey Statistics Unit (2015, p. 71).

with much more activity from the twentieth century. In the post-World War Two tourism boom, regular boats from England serviced the island. It was in 1973 under the new brand of Sealink (run by British Rail) that a daily roll-on-roll-off (ro-ro) car ferry service was started between Jersey and Weymouth, thus offering a more convenient service for visitors (prior to this cars would be hoisted by crane into the ships) (The Guardian, 1973). In 1993, Condor Ferries introduced a highspeed car ferry service travelling between Jersey and Weymouth carrying 80 cars, 600 passengers, and travelling more than 36 knots (The Guardian, 1992).  When Jersey’s mass tourism went into serious decline from the 1990s, showing an approximate 47 per cent reduction in the number of staying leisure visitors (Table 5.3), which was reflected by a reduction of accommodation providers and bed spaces between 1992 and 2014 (Visit Jersey, 2015a, p. 19), the island showed resilience in the development of some of its sea tourism ventures as a way of adding to the diversity of activities available and by offering several niche ventures. Relating the need to diversify to one of the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s seven principles of building resilience (Simonsen et al., n.d.), one sphere of tourism activity that was initiated in the early twenty-first century was sea adventure tourism. In connection with sea tourism and resilience in the face of a massive decline of visitor numbers, Visit Jersey (2016) recommends a number of boat trips and charters: • • • •

Anna II Fishing Trips Jersey Yacht Charter – Go-Sail Harmony Charters, Private Bespoke Boat Charter Gorey Watersports Centre

Tourism and resilience on Jersey  97 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Island RIB Voyages Jersey Yachting Jersey Seafaris Jersey Sea Sport Centre H2O Sports Powerboat Training Betty Mae Boat Cruises and Charters Dive Jersey Tarka Sea Trips Raleigh Sailing Mojo Jersey Yacht Charters Stay and Sail Wetwheels Jersey Pure Adventure South Coast Cruises3 Jersey Odyssey

Rather than leaving large tourist numbers simply to enjoy Jersey’s many sandy beaches where they might entertain themselves on the sand and sea, which was typical in the heyday of mass tourism, there are clearly nowadays a large number of Table 5.3  Staying leisure and total visitors, 1997–2014 Year

Leisure

Total

1997

590,000

985,000

1998

536,000

950,000

1999

509,000

923,000

2000

478,000

878,000

2001

441,000

843,000

2002

399,000

802,000

2003

379,000

749,000

2004

385,000

747,000

2005

381,000

752,000

2006

368,000

729,000

2007

376,000

739,000

2008

362,000

726,000

2009

338,000

681,000

2010

336,000

690,000

2011

340,000

700,000

2012

333,000

688,000

2013

326,000

682,000

2014

338,000

701,000

Source: Adapted from States of Jersey Statistics Unit (2015, p. 12).

98  Christian Fleury and Henry Johnson niche tourism operators offering a range of activities that take advantage of Jersey’s coastal waters. While each offers a sense of adventure, several offer high-speed adventure across the waters to nearby reefs. For example, Island RIB Voyages was established in 2006 and Jersey Seafaris was established in 2011 (Allo, 2014). Each offers tourists (visitors and locals alike) an opportunity to experience a fast and short trip on a high-speed RIB (rigid-hulled inflatable boat), either around coastal areas or to the Minquiers and Écréhous reefs (Fleury and Johnson, 2015).4 Indeed, the coastal waters around Jersey and its nearby reefs offer adventure tourists not only a high-speed marine experience, but also many intriguing sites such as dolphins, seals, and birdlife, as well as an environment that includes fast-flowing and wide tidal currents, navigational hazards, and scenic beauty.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have shown that for Jersey sustainable development has been at the core of the island’s tourism resilience. In a similar way to Winnard et al.’s (2014) argument for the integration of the study of sustainability and resilience, in our discussion of cultural tourism, environmental tourism, and sea tourism, it has emerged that each contributes cultural capital for the island in terms of their importance for the tourism industry at a time when resilience has underpinned a re-thinking of the nature of this industry. At the same time as preserving cultural and environmental heritage as island capital, the sea has been utilized in a context of aiming to grow the tourism industry. In this context, we have considered island resilience in terms of culture as capital, environment as capital, and sea as capital. It is particularly interesting to note how Jersey could fit with a classical definition of resilience, but even more interesting to explore how its practice can even in some small measure enrich the concept. In connection with the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s principles, we have shown how several key points for Jersey reveal resilience in tourism practice. For example, diversity and redundancy are maintained by exploiting local culture, environment, and sea capital; connectivity is managed through the island’s public-private tourism agency (Visit Jersey); learning has been encouraged by the diversification of the tourism industry; and participation has been broadened as a result of various organizations such as Genuine Jersey and Jersey Heritage fostering interest in key aspects of island life within the tourism industry, which also links to a sense of developing a polycentric governance system of the tourism industry itself. However, in addition to the theoretical connection with the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s principles, two points deserve particular mention with regard to the social, political, and economic stories of Jersey in relation to tourism resilience. The first one is a renewed ability to benefit from both its island location as ‘in-between’ as well as having political and economic room for manoeuvring based on its status. The second is its excellence in competition, leading to a high standard of living, at least for a large part of its population. This first applied from the seventeenth century to activities such as smuggling or privateering, then

Tourism and resilience on Jersey  99 to others such as tourism and agriculture, which thrived in earlier times. More recently, the development of financial activities might be considered in terms of the last stage of a rocket, thus propelling Jersey to the forefront of the global economy, although its integration could nevertheless be damaging in terms of image. At the same time, the collapse of the traditional model of tourism was an opportunity for re-thinking strategies of development. As discussed, some elements characterized this phenomenon, which could be seen as a specific model of island resilience. The convergence of culture, which allows historical and emblematic heritage to surface again in a new tourism environment (i.e. utilizing culture of a bygone age), now includes the sea to represent one identifying aspect of Jersey’s tourism resilience. As a small island, the sea has been pivotal in terms of travel, shipbuilding,5 imports, and exports, and while tourism had traditionally used such a mode of transport as one way of bringing tourists to the island, the sea is nowadays further featured in terms of private yachting, leisure and sport fishing, and sightseeing excursions. For Jersey, and in a context of the reorganization of the local tourism brand, exploitation of local resources, and conservation of the environment, the island’s tourism industry is increasingly moving to the exploitation of a unique combination of culture, environment, and sea capital. This includes a strong affirmation of cultural identity as well as the integration of environmental and marine space. The island itself – its beauty and its ‘story’ – has been for a long time the overriding promotional object for enticing outsiders to visit. As everywhere in the world, the sea has recently gained a growing importance in strategies for both development and conservation of the environment. The sea is no more an interval, a space of division, or a source of conflicts, but has become an encompassing space to protect and exploit in a context of sustainable development and island resilience.

Notes 1 The publication, Nos îsles: A symposium on the Channel Islands (1944, pp. 51–62), provides a study of Jersey’s tourism planning for the post-liberation period. 2 The government has even noted that some of the remnants of the past age of mass tourism might be redeveloped as sites that are ‘more sympathetic to their locality and . . . landscape’ (States of Jersey, 2011b, p. 78). 3 South Coast Cruises closed in 2016 (Jersey Evening Post, 2016a). 4 There are also several French tour operators with excursions to these reefs, including Le Courrier des Iles. 5 Jersey had a flourishing timber shipbuilding industry during a period of about 60 years during the nineteenth century (Jamieson, 1986).

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6 From warrior to beach boy The resilience of the Maasai in Zanzibar’s tourism business Lauri Johannes Hooli

Introduction The rapid growth of contemporary tourism is one of the most visible signs of globalization in many localities in developing countries (Harrison, 2015). In Africa, the changes in social, economic, and environmental dynamics caused by tourism have been extremely rapid and significant (Nelson, 2012). As a result, in poor local communities, tourism has become an easy way of generating seriously needed income; however, it has also created many far-reaching issues for local societies and for the environment (Salazar, 2009). Local societies’ ability to change, adapt, and, importantly, transform in response to these global changes vary (Carpenter, Westley, & Turner, 2005). One prominent way to describe this ability is through the concept of resilience, which is one of the major conceptual approaches for resolving the inherent ambiguity when anticipating both the impacts of global changes and the dynamic, complex ways in which individuals, organizations, and society respond to those changes (Davoudi, 2016). Although tourism scholars have been slow to adopt this concept into their discourse, resilience is increasingly being applied in tourism studies (Lew, 2014, p. 14). In this field, the concept of resilience is conceived as a useful framework for increasing understanding with regards to how the different actors involved in tourism can respond to, learn from, adapt to, and transform in response to growing global uncertainties and changes. Resilience is also used to discover how communities can become more resilient in the face of the flux brought about by global tourism. Ultimately, according to Salazar (2009, p. 49), people and places are continuously ‘(re)invented, (re)produced, and (re)created’ by global tourism. Notwithstanding its popularity, resilience has been strongly criticized in social studies (Swanstrom, 2008; Hassink, 2010; Walker & Cooper, 2011; Joseph, 2013; MacKinnon & Derickson, 2013; Weichselgartner & Kelman 2015). The main criticism is related to this ecology-rooted concept’s inability to appropriately address and reflect the social and political dimensions (Brown, 2014), particularly regarding questions concerning power and agency (Béné et al., 2014). This critique has not been extensively discussed in tourism studies, where resilience is still commonly applied from the equilibristic perspective developed in the field of ecology. Analyses of long-term transformation using the so-called evolutionary perspective of resilience have been less frequent (Lew, 2014).

104  Lauri Johannes Hooli For this ethnographic research, resilience is approached from the evolutionary perspective, applying the concept to a case study in Tanzania where tourism has caused major transformations in the Maasai community. Tanzania is one of the countries in southern Africa where tourism has grown remarkably quickly after the country’s economic liberalization during the 1980s (Nelson, 2012). Tourism is generated by the country’s rich and diverse natural environment, including some of the most famous wildlife areas in the world, combined with its ideal geographic location on the coastline of the Indian Ocean. Although tourism has become one of the nation’s most significant external sources of income, it has also had a considerable effect on the dynamics of local communities in the areas of tourist interest. Among the local communities that have been most influenced by tourism are the Maasai, who, due to their distinct appearance, dress, and resistance to many modern values, are both one of the most recognizable and one of the most discriminated-against ethnic groups in Tanzania (Gardner, 2016). There are an estimated 430,000 or more Maasai in Tanzania. This seminomadic Nilotic culture has inhabited the arid and semi-arid rangelands in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya for around two centuries (Spear & Waller, 1993). The area, commonly known as Maasailand, is where Tanzania’s most popular natural attractions and wildlife areas are located. During the late 1980s, due to the nation’s structural adjustment policies and neoliberal reforms, the Tanzanian government began to transform Maasailand into an internationally significant area for conservation and tourism. According to Gardner (2016), this led to restrictions on the culture’s customary lifestyle, forcing many Maasai to relocate from their land of origin. This situation was aggravated by the redevelopment of their grazing lands and water posts, which made it difficult for the Maasai to maintain their traditional lifestyle and hunting habits. The conflict over land is ongoing; the most recent plan, which has been put on hold due to international pressure, was to evict 40,000 Maasai from the border area of Serengeti National park, which was to be reserved for the Dubai royal family’s trophy-game hunting use (IWGIA, 2016, pp. 77–78). The evictions, together with the area’s rapid population growth, have forced Maasai communities to seek alternative livelihood strategies. Consequently, tourism has become one of their most significant new sources of income. The Maasai are not only involved in tourism in their homelands; gradually, they are also exploring new possibilities in other tourist regions in Tanzania. The Zanzibar archipelago, famous for its golden beaches, turquoise seas, and unique Afro-Arabic culture, is one of the most popular tourist locations in Tanzania (Anderson, 2013). An increasing number of Maasai seasonally migrate there to be involved in various tourism activities. Approximately one thousand Maasai annually seek seasonal livelihood opportunities on the island, and the number doing so is growing. In this research, particular concern is given to the Maasai’s resilience in the Zanzibar tourism industry and the social transformation and adaptability processes that enable them to be involved in that industry; this involvement requires quick learning and skills related to languages, business, and social interaction and their lack of formal education is a particular constraint. Some of the key attributes of their adaptability and transformation – namely,

From warrior to beach boy  105 social learning and self-organization are examined and are argued to be the central elements in the creation of communities’ resilience towards different uncertainties and changes (Magis, 2010). First, a brief literature review of the evolutionary perspective of resilience theory and the main critique of that perspective in social studies is put forward. Second, a description of the research area, ethnographic research methods, and research data in detail is provided. Third, empirical analysis is submitted with the point of entry comprising an elaboration of the social dynamics, history, and roles of the Maasai in Zanzibar’s tourism. Subsequently, resilience of the Maasai is analysed through their processes of self-organization and social learning, especially in terms of relevant theory. This chapter concludes with the argument that although, from many perspectives, the Maasai in Zanzibar tourism are an exemplar of a self-organized, adaptive community capable of social learning, this industry has not noticeably raised them out of poverty or substantially improved their socio-economic well-being.

Towards an evolutionary perspective of resilience Resilience originates from multiple fields, including psychology and ecology, and it has evolved to become one of the most important approaches to development issues in social studies. The strengths of this approach are its malleability and ability to act as a bridging concept (Brown, 2014). Due to its emphases on future-oriented dynamism and on the active role of agency, resilience has often replaced conventional sustainability as a goal of development (Carpenter et al., 2005). Indeed, resilience has become an interdisciplinary concept that used to address complex changes that require the integration of social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability (Pike, Dawley, Tomaney, 2010, p. 59). Most commonly, resilience is defined using the equilibrium perspective which was developed in the field of ecology. Holling (1973) divided resilience into engineering and ecological approaches. He defined engineering resilience as resistance to disruption or shock and the system’s ability to quickly return to equilibrium. Disruption can refer to anything from an environmental hazard or economic crisis to social disorder, and resilience is measured in terms of the time the recovery takes. However, the emphasis in ecological resilience is on the capacity of the individual, material, organization, or ecosystem to cope with disturbance and stress by retaining or regaining its form and functional capacity (Berkes & Folke 1998). Compared with the approach of engineering resilience, in which there is only a single equilibrium, ecological resilience can include multiple equilibria; after a disturbance, the system can either return to its pre-existing state or progress to another state or regime. The application of equilibrium resilience to social studies has been criticized because societies are rarely in equilibrium (Brown, 2014). Thus, the idea of bouncing back to normal without questioning the nature of the original normality is considered to be an unsuitable framework for societal approaches (Simmie & Martin 2010). For example, in the context of global poverty, the idea of returning

106  Lauri Johannes Hooli to normality would mean a return to previous levels of poverty after facing a shock (Hooli, 2016). Instead of equilibrium resilience, scholars in social studies, especially in the field of economic geography, advocate for an evolutionary perspective to resilience (Boschma, 2015; Pike et al., 2010; Lew, 2014). The evolutionary approach challenges the idea of equilibrium and considers social development as a constantly evolving, non-static process in which change is the most certain process (Davoudi, 2016). According to Pike et al. (2010), social changes are a result of complex, multi-sided, relational, and evolutional development but do not necessarily have linear causalities – and several coexisting changes can be interconnected, uncertain, and unstructured. Occasionally, a larger shift will not have any relevance, or a small shift will cause a major change. The evolutionary perspective of resilience is as concerned with the long-term capacity to address different changes as it is with the capacity to respond to short-term shocks (Simmie & Martin, 2010, p. 31). Thus, evolutionary resilience is not only about resisting change or the persistence of present structures; it is also about adaptability and, when necessary, transformation. Adaptability is defined as the capacity to learn and combine different knowledge and experiences to develop new pathways, which can include, for example, a departure from the existing path or renewal of that path (Boschma, 2015). Self-organization and learning are some of the most important attributes of any adaptation or transformation in terms of resilience (Folke, 2006). This chapter defines, applies, and critically discusses both of these attributes within the empirical analyses. Notwithstanding the evolutionary approach to resilience, it is essential to notice that the ecologically rooted concept of resilience involves a number of normative and political questions that have not yet been adequately addressed in the literature. Resilience is regarded as a value-laden concept. The issues that need further elaboration are those concerning the ways in which resilience treats and recognizes power, as well as those that define the relationship between agency and structure (Obrist, Pfeiffer, & Henley, 2010). Thus, critical questions are included, such as resilience for what, for whom and under what conditions it occurs (Cote & Nightingale 2012, p. 479). This is because a trait that might appear as resilience, on some scale and for some actors or elements, may increase vulnerability for others or in other places (Cote & Nightingale, 2012). Reid (2012, p. 76) claims that human beings are perceived as resilient if they adapt to rather than resist the conditions they suffer from. Therefore, resilience has a tendency to reinforce the status quo, and theorists using this perspective often consider human-made change as unavoidable. Thereby, resilience may undermine sustainability and endorse inequity (Brown, 2014). Thus, as Obrist et al. (2010) argues, the resilience approach should better acknowledge socio-political processes, such as structural inequality and power asymmetries, which can constrain agency.

Research areas, data, and methodology The empirical research material is based on ethnographic research conducted in Tanzania (see Figure 6.1) between October and December 2013 and in October

From warrior to beach boy  107 UGANDA KENYA

Arusha 0

0

Maasai area

TANZANIA Dar Es Salaam 0

Indian Ocean Nungwi/Kendwa Kiwengwa Zanzibar Town

500 km

Figure 6.1  The research area in Tanzania

2014. Most of the data were collected in the Zanzibar archipelago off the coastline of the Indian Ocean around 32 kilometres from continental Tanzania and its largest city, Dar Es Salaam. The archipelago comprises two main islands, Unguja and Pemba, and around 50 smaller islands. The population of Zanzibar is around 1.3 million. The majority (64 per cent) of the population live on Unguja island, and the tourism activities are highly concentrated there as well (Sharpley & Ussi, 2014). In Zanzibar, tourism has become the most important sector of the economy during the last decade. According to the estimations of Sharpley and Ussi (2014), the tourism economy accounts for approximately 44 per cent of the gross domestic product. Notwithstanding its benefits, the heavy dependency on the tourism sector has caused major economic, environmental, and cultural vulnerabilities. Most of the tourism businesses in Zanzibar are foreign owned, and more than 50 per cent of those they employ are non-Zanzibari (Anderson, 2013). As tourism is mainly based on pre-arranged packages bought before the journey and the businesses are foreign owned, most of the economic benefits are flowing out of Tanzania. During the period of fieldwork, it emerged that tourism is causing constant cultural and social conflicts between the different formal and informal actors involved in it. Tourist behaviour, such as nudity and the use of alcohol and other substances, is inconsistent with the local Muslim culture. This is also one of the reasons why it is challenging for locals to be involved in the tourism industry. The growth of tourism is constantly luring various actors from the mainland to seek new opportunities in different formal and informal tourist activities. At times, the number of beach boys and vendors on the beaches exceeds the number of tourists. This causes constant conflicts among the locals, the beach boys, the Maasai, and the police. For example, the local inhabitants have organized night patrols, which in some extreme cases have led to muggings of guest workers and burning of their stalls. Corruption is very widespread among government officers, the police, village leaders, and the hotels’ (mid)-management.

108  Lauri Johannes Hooli In Zanzibar, the research was mainly conducted in the northern part of the main island of Unguja, where two popular tourist beachfronts, Nungwi and Kendwa, are located. In addition, the study included one week of research in Kiwengwa and several shorter visits to the capital, Zanzibar Town. The ethnographic study material consists of participatory observation notes, 28 transcripts of in-depth interviews, and different unofficial conversations and interviews. The interviews included the Maasai leaders of both the Nungwi/Kendwa and Kiwengwa Maasai communities and two security guards who were within the first organized group of Maasai arriving in Zanzibar in 1998. Furthermore, to better understand the dynamics in the tourism industry, several key stakeholder interviews were conducted including one with the leader of Nungwi village, the special advisor at Zanzibar Tourism Commission, two regional planning officers, the police officers, hotel and business owners, regular tourists, and beach boys on the beach. During the first week of fieldwork, the author acted as a regular tourist, observing the beach dynamics from the tourist’s perspective. Thereafter, the author was introduced as a researcher and gradually increased his presence from that of external observer, to active researcher. The research was conducted at different times of the day to observe normal daytime activities, nightshifts with the security guards, and events at nightclubs where the Maasai socialize with tourists. In the interviews, conducted in English and Swahili, themes were related to the transformation process of the Maasai from nomads to immigrant workers in Zanzibar. Interviews included questions about their general background, motivation, and the practicalities related to the decision to come to Zanzibar. In addition, they discussed their thoughts about their work and residence on the island as well as their future plans and different learning processes occurring on the beach. The interviews were recorded and later transcribed verbatim. However, during the more informal interviews, only systematic notes were taken. The study material was analysed using content analyses and classified under different themes such as capacity to self-organize, ability to learn, and general resilience. The fieldwork was conducted together with the local research assistant from the University of Dar Es Salaam. The fieldwork also included a study visit to the village of Losinyai in northern Tanzania, which is the home village of several key informants who worked in Zanzibar. It is located in the Simanjiro district around 100 kilometres southwest of Arusha (see Figure 6.1). Losinyai is one of the places where Maasai communities were relocated after the dispossession of their original land. The village has no electricity or proper road connections, and the land is very dry for agricultural or pastoral activities. The daily water needs to be brought by donkey cart from the nearest village 12 kilometres away. According to Spear and Waller (1993), traditionally, Maasai society was based on strong leadership and tight social organization. The age-set is the central unit of their society. All men belong to an age-set following their initiation, and the economic responsibilities in Maasai culture are divided functionally between people of different ages and genders (Spear & Waller, 1993). The interviewees were between 18 and 43 years of age, but most of them were between 20 and 30.

From warrior to beach boy  109 According to fieldwork observations, most of the Maasai in Zanzibar are senior Morani (warriors) who are circumcised, unmarried young adults. Traditionally, Morani were the physical guardians of Maasai society, but nowadays their role has changed and they are not needed as protectors. Thus, they have a more important role in the community’s livelihood activities and because they have no family responsibilities, they can also migrate to distant places to seek new job opportunities. The rest are married junior elders, and include a few women. Moreover, in accordance with interviews, the junior elders were Morani when they first arrived in Zanzibar but have continued to work in Zanzibar regardless of their initiation to the next rung on the age ladder. On average, interviewees had worked in Zanzibar for three to seven years. They were seasonal workers who worked in Zanzibar during the tourism high season from September or October until May or June. During the low tourism season, they returned to their home villages to engage in agricultural and rural activities. All of the interviewees considered migration to Zanzibar only as a temporary measure to earn income and none of them had plans to stay there for long. Generally, their future plans were related to activities in their own homes. Most of the interviewed Maasai in Zanzibar had never attended school and the rest had less than four years of primary schooling. The main reasons for this were the unavailability of education opportunities and the tradition of giving the task of cattle herding to uncircumcised young boys.

Maasai immigrant workers at the beachfront in Zanzibar The organized Maasai groups started to travel to Zanzibar at the turn of the millennium. The first groups became associated with the resort constructions in Kiwengwa, because in 1998, a British resort owner employed his Maasai acquaintance to be a night guard on his resort construction site. When the hotel was opened, more security guards were needed and the resort started to systematically recruit other Maasai and this led to other resort managers in the area doing likewise. Today, most of the Maasai in Zanzibar still work as security guards. According to resort managers who were interviewed, they are desired for security jobs because of their good reputation, low salary requirements, and tight social control, as they are well self-organized. Self-organization is also one of the most important factors of their resilience. Owing to their ‘warrior’ culture and the light traditional weapons they bear, they are considered to be particularly suitable as security guards and as the Maasai tend to have have only weak social bonds with local society, the chances of them becoming involved in organized crime is limited. For the resorts, the Maasai are more than security guards; due to their distinctive appearance and dress, they have become tourist attractions themselves. Their presence is important in the creation of an exotic ‘African atmosphere’. They are also part of the resorts’ weekly evening programmes and frequently perform traditional music and dances at weddings and other celebrations. As the numbers of Maasai in Zanzibar increased, they acquired experiences and knowledge of the tourism sector, and some of them also started to sell their

110  Lauri Johannes Hooli craft at the beachfronts and in the town of Zanzibar. Their merchandise included wooden crafts, paintings, traditional Maasai jewellery, and more general tourist junk. According to interviews conducted, the main reason for the migration of the craft vendors is the distinctive nature of the tourism between northern Tanzania and Zanzibar. In the north, tourism has only involved a small number of Maasai. Mostly they have been employed or self-employed at the bottom of the employment scale: as security guards, craft vendors, and exhibitors in traditional bomas (settlement) built for tourists, or at traditional dance displays at tourist lodges. At the upper end, a very small number of them are working as tour guides or operate their own tour companies. Moreover, as walking and hunting are forbidden in the natural parks, tour operators have rented communal lands from the Maasai communities for tourist activities (Gardner, 2016). In the north, tourism is mostly focused on safaris and faraway natural attractions where tourists are on a fixed itinerary. This makes tourists inaccessible for the Maasai. However, in Zanzibar, tourism offers better opportunities as tourists move more freely and are easier to engage with because they spend time on the beaches and in Zanzibar Town. Self-organized security guards The capacity to self-organize, described as the community’s or individual’s own capacity to respond to or recover from adversity rather than depend on external assistance or aid, is one of the key attributes of any resilient individual, community, or society (Folke, 2006; Walker & Cooper, 2011, Davoudi, 2016). It is expected that rather than acting as a passive recipient, communities or individuals act as active agents whose responsibility is to take planned actions and adapt to various changes (Magis, 2010, p. 404). However, this is also one of the most criticized attributes of the resilience approach, as in a social context, self-organization easily becomes ideological with an emphasis on ‘self-reliance’ and the individualistic ‘adaptive’ subject of neoliberalism (Walker & Cooper, 2011). Reid (2012, p. 69) claims that resilient people do not expect the state to secure their well-being because they have been persuaded to believe that it is their responsibility to do it themselves. Self-reliance exaggerates the ability of individuals and communities to raise themselves out of difficulty or reinvent themselves when confronted with adversity (Swanstrom, 2008, p. 10). For Maasai craft vendors, self-organization is mostly related to their social learning practices, which will be elaborated on in the next section. The selforganization of security guards is attached to their organizational structures, social networks, and recruitment practises. Resort managers commonly recruit security guards through a Maasai leader in the Maasai area with whom the employers are in direct contact. Thus, security guards are responsible not only to their local employer but also to community leaders. The manager of one of the largest resorts in Nungwi described Maasai self-organization as follows: The Maasai come as a group and leave as a group. (…) They have their social organisational structures, management system and hierarchy. For us, there

From warrior to beach boy  111 is no big difference are we recruiting the official security company or an organized group of Maasai. Maasai also use their tight social organization as a ‘labour union’. The same resort manager continued: Once, a leader of Maasai security guards came to me and demanded to double their salaries or they will all leave. As we could not agree, they left at the same evening, although I could see that not all of them agreed. However, already next day the new group of Maasai was on the way to substitute them. If there is a serious security issue, they call their fellow Maasai who are not working in that resort to assist. Moreover, they organize weekly meetings on the beach, coordinated by their appointed leader, which all the Maasai males (security guards and craft vendors) attend. The purpose of the meetings is to discuss common issues, to be self-organized, and to collect welfare contributions – for example, if someone falls ill or needs to go home suddenly. Meetings are also meant to maintain moral values and the traditions of the Maasai culture. Learning at the beachfront Folke (2006) denotes that the most important dimensions of resilience are the ability to learn based on a combination of different types of knowledge and the capacity for innovation, renewal, and re-organization. Most of the learning processes at the beachfront in Zanzibar are social and pragmatic and take place in practice. According to Müller and Ibert (2015, p. 340) learning in practice is an embodied and a kinaesthetic process which occurs regardless of the formal qualifications or institutions involved and the intensity of the information processing. Generally, it takes place in traditional apprenticeship through imitation and repetition supervised by an experienced practitioner. It is a local and tacit process, and it requires close proximity and co-presence with colleagues or clients, as it involves physical interaction or joint work on objects (Müller & Ibert, 2015). Initially, beach vendors sold their items from large bags that they carried along the beach. However, because the beach boys caused constant disturbances for tourists, their peddling was prohibited and local authorities began to impose restrictions regarding the use of the beach. Nowadays, the beach ordinance prohibits locals from interacting with tourists on the beach. The local police patrol the beach and arbitrarily make arrests that are usually cancelled after a bribe. After the prohibition, the Maasai managed to negotiate the renting of permanent places for their stalls. In Nungwi, the stalls are located in the narrow wasteland between two resort walls, for which vendors pay a monthly rent to the local village leader. As the marketplaces are very informal looking and difficult to find, there is still a need for interaction with tourists on the beach and at resort gateways to guide the tourists to the market. One of the Maasai, ‘Mr. Barbique’, described the importance of this acquaintance with tourists:

112  Lauri Johannes Hooli It is very rare that a tourist accidently enters to the Maasai market and buys something from you when the market is a bit on the side and might take courage to enter. Then when entered there are 25 similar stalls. Only way to get customers to buy something from you is to become a friend with them first. You start to walk and hang around with them at the beach and nightclubs, play with their kids, and then slowly they know you better and you can start to invite them to take a look of your stall. Furthermore, becoming a friend, creating cognitive proximity (Hautala, 2011), and developing social networks with the tourists is important for business, as a tourist who is a ‘friend’ of the vendor, will pay a higher price for purchases, will consume more, and may also donate money to the vendor’s family. Social interaction with tourists demands different skills that are completely new to the uneducated Maasai. Most importantly, they need to learn different languages. As most of their customers come from Italy, the vendors are able to have in-depth conversations in Italian, but they can also speak English reasonably well. To strengthen the interaction, they also need to have cultural understanding and knowledge about the visitors’ home cultures, which is usually acquired through interaction with the tourists. During the course of fieldwork, it was common to hear in-depth discussions between the Maasai and Italian tourists about Serie A football games or Silvio Berlusconi’s trial. According to Folke (2006), social learning stresses the role of social institutions and networks in resilience, as these encourage and engage knowledge creation and lead to flexibility in transformation, innovation, and the reformation of values and norms. The Maasai are constantly learning from each other and from their interactions with tourists when they are performing shared professional practices and by imitating each other and exchanging experiences. For example, one experienced Maasai is called the ‘Professor’ because he has been in Zanzibar for a long time (seven years) and speaks fluent Italian and good English. He is frequently consulted when anyone wants to learn new words or phrases. In addition to social learning, several Maasai are taking languages, IT, and social media courses either in the informal ‘beach-boy school’ or in the private education institute, which are both mainly targeted towards the informal workers in the tourism sector. Critics have claimed that the resilience approach overemphasizes the importance of post hoc and reactive learning (Chandler, 2014; Davoudi, 2016). Reactive learning might be crucial for coping with the short-term changes as they emerge; however, it might be less relevant for the long-term capacity to address different transformations, achieve collective goals, or create new pathways. For the Maasai, the uncertainties and rapid changes as a consequence of tourism have meant that learning processes are more challenging and reactive. This is especially true when the knowledge acquired from the learning in practice is socially contextualized and materially situated (Müller & Ibert, 2015). For example, in Nungwi, during the intial fieldwork period, a large charter hotel for Italian tourists next to the Maasai market was the most important source of income. However, when the author returned to the beach in 2014, the hotel had been sold to a new

From warrior to beach boy  113 tour operator that was organizing package tours for Israeli tourists. Thus, very quickly the most important skills of the Maasai – languages, social skills, and customs related to Italian culture – lost their relevance. Furthermore, as none of the Maasai planned to stay in Zanzibar for long, the interviewees were not sure how they could use their skills in the future after returning home, as in the north the dynamics of tourism are completely different.

Conclusion In this study, the resilience of the Maasai in the Zanzibar tourism industry was scrutinized and resilience was approached from the evolutionary perspective. Contrary to the generally portrayed image of unchangeable static pastoralism, the livelihood of the Maasai is in constant transformation, with the contemporary global tourism making the changes faster and unprecedented. For the Maasai, the impacts of tourism have been two-fold. First, land grabbing related to tourism is the main reason why Maasai communities have been forced to relocate to more unfavourable areas in search of alternative livelihood activities. Second, tourism has created new economic opportunities that have resulted in the socio-economic transformation of the Maasai from pastoralists to tourism workers. This is an example of the ambivalent development of global tourism, wherein the changes and uncertainty can simultaneously be a source of threat and opportunity. Anderson (2010, p. 782) claims that anticipatory action towards uncertainty ‘has emerged in a situation where it is precisely the contingency of life that is the occasion of threat and opportunity, danger and profit’. Resilience is conceived as offering a solution to this because it concurrently emphasizes the need for adaptability and adjustment in order to live with changes, as well as to take advantage of them through transformation (Davoudi, 2016). This research elaborates how the Maasai in Zanzibar tourism could be considered an example of the ‘resilient subject’ as presented in resilience theory is examined. This is because after the decline of their traditional livelihood activities, they have self-reliantly begun to transform themselves to join other socio-economic regimes. Often, the transformation has also meant travelling beyond their traditional territorial boundaries. Their participation in the Zanzibar tourism trade has required considerable self-organization from uneducated Maasai; they have organized security guard groups, negotiated marketplaces, organized learning activities, and continued their weekly meetings. They have also been quick learners, acquiring various skills that were completely new to them as uneducated pastoralists. They have also managed to promote their traditional strong leadership, tight social organization, and networks among themselves in these new socio-economic circumstances, and these factors are also key attributes of their resilience. Despite the modest economic advantages that tourism has created, adaptability and transformation actions have not alleviated the poverty or increased the longterm well-being of Maasai communities. Living conditions in Zanzibar are harsh, including constant conflicts between the Maasai, local people, beach boys, and

114  Lauri Johannes Hooli the police. Tourism is an uncertain income generator and sensitive to global and local changes. Resilience in tourism requires the ability to deal with uncertainties as they emerge, based on reactive and post hoc learning to cope with short-term changes, rather than acquiring skills that could be important for achieving longterm plans. To conclude, discovering the resilience of communities in the context of global tourism is a useful tool to analyse and reveal the challenging nature of the complex and relational transformation processes that global tourism is creating at a local level. However, a more general argument presented by Bene at al. (2014, p.615) that there is no clear causality between normative development goals, such as poverty alleviation or well-being of local communities, and resilience, also applies to communities involved in contemporary global tourism. For the marginalized Maasai living in poverty, the most fundamental question might not be how they could be more resilient in tourism, but how they could have more equal opportunities, which are based not only on contingency but also on freedom to decide how they are willing to be involved. Thus, the resilience of local communities as regards tourism cannot be only about social learning, selforganization, and networking of their agency, but must also address the broader socio-political circumstances that are either constraining or supporting agency. In the case of the Maasai, those circumstances are related to their access to education, land rights, power asymmetries, and discrimination.

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From warrior to beach boy  115 Harrison, D. (2015). Development theory and tourism in developing countries: What has theory ever done for us? International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, 11, 53–82. Hassink, R. (2010). Regional resilience: a promising concept to explain differences in regional economic adaptability? Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society, 3, 45–58. doi: 10.1093/cjres/rsp033 Hautala, J. (2011). Cognitive proximity in international research groups, Journal of Knowledge Management, 15, 601–624. Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23. Hooli, L. J. (2016). Resilience of the poorest: Coping strategies and indigenous knowledge to live with the floods in Northern Namibia. Regional Environmental Change, 16, 695–707. IWGIA (International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs) (2016). Tanzania Pastoraslists threatened: eviction, human rights violations and loss of livelihood. IWGIA report 23. Copenhagen: Eks-Skolens Trykkeri. Joseph, J. (2013). Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: a governmentality approach. Resilience, 1(1), 38–52. doi: 10.1080/21693293.2013.765741. Lew, A. A. (2014). Scale, change and resilience in community tourism planning. Tourism Geographies, 16, 14–22. Magis, K. (2010) Community resilience: An indicator of social sustainability. Society and Natural Resources, 23, 401–416. Müller, F. C., & Ibert, O. (2015). (Re-)sources of innovation: Understanding and comparing time-spatial innovation dynamics through the lens of communities of practice. Geoforum, 65, 338–350. Nelson, F. (2012). Blessing or curse? The political economy of tourism development in Tanzania. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 20, 359–375. Obrist, B., Pfeiffer, C., & Henley, R. (2010). Multi-layered social resilience: a new approach in mitigation research. Progress in Development Studies, 10, 283–293. Pike, A., Dawley, S., & Tomaney, J. (2010). Resilience, adaptation and adaptability. Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society, 3, 59–70. Reid, J. (2012). The disastrous and debased subject of resilience. Development Dialogue, 58, 67–81. Salazar, N. B. (2009). Imaged or imagined? Cahiers d’études africaines, 1, 49–72. Sharpley, R., & Ussi, M. (2014). Tourism and governance in small island developing states (SIDS): The Case of Zanzibar. International Journal of Tourism Research, 16, 87–96. Simmie, J., & Martin, R. (2010). The economic resilience of regions: Towards an evolutionary approach. Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society, 3, 27–43. Spear, T., & R. Waller (Ed.) (1993). Being Maasai: Ethnicity and identity in East Africa. London: James Currey. Swanstrom, T. (2008). Regional resilience: a critical examination of the ecological framework. Working Paper, Institute of Urban and Regional Development. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Walker, J., & Cooper, M. (2011). Genealogies of resilience – from systems ecology to the political economy of crisis adaptation. Security Dialogue, 42, 143–160. Weichselgartner, J., & Kelman, I. (2015). Geographies of resilience: Challenges and opportunities of a descriptive concept. Progress in Human Geography, 39(3), 249–267. doi: 0.1177/0309132513518834.

7 Resilience in the face of changing circumstances Fair Isle, Shetland Richard Butler

Introduction Small and isolated islands and their communities are often portrayed as epitomising resilience, at least in the sense of retaining their numbers and way of life, although they may often suffer varying levels of degradation of their island’s original ecology (Hall 2012). In the physical scientific context in which the term originated, resilience is normally used in the sense of the ability of an ecosystem to recover from one or more shocks and regain stability. A commonly accepted definition of resilience is that of Holling, the author of the term in the modern context: ‘A measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables’ (Holling 1973: 14). In the context of tourism, resilience normally relates to the ability of a destination (community, ecosystem, resources) to maintain its quality and appeal, as well as its traditional way of life and natural processes, in the face of the effects of tourism and related developments. In the case being examined in this chapter, a small and relatively isolated island community has become exposed to the pressures of tourism and other external forces but has managed to maintain and even increase its population and improve the quality of life of its members over the past half century. The more specific period under examination is the last six decades, during which time there have been major changes and impacts upon the island and its residents. Some of these impacts might have been expected to have had negative results for the population and the well-being of the community as a whole. The fact that during this period the island has experienced a growth in population, an expansion of infrastructure and services, improved housing and increased standards of living is a reflection of both a natural or inherent resilience of the community and fortunate geographical characteristics, along with a considerable ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Holling’s statement on resilience as also being ‘The ability of the system to maintain its structure and patterns of behaviour in the face of disturbance’ (Holling 1986: 296) is quite appropriate in the case under discussion, although as will be noted, a number of the elements of disturbance resulted in positive rather than negative or limiting outcomes. They perhaps proved to be more akin to agents

Resilience in the face of changing circumstances  117 of Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ (quoted in Russell 2006: 109) in that they created new opportunities and strengthened the resilience of the community rather than weakened it. Community resilience is a term used increasingly in the context of tourism and its effects on destinations and their residents, and is well defined by Norris et al. (2008: 131) as ‘A process linking a set of networked adaptive capacities to a positive trajectory of functioning and adaptation in constituent populations after a disturbance’ In the situation discussed here there has been more than one ‘disturbance’ over the six decades involved, some clearly linked to each other, others, particularly external disturbances, created and imposed by forces far beyond the control or influence of the community involved. In examining the response of the specific community on Fair Isle, the commentary will refer to the three elements of resilience noted by Becken (2013), ‘resistance’, that is, the ease or difficulty of changing a community; ‘latitude’, the extent to which a community can experience change but not be permanently changed, namely its flexibility and recovery capability; and ‘precariousness’, the measure of the closeness of a community to the threshold or limit beyond which recovery is not possible. This introductory section is followed by a description of the context and background of the case studied to illustrate the specific conditions and characteristics involved. There is then a review of key issues affecting the community and the major influences and changes which have taken place. Finally, there are conclusions relating to the effects of those changes on enhancing or weakening the resilience of the community to future shocks that it might face including any negative effects of increased tourism – that is, its latitude to handle tourism and how precarious the position of the community is to potential problems brought by tourism and other factors, and what lessons might be learned for other communities at large.

Context The United Kingdom has a large number of islands, most of them lying off the coast of Scotland concentrated in three major groups, the Hebrides (Inner and Outer) off the west coast, and Orkney and Shetland off the north coast of the mainland. Shetland, the northernmost group, lies on the sixtieth parallel, and presently has a population of around 23,000, (SIC 2015) scattered over 16 inhabited islands, with the vast majority living on the Shetland ‘mainland’. Transport links to mainland Britain consist of passenger and vehicle ferries from Aberdeen and Thurso, entailing a journey of over 12 hours, and flights from several Scottish airports of around an hour. Shetland generally has little arable land, so traditionally the population has made its living from the sea, and its male inhabitants have a reputation for being widely travelled through a tradition of seafaring in the British Royal Navy and Merchant Navy, in whaling and fishing fleets and as members of expeditions and voyages of discovery. Shetland (as Orkney) traditionally belonged to Norway, having been colonised by Vikings a millennium ago, and only became a part of the United Kingdom in the fifteenth

118  Richard Butler century. Much of the culture and dialect is more Scandinavian than Scottish and this is often reflected in its political leanings and adopted policies, particularly in the last few decades. A Shetlander was often described as a fisherman with a croft, a small tenanted agricultural holding (United Kingdom Government 1886), and has traditionally relied on fishing with a small agricultural (mostly sheep farming) segment in its economy (O’Dell and Walton 1961). Politically Shetland functioned for many years as a county, the second tier in the British political structure, with powers relating to development control, education, and basic local government services. This situation is one element which has changed considerably in the last few decades, as will be discussed below. In conjunction with Orkney, it shares one elected Member of Parliament (MP) in the Westminster (national) government and since 1999 has elected one Member of Scottish Parliament (MSP) in the devolved Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Shetland is now an Island Authority, with significantly increased powers which originated in the 1970s and have continued to the present, allowing it (and the other two Island Authorities, Orkney and the Western Isles) greater control over many aspects of the economy and environment than other secondtier authorities in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. This has proved important in the context of the way of life of all Shetlanders (Nelson & Butler 1992, 1994).

Figure 7.1  Plaque commemorating lighthouse keepers of Fair Isle Source: Flickr Creative Commons.

Resilience in the face of changing circumstances  119 Fair Isle, the focus of this chapter, is located some 40 kilometres south of the ‘mainland’ of Shetland, making it the most remote, in geographical terms, of all the islands in the British archipelago. While Foula, to the west of Shetland is in reality more ‘cut off’ in terms of regular contact with its neighbours (Gear 1983), Fair Isle is further distant from any other landfall. Within the Shetland archipelago Fair Isle ranks as one of the smallest islands in terms of area. It is less than three miles from north to south and one mile from east to west. There are lighthouses (now automated so without permanent staff) at the north and south of the island, and two anchorages, one little used at the south, and the main harbour and pier in the north (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). The northern half is upland peat and heather moorland with cliffs on all sides, while the southern part is lower lying containing all of the permanent settlement and the only farmed and enclosed land (Figure 7.3). The North Haven is the landing point for the ferry boat to the mainland, and is the official harbour for the island, also being used by visiting pleasure yachts. It was the site of a small naval base during the Second World War and the huts from that period became the first of a series of bird observatories that have been of critical importance in growing the resilience of the island’s economy and community. From a population peak of 380 in the mid-nineteenth century the island experienced a continual decline in population such that the 1961 census showed a population of only 37 permanent residents and four children at school in Shetland (Butler 1963). The subsequent change in fortunes and rise in population, and ironically perhaps, an increase in the resilience of the community, is due to a number of factors, some relating to the ownership and control of the island and

Figure 7.2  Fair Isle lighthouse Source: Flickr Creative Commons.

120  Richard Butler

Figure 7.3  Sheep farming on Fair Isle Source: Flickr Creative Commons.

its subsequent development path (Gill and Williams 2014) and some relating to external political and economic changes. The economy of the island was for a long period based on fishing, trading with passing boats, and subsistence agriculture (mainly sheep farming and a few crops such as potatoes and oats) (Figure 7.3). One of the key items in trade with passing boats was knitwear (sweaters, hats, scarves and mitts) and this aspect has continued to the present, albeit in a different form, as noted below. For many years life on the island was difficult: landowners in Shetland were traditionally unsympathetic to their tenants (see for example Balfour 1859) even attempting to prohibit their trade with passing vessels; the only fuel was peat, and communication with other islands problematic because of weather and sea conditions (the tide race to the north of Fair Isle being one of the most severe in the North Sea, running to seven knots at times (Butler 1963) being extremely hazardous for sailing boats). These factors, along with few and only relatively unattractive life-style options for young people, meant that many Fair islanders emigrated, to Shetland, Scotland, and further afield throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. By the middle of the twentieth century the community was at a high level of precariousness, with serious discussion taking place of following the example of the population of other Scottish islands and moving to the closest ‘mainland’ in search of an easier life (Respondent 14 2013). At this point in its history, resilience was at a low ebb and there appeared to be little

Resilience in the face of changing circumstances  121 likelihood of the island remaining populated into the twenty-first century. The reasons for the turn-around in fortune for the island are relatively easy to identify, and these include a number of what can best be described as serendipitous or fortunate occurrences caused by a combination of personal, spatial, economic, and political forces, many of them external to the island itself, along with some local geographical characteristics that have played a significant role in the life of the community and increased its level of resistance considerably.

Issues As is the case for many small islands, specific factors, often sometimes insignificant in other situations, are of crucial importance in the well-being of such communities and are indicators of the precariousness of a community. In the case of Fair Isle, one of these crucial issues has long been the maintenance of the island ferry boat which serves as a lifeline to the Shetland mainland, carrying passengers, cargo, and vehicles twice a week (weather permitting) throughout the year, with occasional extra voyages as needed. Fair Islanders consider having the boat based in Fair Isle rather than on the Shetland mainland as vitally important to morale and the feeling of independence among the community (personal surveys 1963, 2013). The current boat requires a crew of at least four individuals including a qualified skipper. In earlier years between five and seven individuals were needed, and thus such a number of willing and capable (in terms of age, experience, and physical fitness) individuals living on the island is essential to meet this requirement. In the 1950s when the population was below 50 in total, crewing the boat was a difficult task. It would require the crew to be away from the island for almost a full day, occasionally longer if weather conditions became too severe to return to the island the same day, twice a week. This is a high proportion of a six-day working week (Sundays were, and still are to a considerable degree, maintained as a day of rest on the island) for a family to forego from working on their croft and other activities. Thus an increased and stable population is an essential factor in the island’s community resilience. Another problem has been sources of economic livelihood. In earlier years fishing, trading with passing boats, agricultural produce, and part-time occasional work at the two lighthouses provided limited sources of money to the residents, but overall incomes were low in absolute and comparative terms and future prospects of significant improvement very slim (Figure 7.2). Young people left the island to attend secondary school in Shetland and few returned to live on the island (still a current problem) Thus increased sources of income and an overall improvement in living standards were needed to both retain the offspring of current residents and attract newcomers to the island. Given the limited natural resources of the island (peat for fuel, very limited arable land and a finite area for sheep grazing, and marine resources vulnerable to exploitation by better equipped boats from other areas) in the middle of the twentieth century there seemed little hope of economic revitalisation. Living conditions until the second half of the twentieth century were poor, with no running water supply, no permanent electricity supply,

122  Richard Butler no medical care on the island, no fire protection service, limited access to and from Shetland, and poor housing stock, unimproved for many years. While there was a desire to retain the community on the island, there were serious discussions on evacuating the island, as had happened on St Kilda in 1931 (Steel 2011) and Mingulay in 1912. During the Second World War the island had been garrisoned by naval and army personnel, with the construction of buildings on Ward Hill (the highest point on the island) and at the North Haven as the island served as a look-out post for enemy shipping. It was attacked from the air on several occasions, and the remains of a Heinkel bomber still remain on the island. The removal of military personnel in the post-war period saw one additional source of income and manpower disappear, although many of the structures still remain today, mostly unused. The future of the island therefore looked bleak. It was hard to envisage how the economy and the population could be increased and the island remain viable without significant change and the potential sources of such change were not visible. The precariousness of the community, as defined earlier, was at a very vulnerable level. Without change and external support this author argued that the community was unlikely to be able to continue (Butler 1963).

Influencing factors What proved to be the key stimulus to increased resilience on Fair Isle stems from its specific geographical location on a major migratory bird flyway midway between two archipelagos. Migrating birds generally fly at night and at dawn find somewhere to rest and feed before continuing their migration. To birds flying north in Spring and south in Autumn on the flyway to the west of the north European mainland, Fair Isle was the only landfall over a 50-mile stretch of open water, and thus was visited by not only considerable numbers of birds but a surprisingly high number of rarities not seen elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Unimportant though this may seem in economic terms, it was sufficient to attract a very few keen bird watchers around the beginning of the twentieth century and draw the attention of ornithologists more widely to Fair Isle from then on. Pennington (2004: 41) notes that ‘In Autumn 1905, the whole focus of attention in Shetland shifted when Dr William Eagle Clark … visited Fair Isle for the first time.’ Clark went on to publicise the attributes of the island for migratory birds, stimulated a lasting interest in birds amongst the island residents, and was followed to the island by a small number of notable visitors, including the Duchess of Bedford and Rear Admiral Stenson. Relative inaccessibility and the absence of accommodation for visitors prevented the growth of a tourist industry and any economic renaissance until after the Second World War. Two unrelated elements transpired to alter this situation. One was in the form of the abandoned naval huts at the North Haven. The other was the desire of one individual, George Waterston, to acquire the island and turn it into a bird observatory location (Waterston 1963). On his release from prisoner of war camp, Waterston, with financial support from friends, acquired Fair Isle in 1947,

Resilience in the face of changing circumstances  123 established a bird observatory trust, and oversaw the opening of the Fair Isle Bird Observatory (FIBO) in the following year (Niemann 2012). The original observatory could accommodate a maximum of 12 paying guests in barrack-like accommodation, a permanent warden (and family), and a very small staff (Fair Isle Bird Observatory 1950). It was open from April to October each year and operated as a registered charity (as it still does today). This gave a small but significant economic boost to the community, providing: additional income to the community shop, additional paying passengers for the ferry boat, occasional limited employment at the observatory, and a small market for Fair Isle knitted products. (Fair Isle had developed an international reputation for knitted goods, particularly sweaters with the Fair Isle patterns, popularised in the 1930s by the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII). As well as its economic benefits, the establishment and albeit limited success of the observatory provided a boost to morale amongst the population. Waterston is remembered with great affection on the island as the trigger for the change in fortunes that followed his acquisition and is recognised by the creation of a museum of island life bearing his name on the island. It soon became clear, that however well-intentioned he was, an individual of limited means like Waterston could not alone ensure the survival of the community, particularly at a time when financial support for any endeavour was in short supply in the aftermath of war. In 1954 Waterston sold the island to the National Trust for Scotland (NTS), retaining an interest and involvement in the island through his membership on the FIBO Board of Trustees until his death in 1980. The acquisition of the island by NTS proved to be even more important than that by Waterston as the organisation was able, by virtue of being a registered charity, to apply for and access a wide variety of sources of financial support (Bennet 2012). This has continued to the present and has included backing for projects from the EU. as well as all levels of government within the United Kingdom. The shift to highly supportive and positive landlords, first Waterston and then NTS, proved a further boost to morale of the community and by the 1960s there was little if any serious consideration of voluntary evacuation (Personal Survey 1962). A royal visit in 1960 and resulting media attention increased awareness of the island and its knitwear and visitor numbers to the observatory slowly increased. Despite these influences, the long-term future of the community was by no means certain. Personal incomes remained low although rents have been kept minimal by the NTS, and living standards were poor, services still basic or absent, and opportunities for youth virtually non-existent. The one major benefit of a stable population was sufficient numbers to crew the ferry boat.

Political and economic changes The political and economic fortunes of the United Kingdom, and Shetland in particular, changed drastically and suddenly with the discovery and subsequent exploitation of oil and gas reserves in the North Sea in the 1970s, although the Shetland community has exhibited considerable latitude with respect to

124  Richard Butler accommodating change while retaining many key traditional characteristics. The major impacts of these events on Shetland and its response has been discussed elsewhere (Nelson and Butler 1992, 1994) and will not be elaborated on in detail here. The main initial effect was dramatic economic growth in the Shetland economy. Construction of an oil terminal and a drastic enlargement of the airport allied with massive growth in sea and air traffic related to oil rig and pipeline construction and operation meant that there were vast expenditures by private and public sector bodies in Shetland and a corresponding increase in tax revenues of various sorts for the then County Council. The response of the Council to this rapid and extensive development was somewhat unique in such situations as it essentially stated that it would only accept and allow such development as met Shetland’s needs and priorities (SIC 1978). As the islands had close to full employment at the time, major concerns were loss of key employees into the oil related industries and a rapid inflation in labour, housing, and other costs. Importantly, Shetland Country Council put as its first priority what could be seen as a statement of resistance to being overwhelmed by such threats, namely, the maintenance of the island way of life and indicated it was prepared to prevent further development if that goal was threatened (Clark 1989). The end result was the granting to Shetland of considerable new powers over development control such that it could achieve its goals, along with the creation of a compensation fund for disturbance suffered by the islands from oil and gas related development based on a levy on oil entering the Shetland terminal. These developments left the Council in a very strong position, financially and in terms of control of further development. Over the subsequent years the Council, now the Island Authority, has invested a great deal of money in transport facilities servicing the outlying islands as well as roads on all the islands in the archipelago. Money has also been invested in schools, in medical facilities, many other social services, and developing and promoting traditional Shetland industries (fishing, sheep farming, knitwear). The demand created by oil developments for accommodation and related services provided a bonanza for Shetland hotels and other tourist providers in the islands (albeit creating other problems) as noted by Butler and Fennell (1994) and subsequently left the tourism infrastructure in Shetland at a much higher level than may other parts of Scotland. Despite this, until relatively late, tourism was not viewed as a ‘traditional’ activity in Shetland and for a long period received little attention or support from local government. In the last two decades, however, the potential of tourism to be a key segment in Shetland’s economy has been appreciated and promotion and support for the industry has grown. General awareness of Shetland has also increased by the popularisation of literary outputs, particularly novels by Ann Cleeves (2010) that are set in Shetland and have recently been the basis for three television dramas filmed on the islands, including one (Blue Lightning) set specifically on Fair Isle, based and filmed at the bird observatory The direct impacts of oil and gas developments have not been experienced on Fair Isle, but the results of their effects on Shetland as a whole have resulted in major changes on Fair Isle. The most important of these relates to transport

Resilience in the face of changing circumstances  125 improvements in accessibility and linkage of the island to the Shetland mainland with major improvements being made to the North Haven. Local authority funding assisted in the replacement of the earlier ferry boats and the acquisition of Good Shepherd IV, along with an agreement to keep it based on Fair Isle. Of equal or perhaps major importance to tourism has been the creation of an airstrip on Fair Isle, construction being undertaken by military personnel but operation of the airstrip and air services being subsidised (as on other islands) by the Island Authority. This has meant there is a regular (weather permitting) twice weekly service to and from Fair Isle from the Shetland mainland, increasing to three times a week in the summer. While of considerable value to tourists, allowing them to replace a frequently rough nearly three-hour boat crossing with a twentyminute flight, the air service has been in relative terms, an even greater benefit to islanders, allowing them to visit the ‘mainland’ for part of a day instead of having to stay overnight. Visits for medical, social, and educational purposes are thus much easier, as well as shopping trips, with a great improvement in feeling less isolated than before. The airstrip has also allowed private planes to call at Fair Isle, and keen bird watchers take advantage of this when extremely rare migrant birds are recorded on Fair Isle (Tallack and Riddington 2010). In addition, the establishment of the air service has led to the creation of a number of additional part-time jobs on the island, necessitated by safety requirements. There is now a fire engine and part-time crew on the island, which meets each plane on arrival, but which is of course available for any other fire danger on the island for the first time. There is an airport manager, a meteorologist, and a taxi service, thus increasing the economic driver effect of this facility. This growth in employment as a result of the airport creation has been mirrored by other additional positions which have arisen in the past few decades. The primary school, which has a small enrolment (between two and seven children in recent years) has a teacher and five other (part-time) staff. The pattern of part-time employment fits extremely well in a small community engaged in a number of other activities such as farming, knitting, and other entrepreneurial activities from furniture to boat making (Butler 2015). As on many small islands and mainland communities, multiple employment has proved key to providing a level of income sufficient for maintenance of a satisfactory life-style (Albers and Baldachinno, 2017). Other local government employment situations relate to the resident nurse, and road and harbour maintenance, while part-time work is also available at the two lighthouses since automation in the 1980s meant the departure of permanent staff. Occasional work is also available on the communications facilities around the mast on Ward Hill, and as harbour master. Many of these positions on Fair Isle owe their creation to a combination of changes in local government regulations and requirements, for example in the area of health and safety, and as a result of increased funds being available to the Shetland Island Authority stemming from the oil compensation fund and are thus indirect positive benefits of distant political decisions and from the discovery of oil and gas in the North Sea. The above improvements in the economic life of the island community have been mirrored in very significant improvements in the overall quality of life for residents.

126  Richard Butler The NTS, with support from a number of other charities and public agencies has modernised or rebuilt all but one of the houses it owns on the island, enabled a running water supply to all residences, and provided an independent source of electricity (formerly supplied at specified hours only by the lighthouse generators) through generators (Bennet 2012). This latter service is now a back-up system for what was at the time of its establishment, the first community wind turbine electricity system in Europe. Fair Isle now has two wind turbines which provide 24-hour power when conditions are suitable, with the generators providing power for 18 hours each day when needed. A communications mast on the island boosting signals to Shetland from the south provides good telephone and internet connections. These improvements in utilities have allowed residents to be able to utilise the laboursaving and entertainment equipment that most UK residents take for granted, making island life more comfortable and raising the quality of life considerably. Throughout the period under examination, tourism to Shetland, and to Fair Isle in particular, continued to rise. Improvements in ferry services, particularly in the vessels used, and in the increased frequency of air services from mainland Scotland, combined with the upgrading of facilities on Shetland as noted earlier, meant that tourism to the archipelago was much easier and more comfortable. On Fair Isle the original rather spartan observatory was demolished and a successor, considerably larger and more comfortable, built a few metres away. This both allowed and encouraged larger numbers of visitors to come to the island, taking advantage of improved accessibility of Shetland and Fair Isle. Most recently, in 2012 a new observatory was built, accommodating 48 guests in considerable luxury compared to earlier establishments. There are also two houses offering accommodation and a self-catering croft on the island meaning the total visitor capacity is around 60, roughly equal to the permanent resident population. Not all visitors are bird watchers; there are always a number of local government and private sector agencies visiting the island and needing accommodation, and with the advent of air access, short term ‘ordinary’ tourists are now coming to the island, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes to take courses in knitting and related subjects. In addition, Shetland has become a regular site for cruise vessels to visit, with over 20 arriving most years. Fair Isle receives visits from a small number of these and specific visits from vessels on tours organised by NTS and similar bodies. Visitors are brought ashore in small boats and walk or are taxied to the village hall for refreshments and a display of local handicrafts, particularly knitwear. The arrangements are paid for by the cruise vessel operators and are welcomed by the residents as providing not only a social occasion but a widely successful opportunity to sell the locally produced knitwear and other items. As with other forms of tourism, numbers are small, fewer than 200 cruise ship passengers arrive on any single visit and only two to four ships call each year, with passengers remaining on the island only a few hours. While the presence of tourists on the island is very obvious to residents, attitudes have remained positive over the last six decades. Residents were supportive and indeed instrumental in building the reputation of the island in bird migration circles and remain positive about the work and attraction of the observatory

Resilience in the face of changing circumstances  127 despite bird watchers searching the island for specific birds, particularly when a rare migrant is recorded that may attract ‘twitchers’ arriving by private plane at short notice. It is recognised that the observatory, as well as providing some part-time employment, also provides the only licensed bar and restaurant on the island (as both are open to residents as well as observatory guests) and provides the location for a bi-weekly musical evening as well as occasional talks by visitors and residents to each other. As well, although perhaps not as clearly recognised, the observatory, and through it tourism, provides a crucial source of income to the only community shop, a market for knitwear and other handicraft producers, and additional passengers and hence justification for local authority subsidies for air and ferry services. Thus tourism, primarily through the bird observatory, has become a key agent in strengthening the resilience of the island community in its efforts to survive and remain viable (Butler 2014).

Conclusions It has been argued elsewhere (Amoamo, 2017: 167) that views on resilience in the context of small islands have changed. She notes: Only more recently, has the concept resilience (or capacity) been given renewed emphasis as a strategy for management and development (see Hamzah & Hampton, 2013), one that promotes the notion of resourcefulness of SIDS [small island developing states] to cope with the many challenges islands face. According to Cooper and Shaw (2009, p. 4) the privileging of both resilience and resourcefulness challenges the notion of SIDS as ‘structurally weak Lilliputs in a system controlled by the big and strong’, shifting the image of SIDS from a naturally imposed and predictable condition of constraint (i.e. vulnerable) to one of adaptability (i.e. resilient). Here, Briguglio (2014) argues small states can succeed economically in spite of their economic vulnerability if they adopt policies conducive to good economic, social and political governance. Indeed, outcomes like Briguglio’s (2014) Economic Resilience Index (ERI) give rise to a conceptual understanding of how small states can examine their vulnerability and resilience profile and identify policies and projects to mitigate exogenous shocks. Such discourse does not necessarily replace ‘vulnerability’ with ‘resilience’, but seeks to reconfigure and re-align these two competing conceptual frameworks in a fruitful and symbiotic way. (Payne, 2009) While Fair Isle is far from being an independent state, the island’s Community Council and its owner (NTS) have sought to refocus the community’s economic focus from what was essentially subsistence agriculture to a much more diverse set of goals, of which tourism is a major part. While this author criticised the NTS in the early 1960s for having focused on improving amenities on the island rather than developing the economy (Butler 1963: n.p.), the major improvements in housing quality and utilities have undoubtedly helped in stabilising the population

128  Richard Butler and by careful selection of incoming settlers the NTS and the community have broadened the range of skills and capabilities of the population. The economy is now much more varied than in earlier years, income sources more numerous and household incomes substantially higher. In the case of Fair Isle, it can be argued that contrary to the situation found in many tourist destinations, here tourism has been a positive factor in strengthening the resilience of the island community and its chances of continuing as a viable population for the short to medium term at least, by decreasing its precariousness. In many cases tourism has been seen as an agent of change and shock, often a force which can create major effects on communities, in particular, their way of life, their economies, and their traditional activities (Wall and Mathieson 2006). On Fair Isle somewhat the opposite has occurred, as the advent of tourism, albeit on a small scale, has helped to ensure the economic viability of key elements of the island’s operations and justified the improvements in services and access that have taken place over the past half century. It represents, perhaps, a rare example of Budowski’s symbiotic relationship, not only between tourism and the environment (Budowski 1976) but in this case at a wider scale, between tourism, governance, residents and environmental conditions. The serendipitous coincidence of the existence of suitable structures (old naval huts) for the establishment of a bird observatory, the driving ambition of a specific individual (Waterston) and the subsequent ownership and management of the island by the National Trust for Scotland, all happened within less than a decade. This allowed the creation of the conditions on Fair Isle that have enabled the growth and stabilisation of the population and the establishment of a small but crucial tourism industry on the island that has become integrated with several other elements of the economic life of the community. The disparate elements in this equation have knitted together successfully through force of geographic circumstance, supportive governance, favourable economic changes in the Shetland archipelago, and appropriate political actions and policies (Butler 1994) which enabled the symbiosis noted above to take place. Whether there are lessons to be learned from this very specific and small example that are applicable in other situations at different scales is unclear. Certain variables do seem clear however, some that fall under human control and others which do not. One is that a clear direction and goal is important for a community. In the case discussed above such focus came initially from one key individual and subsequently from the current owner and manager of the island. A focus in the first instance was on establishing a bird observatory, now the prime factor in attracting tourists to the island, and in the second, the goal of population stabilisation, a similar goal to that of the Shetland Island Council (and later Shetland Islands Authority). A second variable has been the relationship between the tourism component (bird observatory and visitors, including cruise ship passengers) and the resident population, which has been overwhelmingly positive, mostly because of attitudes and behaviour on both ‘sides’, but also aided by the distinctly separate locations of residences and bird observatory. A third factor has been the political and economic changes which have taken place in

Resilience in the face of changing circumstances  129 Shetland and Scotland in particular; the discovery and extraction of North Sea oil and gas with subsequent economic benefits particularly to Shetland, and with the subsequent and resulting transfer of powers to both Shetland and to Scotland which have enabled policies to be implemented which have been of considerable benefit to Fair Isle. The management of the tourism component and its fortuitous specific location on the island do suggest that it is possible to have tourism grow successfully with mutual benefits in even very small communities if the scale of tourism, and the pattern and the behaviour of tourists are kept at appropriate levels and forms (Butler 2014). Overall goals and objectives for communities need to be in line with local desires, a particularly sensitive issue in the case of absentee landlords, and political priorities also have to match the needs of the populace being governed. In the case of Fair Isle, and Shetland generally, this has been the case, with Shetland local authority policies over the past 40 years having received strong local approval and support. Upper-level political policies, for example on Scottish independence have been of less direct relevance and received at best luke-warm support in the Shetland archipelago, and viewed with some concern in terms of future implications. The recent referendum decision to leave the European Union may have repercussions for Fair Isle as elsewhere but at the time of writing are unclear, much depending on whether British governments maintain some or all of the EU support programmes for activities such as hill sheep farming and regional development projects. The long-term future for the Fair Isle community remains uncertain. A small number of people on a very small remote island cannot have full control of their own destiny, particularly when an absentee body (which is currently facing financial problems and undergoing re-organisation (Wade 2016)) owns the island. Over the last half century circumstances have been such that the community has grown in numbers and with an improved quality of life and barring unforeseen changes in political and economic conditions the outlook is positive in the short to medium term. Contrary to the situation in many other locations, on Fair Isle, tourism has played an important role in strengthening the resistance and overall resilience of the community to local and global problems rather than being something to strengthen resilience against.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Foundation in the form of an Emeritus Professorship (2012–2013) which made the most recent field studies on Fair Isle possible, and the hospitality and assistance from the residents of Fair Isle during the field research visits in 1962–1963 and 2012–2013.

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130  Richard Butler Amoamo, M. (2017). Resilience and tourism in remote locations – Pitcairn Island in R. W. Butler (Ed.). Tourism and Resilience (pp. 163–180). Wallingford: CABI. Balfour, D. (1859). Oppressions of the 16th century in the isles of Orkney and Shetland. Edinburgh: Private Publication. Becken, S. (2013). Developing a framework for assessing resilience of tourism sub-systems to climatic factors. Annals of Tourism Research, 43, 506–528. Bennet, A. (2012). Personal communication, Island Representative, Inverness; National Trust for Scotland. Briguglio, L. (2014). A vulnerability and resilience framework for small states. In D. LewisBynoe (ed.) Building the resilience of small states. London: Commonwealth Secretariat Budowski, G. (1976). Tourism and environmental conservation: Conflict, coexistence, or symbiosis? Environmental Conservation, 3(1), 27–31. Butler, R. W. (1963). Fair Isle a geographical study of the development of an isolated island community. Unpublished BA thesis. Nottingham: University of Nottingham. Butler, R. W. (1994). The importance of local controls: The case of oil related Ddvelopment in the Shetland Islands. People and Physical Environment Research, 45, 9–20. Butler, R. W. (2014). Understanding the place of birdwatching in the countryside: Lessons from Fair Isle. In K. Dashper (Ed.), Rural tourism: An international perspective (pp. 332–336). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Butler, R. W. (2015). Knitting and more from Fair Isle, Scotland: Small-island tradition and micro entrepreneurship. In G. Baldacchino (Ed.), Entrepreneurship in small island states and territories (pp. 83–96 ). London: Routledge. Butler, R. W., & Fennell, D. A. (1994). The effects of North Sea oil development on the development of tourism: The case of the Shetland Islands. Tourism Management, 15(5) 347–357. Butler R. W., & Nelson, J. G. (1994). Planning to mitigate the effects of resource development. Ontario Geography, 39, 1–12. Clark, I. (1989). Personal communication, Chief Executive Shetland Islands Council, Lerwick. Cleeves, A. (2010). Blue lightning. London: Pan Macmillan. Cooper, A. F., & Shaw, T. M. (2009). The diplomacies of small states at the start of the twenty-first century: How vulnerable? How resilient? In A. F. Cooper & T. M. Shaw (Eds.), The diplomacies of small states between vulnerability and resilience (pp. 1–18). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fair Isle Bird Observatory (various years). Annual reports Ipswich: Healeys Printers. Gear, S. (1983). Foula: Island west of the sun. London: Hale. Gill, A. M., & Williams, P. W. (2014). Mindful deviation in creating a governance path towards sustainability in resort destinations. Tourism Geographies, 16(4), 546–562. Hall, C. M. (2012). Island, islandness vulnerability and resilience Tourism Recreation Research, 37(2) 177–181. Hamzah, A., & Hampton, M. P. (2013). Resilience and non-linear change in island tourism. Tourism Geographies, 15(1), 43–67. DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2012.675582. Holling (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4,1–23. Holling, C. S. (1986). The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems; local surprise and global change. In W. C. Clark & R. E. Munn, (Eds.), Sustainable Development of the Biosphere (pp. 292–317). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, J. G., & Butler, R. W. (1992). Assessing, planning, and management of North Sea oil: Effects in the Shetland Islands. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 13(2), 201–227.

Resilience in the face of changing circumstances  131 Nelson, J. G., & Butler, R. W. (1994). Evaluating environmental planning and management: The case of the Shetland Islands. Geoforum, 25(1), 57. Niemann, D. (2012). Birds in a cage. London: Short Books. Norris, F. H., Stevens, S. P., Pfefferbaum, P., Wyche, K.F., & Pfefferbaum, R. L. (2008). Community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness. Community Psychology, 41(1–2) 127–150. O’Dell, A. C. & Walton, J. (1961). Highlands and islands of Scotland. London: Nelson. Payne, A. (2009). Afterword: vulnerability as a condition, resilience as a strategy. In A. F. Cooper & T. M. Shaw (Eds.), The Diplomacies of small states between vulnerability and resilience (pp. 279–285). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pennington, M. (2004). The birdwatchers. In M. Pennington, K. Osborn, P. Harvey. R Riddington, D. Okill, P. Ellis, & M. Huebeck (Eds.), The birds of Shetland (pp. 30–65). London: Christopher Helm. Personal Respondent 14 (2012). Lerwick, Shetland. Russell, R. (2006). The contribution of entrepreneurship theory to the TALC Model in R. W. Butler (Ed.), The tourism area life cycle Vol.2. Conceptual and theoretical issues (pp. 105–123). Clevedon: Channelview Publications. Shetland Islands Council (SIC) (1978). Shetland’s oil era. Lerwick: Shetland Islands Council. Shetland Islands Council (SIC) (2015). Shetland in statistics Lerwick: Shetland Islands Council. Steel, T. (2011). The life and death of St Kilda. London: Harper Press. Tallack, M., and Riddington, R. (2010). Fair Isle Through the Seasons. Lerwick: Fair Isle Development Company. United Kingdom Government (1886). Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 c. 29 (Regnal. 49_and_50_Vict) London: Hansard. Wade, M. (2016). National Trust to cut 90 jobs in attempt to balance books, The Times (p. 8), October 5. Wall, G., & Mathieson, A. (2006). Tourism impacts and opportunities. London: Pearson. Waterston, G. (1963). Personal communication, Edinburgh.

8 Threats and obstacles to resilience Insights from Greece’s wine tourism Maria Alebaki and Dimitri Ioannides

Introduction Having emerged from the existing symbiotic relationship between agriculture, manufacturing, and the tertiary sector, wine tourism represents a social-ecological system that is particularly exposed to multiple stressors (Gilinsky, Newton, & Vega, 2016; Gössling & Hall, 2013). Operators of wineries open to public are constantly challenged by a wide range of pressures, including inter alia: increasingly unpredictable weather fluctuations associated with climate change; competition for natural resources; marketing issues; bureaucracy; and changes in consumption patterns (Alonso, Bressan, O’Shea, & Krajsic, 2013). As Alonso and Bressan (2015) recommend: Identifying the most serious challenges wineries face can be of practical usefulness for the sector. The availability of this knowledge could provide hints and clues to other wine regions … that either experience challenges, or that may be interested in learning how other regions may cope with such challenges. (p. 41) The ongoing crisis in the Eurozone has been especially tough for the Greek economy and people. Concurrently, a number of pressures at various levels threaten Greece’s relatively young wine tourism sector. Against this background of insecurity and the risks it entails, the objective of this chapter is to generate new knowledge on the complexity of issues associated with the resilience of wine tourism. In particular, the present study seeks to explore the constellation of factors that constitute major or potential sources of perturbations, and therefore could affect the performance or prevent the sector’s further development. Following this initial introductory part, this chapter is divided into a further five sections. We begin by reviewing the interconnections of resilience theory to tourism studies. Within this next section, we discuss how wine tourism is embedded in social-ecological systems. We then move on to a brief overview of the Greek wine tourism sector before providing a description of our method. Empirical results and the conclusions can be found in the fourth and fifth sections.

Threats and obstacles to resilience  133

Review of literature Resilience theory and tourism research Scientific interest in human-environment relationships has broadened to include the concept of resilience, calling for a more integrated understanding of complex social-ecological systems (Fiksel, 2006; Folke, 2006; Larsen, Calgaro, & Thomalla, 2011). While initially embraced in the mathematical and natural sciences, the term has been continuously expanded to encompass sociological aspects (Lew, 2014). In this context, resilience is inextricably linked to the capacity of social entities (individuals, organizations, or communities) (Keck & Sakdapolrak, 2013) to respond, together and effectively to external shocks (Walker & Salt, 2006), caused ‘as a result of social, political and environmental change’ (Adger, 2000, p. 347). The notion of resilience has also attracted tourism academics’ attention, serving as a framework that sheds light on the community’s ability either ‘to cope with crises, systemic shocks and change’ (Biggs, Hall, & Stoeckl, 2012, p. 646) or ‘to develop a tourism industry in a sustainable manner’ (Holladay & Powell, 2013, p. 5). Several tourism-related studies have focused on resilience as a mechanism of disaster risk reduction and recovery (Becken & Hughey, 2013; Calgaro, 2010; Lamanna, Williams, & Childers, 2012; Sydnor-Bousso, Stafford, Tews, & Adler, 2011). Another stream of research is concerned with the application of resilience theory to tourism destination management and, particularly, on developing models that extend Butler’s (1980) evolutionary approach of Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) (Cochrane, 2010; Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004; Hamzah & Hampton, 2013; Petrosillo, Zurlini, Grato, & Zaccarelli, 2006). Obrist, Pfeiffer, and Henley (2010) suggest the following questions as a point of departure for empirical research: ‘Resilience of what to what? What is the threat or risk we examine?’ (p. 290). In this context, Hall (2010) concludes that the tourism industry ‘is clearly associated with different forms of crisis’, stressing the need for a deeper understanding of ‘the way in which various crises interact with each other’ (p. 406). Similarly, Becken (2013) argues that tourism destinations suffer from a wide range of simultaneously occurring stress factors. Nevertheless, regardless of these assertions, most academic efforts thus far have overwhelmingly concentrated on the area of tourism resilience with respect to climatic effects (Jopp, DeLacy, Mair, & Fluker, 2013; Kaján & Saarinen, 2013; Lambert, Hunter, Pierce, & MacLeod, 2010), paying scarce attention to vulnerabilities arising from other sorts of threats. Importantly, given that particular forms of tourism are highly dependent on natural resources, they can be explicitly vulnerable to multiple stressors (Biggs et al., 2012). Not surprisingly, therefore, several studies have applied the idea of resilience to specific types of Special Interest Tourism. Such examples include dive tourism (Klint 2013); reef tourism (Coghlan & Prideaux, 2009); island tourism (Hamzah & Hampton, 2013); and rural tourism (Amir, Ghapar, Jamal, & Ahmad, 2015). To broaden this discussion, the present chapter focuses on wine tourism.

134  Maria Alebaki and Dimitri Ioannides Wine tourism as a complex social-ecological system Wine tourism covers a wide set of activities, including ‘visitation to vineyards, wineries, wine festivals, and wine shows, where grape wine tasting and/or experiencing the attributes of a grape wine region are the prime motivating factors for visitors’ (Hall et al., 2000, p. 3). Since the 1990s, this tourism form has rapidly emerged in many parts of the world, offering a rich set of opportunities at both an individual/business and a community/destination level (Carlsen, 2004). From an academic point of view, wine tourism can be approached from three different angles: a form of consumer/ tourist behaviour; an opportunity for promotion and direct sales; and a destination strategy (Getz, 2000). It is upon the third of these perspectives that the present chapter focuses, adopting a systems approach. The latter emphasizes the importance of interconnectedness (Taylor, 2016) and mutual interdependence between the various components (Király et al., 2015), as well as the fact that ‘processes are linked at multiple temporal and spatial scales’ (Boone & Fragkias, 2013, p. 51). In this sense, wine tourism incorporates both tangible and intangible components of supply and demand, with its core being ‘the wine tourism experience’ (Hall et al., 2000, p. 7). In fact, the wine tourism system comprises resources from the wine industry (wineries, vineyards, festivals, and shows); the tourism industry (accommodation, restaurants, and other facilities); human resources (winemakers, employees, tour operators); elements of the surrounding environment (infrastructure, scenery, local cuisine, etc.); institutional arrangements (i.e., levels of government and legislation); and demand particulars (i.e., visitors’ perceptions; motivations; culture; and destination image) (Hall et al., 2000, pp. 6–10). To date, research on wine tourism has been mainly conducted in the New World. By contrast, very few studies have focused on Europe (Charters & Menival, 2011). Among the eight issues that are identified as ‘emerging’ in present and future literature, Thach (2016) highlights ‘Environmental Impact’ and ‘Increased Saturation and Competition/ Sustainability’. Albeit from a variety of directions, a number of scholars have attempted to explore wine tourism with respect to sustainability (Alonso & Liu, 2012a; Flores & Medeiros, 2016; Grimstad, 2011; Poitras & Getz, 2006). Yet, no published evidence to date incorporates the resilience viewpoint into the existing theoretical framework of wine tourism.1 This leads to the following research questions addressed in this chapter: • • •

In which ways does wine tourism respond to current crises and to what extent is the sector capable of confronting future shocks? How resilient is the wine tourism system to external stresses? Which are the most prominent challenges to the sector’s performance and transformation?

In the next section we turn our focus specifically to the case of Greece, providing an overview of the country’s wine tourism sector.

Threats and obstacles to resilience  135

Case description: wine tourism in Greece Winemaking in Greece spans over 4000 years (Lissarrague, 2015). Despite this long history, the development of the country’s wine tourism industry is still very much in its infancy, compared to what exists in several other parts of the world. Prior to the 1990s, a handful of wineries attracted visitors primarily given their location in popular mass tourism destinations (i.e., Rhodes and Santorini). Meanwhile, a few individual wineries on the mainland drew visits due to a particularly interesting architectural feature or because of an outstanding historical detail (Velissariou, Galagala, & Karathanos, 2009). Concentrated actions aiming at developing wine tourism were mainly expressed via regional, collective initiatives (Alebaki & Iakovidou, 2010). The first and best organized venture was set up in 1993 in the north of the country. Spearheaded largely through EU funding programmes, the establishment of the ‘Wine Producers’ Association of the Macedonian Vineyard’ marked the beginning of a coordinated effort to improve the quality of tourism infrastructure both at wineries and across the wine regions. In 2002, the network grew to incorporate winemakers from the regions of Epirus and Thrace, leading to an expansion of activities and a name change (‘Wine Producers Association of the Northern Greece Vineyard’). In 2008, the Association was extended even further to include other than wineries ‘cooperating’ members (i.e., restaurants and hotels) (Alebaki & Koutsouris, 2015). The experience of Northern Greece has encouraged bottom-up initiatives in several other regions throughout the country. The following decades have seen similar initiatives in the regions of Peloponnese, Attica, Central Greece, Crete, and the Aegean islands. Beyond the five regional associations that followed suit, a number of joint actions targeting wine tourism development at the local (prefectural) level have also occurred.2 Alebaki and Iakovidou (2010) argue that wine tourism development in the Greek case had a two-pronged aim: first, to build supplemental income for wine producers; and second, to open up the potential for city dwellers who seek escape in a rural context. Today, more than 240 of the approximately 1,0003 active wineries throughout Greece, are open to the public (Alebaki, 2017). Despite the substantial progress made so far, the country’s ‘wine tourism terroir’ (Hall & Mitchell, 2002) has not yet reached its full potential. Without a doubt, inter-sectoral collaboration presupposes overcoming numerous hurdles, given that both the wine sector and the tourism industry are today requested to re-establish their position in a highly complex and uncertain environment.

Method Informed by previous research on the resilience of tourism systems (Becken, 2013; Espiner & Becken, 2014), the wine sector (Alonso & Bressan, 2015), but also the sustainability of wine tourism (Alonso & Liu, 2012a), we designed this exploratory study with a twofold purpose:

136  Maria Alebaki and Dimitri Ioannides • •

to identify key risks and perturbations to the wine tourism system, within the Greek context; to develop an integrative framework for the resilience of wine tourism, by classifying specific stress factors/threats (as identified in research) into three main categories that represent economic, social and environmental challenges.

In doing so, we conducted 39 in-depth interviews with a diverse group of key stakeholders and national experts of wine tourism throughout Greece, including: winemakers,4 enologists, wine distributors and exporters, representatives of wine tourism associations and wine clubs, wine writers and wine tourism bloggers, wine restaurant owners and tourism entrepreneurs, viticulture/wine/tourism academics, wine/tourism officials; and policy makers. We gathered qualitative data during the five-month period between December 2014 and April 2015. Interviews were semi-structured and carried out mostly face-to-face, in Athens and Thessaloniki. In three cases, we had to contact the respondents via telephone or Skype and in one instance, an interviewee communicated via email. With the consent of participants, we used a digital device to record their viewpoints regarding: (a) the future potential evolutionary trajectory of the Greek wine tourism; and (b) the various threats that cumulatively affect the system as a whole. From an ethical standpoint, in order to maintain the scientific integrity of the study and to protect the identities of the respondents we guaranteed everyone full anonymity. We recruited the 39 respondents through Snowball Sampling, which enables the use of referrals made from respondents already involved in the study (Rodrigues, Rodrigues, & Peroff, 2015). During the first research phase, we contacted each participant via either phone or face-to-face discussions, explaining the project’s objectives. Once each stakeholder or expert accepted the invitation to take part in the research, an interview date and place were set. This procedure was followed by a confirmation e-mail during which the interview guide (semi-structured) was sent to each study respondent, together with a cover letter. Interviews lasted between 30 minutes and 2.5 hours. The digital recordings of the interviews which were carried out through the use of Windows audio files were transcribed after each interview. Because of the nature of the interview that was semi-structured, we allowed each respondent considerable leeway to provide additional comments that in many occasions went well beyond the answer to the question that had been posed, in line with previous similar studies (Alonso & Liu, 2012a, b). To indicate their comments, individuals were labelled as ‘Respondents’ (i.e., R1, R2, R3…, R39). We utilized Thematic Analysis in order to code and interpret the qualitative data. This method allows the search for repeated topics and enables identification of prominent themes and categories in the participants’ responses, through a series of iterative readings (Liu & Tsaur, 2014). Table 8.1 presents the questions that were posed during the interviews.

Threats and obstacles to resilience  137 Table 8.1  Questions related to the objectives of the current study (extracted from the initial six-item questionnaire) 1.

How would you define wine tourism?

2.

Which are the most important threats/fundamental issues that wine tourism faces today and those that you expect the sector to face in the future?

3.

Current economic crisis. Who has it affected most? To what degree and in what manner do you expect it to influence the future of wine tourism?

It is important to note that the present study is part of larger project5 aimed at exploring the resilience of the Greek wine tourism sector, with a mixed methods research design and a twofold approach (i.e., Macro/Micro perspective or General/ Specified Resilience). Upon completion of the interviews, several key findings were identified, which are discussed in the following section.

Major challenges to the resilience of the Greek wine tourism sector Despite Greece’s long tradition in viticulture, the professionalization of the wine sector is a much more recent phenomenon. It was only in 1969, that the country revised its legislative framework for wines, in an effort to join the European Union (Alebaki & Iakovidou 2010). Given the Greek wine sector’s relative immaturity compared to that of other regions, the developmental delay of wine tourism has not been surprising. This argument was also expressed by the study’s participants, who viewed winery visitation as being at an early stage. However, on a positive note, a number of respondents expressed cautious optimism concerning the future: R9: Considering how it works in other countries, wine tourism does not really exist yet in Greece. The country’s wine tourism potential is undeveloped, though I think it could have a future. With respect to the factors influencing the sector’s resilience and the consequences of the current crisis, Thematic Analysis revealed several issues which were classified into three categories, namely: Economic, Social, and Environmental. Social challenges were further divided into five sub-categories. Figure 8.1 summarizes the results, illustrating the multiplicity of threats to the resilience of wine tourism, along with examples of particular stress factors. Space limits inhibit us from going through each and every one of these issues in depth; however, specific findings are discussed below. Economic challenges/stress factors Overall, despite the crippling effects of the ongoing Greek financial crisis, it appears that its impacts may not have been devastating to those involved in wine tourism: R3: In my opinion, family-owned wineries that were well run, might have yielded a little due to the crisis, maybe they hesitated, maybe they were affected, but they did not close down.

138  Maria Alebaki and Dimitri Ioannides

Threats/challenges to the resilience of wine tourism

Economic

• • • •

Eurozone/ Greece debt crisis Wine sales and cash flow decrease Changes in consumption patterns Limited resources for investment

Political

• •

Political/tax instability Legal issues and regulations

Organizational

• • • • • •

Institutional deficiencies Lack of executives for administration and management Power relations Loss of trust in networks and associations Need for research and data collection Lack of long-term strategic planning

Cultural

• • • •

Individualism/lack of synergies and collaboration Poorly developed ‘wine culture’ Wine as an elitist, less approachable product Urbanization versus tradition

Structural

• • •

Spatial separation of wineries Insufficient ‘critical mass’ of wineries open to public Absence of tourism infrastructure in specific regions

Entrepreneurial

• • •

Lack of capital/ trained staff in wineries Multitasking and time constraints/marketing knowledge Service quality standards/carrying capacity

Social

Environmental

• • • •

Reduction of vineyard surface area Protection of the landscape Land uses Climate change

Figure 8.1  Main challenges/threats to the resilience of wine tourism

R20: The crisis had a ‘positive’ effect on wineries, since it reinforced exports, in combination with the EU programs ... It is hard to break into foreign markets. Before the crisis, most winemakers were selling domestically and had been lulled into a false sense of security. For now, the sector is resilient and this has much to do with the increased focus toward foreign markets. With respect to the international wine trade, some respondents argued that the reduction of imported wines in recent years due to the economic downturn made Greek products more competitive in the domestic market; hence, where the crisis has had an impact was in terms of liquidity shortage and investments in wine tourism facilities: R36: There is a shortage of cash, meaning that one has to try to survive by making cuts, by being careful and by not investing. Consequently, value is not added and one remains stationary. R10: I believe that someone will prefer to export and not to engage in wine tourism. . . I am not sure that the ‘off Broadway’ producer will invest in such ventures. Interestingly, while the crisis did not seem to have an impact on winery visits in destinations like Santorini and Crete, where tourism is mostly inbound, winemakers on the mainland have noticed a remarkable decline in terms of both visitation numbers and cellar door sales:

Threats and obstacles to resilience  139 R6: Whereas at Christmas we drew in between 5,000 and 6,000 Euros, now we are only making 500 euros. No one comes by these days … Even upperincome visitors buy less, the impact of crisis is mostly psychological. Social challenges/stress factors Social issues were classified into five categories, namely political, organizational, cultural, structural, and entrepreneurial. One set of comments identified government instability and institutional deficiencies, while several legislative and other shortcomings were also encountered: R34: Who arranges things these days? Who is managing the agricultural policy for viticulture and the wine sector, or the development of wine tourism? One is at a dead end. There is only one employee of either the Ministry of Tourism or the Ministry of Agriculture. And what does one employee mean? He remains in his position for 1–2 years, then the government changes and someone else comes, he will stay in charge for three years, he has limited knowledge and too little time to comprehend this composite world … Subsisting an institutional formation is what we need at least, if not requesting public grant funding (who would dare to raise such an issue this time?). Further, many of the interviewees expressed concern over the absence of coordination and strategic planning. Lack of executives in wine tourism networks remains a critical issue. They also stressed the importance of limited training opportunities and the need for information/ records management: R6: Greek wine tourism has been mostly associated with luxury infrastructure and the prestige of the winery. Yet, emphasis should be put on training and consultancy. There is a need for executives who could assist in specific activities, that by their nature the winemaker accepts that he does not have the ability to take charge. The education of wine tourism stakeholders is also essential. There is a need for strategic planning and management, to know how much does wine tourism cost, where we want to be in twenty years. R8: There is a need for data collection … I would suggest setting up an organization that will guide this venture at a national level. R32: Strategic planning cannot derive only from the central administration, the Ministry that is. It also has to include the regional administration, along with all the relevant stakeholders. When it comes to cultural issues, the lack of collaboration among the winemakers was highlighted as a major hindrance to wine tourism development. Respondents also underlined the necessity of trust building and synergies:

140  Maria Alebaki and Dimitri Ioannides R26: There is individualism and we do not trust our executives … The Greek winemaker who is a new ‘fruit’ in Greece has a very short history, while his French counterpart has been around for 500 years. Thus, you see a totally different culture. And because the Greek winemaker developed and enlarged with his own work (he was a vineyard owner, became a winemaker, engaged in marketing, was a salesperson, created his label, had an opinion about everything), he cannot easily respect and trust the others’ opinion. This is because he was a one-man orchestra. If he does not cease to be a one-man orchestra in his work, how will he do this on the next piece? R2: Winemakers cannot sit down and discuss with honesty about what the distinct weaknesses of each of their regions are or how to overcome potential obstacles. Despite being aware of their problems, they do not talk about them. There is a sequential relationship between product involvement and consumers’ desire to visit a wine region (Brown, Havitz, & Getz, 2007). However, many people see wine as elitist, feeling that they cannot appreciate it due to their limited knowledge (Bach, 2007; Jefford & Draper, 2007). Some of the respondents perceived this misconception as a potential barrier to winery visitation: R36: It is some sort of snobbism. It is hard for one to get into the mentality to go to a winery thinking this activity applies only to pretentious snobs. R17: Visiting wineries is not something Greek people commonly do. Of course, the new generation has begun to know more about wine lately. R13: The Greek person has been trapped into the European lifestyle, in the consumption of foreign products. A huge mistake is that rather than making wine an indispensable part of culture, it has been introduced as a ‘lifestyle choice’. When it comes to structural barriers, participants commented on the fact that many wineries are dispersed and isolated from main tourism hubs. R4: In particular regions, there are no hotels, there are no restaurants, so what is one to do if they visit? This means a whole lot of work needs to be completed before even talking about beginning wine tourism. R10: A critical mass (of wineries) is necessary. You have to make an experience complete. The last sub-category of ‘social challenges’ includes several topics that can be labelled entrepreneurial. For instance, there are wine producers who do not have a thorough understanding of what wine tourism entails (R36). Another source of concern expressed by some respondents was related to time constraints. Owing

Threats and obstacles to resilience  141 to the small size of several wineries, their owners find the multitasking that is required in the day-to-day operations an especially onerous challenge. R6: It is a very difficult task, therefore, we count on our children. I mean, I am a viticulturist. I have to clean the winery, am in charge of the exports, of hospitality ... I mean, it can’t work like this. R10: Unless we plan and manage wine tourism properly, potential visitors – rather than serving as ambassadors – might turn into defamers. Finally, several interviewees also express worries over service quality issues and the concept of carrying capacity: R5: We need to promote local particularities ... to offer a real wine tourism experience (the thinking man’s holiday)…We need narratives (story telling). R20: When wine tourism reaches the stage of development it will transform into mass tourism; winery visitors will not be able to enjoy the wine tourism experience. Every operation should impose an upper limit on visitation numbers. The carrying capacity of each winery is a critical success factor … The offered wine tourism product should be differentiated according to each target’s needs and expectations. Environmental challenges/stress factors The third thematic cluster that has emerged from the qualitative data is what we term the ‘environmental threats or constraints’. ‘Reduction of vineyard surface area’ and the issue of ‘Land uses’ were mainly addressed by the respondents: R36: A major challenge concerns the absence of spatial land use planning, even in areas considered as Appellations of Origin … It is not unusual to see a car cemetery right next to a beautiful winery … The issue of wine tourism is that it also relates to aesthetics. R2: Winemakers should openly discuss how to protect the vineyard landscape against pollution; abandonment; urban intrusion; and other negative interventions. R22: Eradication of vineyards was a false step; it should not have happened in Greece … From 1960, when the vines began to be uprooted, the Ministry should have set up a Bank for restitutions. R34: Due to the decrease in vineyard surface area, the country will no longer be self-sufficient in wine. Production has fallen dramatically.

142  Maria Alebaki and Dimitri Ioannides Notably, respondents seem to be complacent regarding the topic of ‘Climate change’ (R9, R22, R27). In fact, one of the respondents perceives this phenomenon as being rather an opportunity than an immediate threat. R22: Our grape varieties are quite resilient when it comes to drought and that is why they attract worldwide interest, especially from regions that face such problems, such as in Australia and California. Nevertheless, one of the interviewees considers that the impacts of climate change are already observed in insular regions: R21: (In Crete) we often have to deal with the lack of snowfall, extended drought seasons, extreme weather conditions. In our region, the wine harvest starts in July.

Discussion Results clearly reinforce the view that tourism is constantly coping with a range of different challenges, which do not take place in a vacuum, but are related to a wider social-ecological context (Calgaro, Lloyd, & Dominey-Howes, 2014). With respect to wine tourism, certain challenges identified in this chapter are common to the overall wine industry, as reported in previous studies. For instance, Alonso & Bressan (2015) have also addressed economic constraints and institutional barriers as major impediments to the resilience of Italian micro-wineries. In the Spanish context, the sustainability of the Canary Islands’ wine tourism has been found to be hindered by the low level of government support, the lack of organization within the wine industry, and the limited resources for investing in hospitality facilities (Alonso & Liu, 2012a). Undoubtedly, the interviews demonstrate the general effect of the global economic crisis on the Greek economy, with a number of respondents feeling that the recession has dampened wine tourism’s further development. Nevertheless, most of the key informants consider the sector resilient enough to emerge from the current crisis, accrediting this ‘relative strength’ to two determinants: •

•

First, the general characteristics of the country’s wine industry. The latter is largely comprised of small and medium, family-owned businesses (ICAP, 2015). This structure indicates several competencies, such as diversity, selforganization, self-correction, and local control, which are inextricably related to resilience (Jepson, 2016; Holladay & Powell, 2013). Second, a significant shift in marketing strategies towards internalization, which occurred during (or due to) the crisis. Reinforced by European funds,6 wineries developed a stronger orientation on export growth, in an effort to diversify, enter new markets or tackle the decrease of sales nationally (see also Alonso, Bressan, O’Shea, & Krajsic, 2014). This advancement implies that the sector possesses flexibility, which is a critical resilience building skill, allowing for ‘the implementation of short-term adaptation processes to imminent external challenges’ (Luthe & Wyss, 2016, p. 27).

Threats and obstacles to resilience  143 Whereas some of the challenges identified in this study may indeed be external or have a temporary aspect (i.e., weather fluctuations), others are highly embedded within historically contingent trajectories that overall have a major bearing on sociocultural structures. Institutional deficiencies or non-collaborative behaviour represent such examples. Extending this view, we argue that the economic crisis constitutes the primary driver of change that has caused – and continues to cause – adverse impacts in multiple levels of the wine tourism system. It is important to underline, that, shortly after the completion of this study, Greece’s wine tourism sector experienced another two major perturbations, both of which were actually produced by the crisis. These include: • •

The imposition of banking capital controls on 29 June 2015, which adversely impacted Greek businesses, particularly SMEs (Nassr, Robano, & Wehinger, 2016). The introduction of excise tax on wine7 – voted in late 2015 and implemented in the beginning of 2016; it was one of many austerity measures that have been imposed since 2010. The tax caused ‘huge unrest in the industry’, since it was expected to seriously affect retail prices and, consequently, overall wine sales (Euromonitor, 2016).

Given the aforementioned discussion, the argument that ‘a crisis is not an exceptional event, exogenous to economic development cycles, but rather it is a substantial element of structural dynamics’, is strongly supported (Bianchi & Labory, 2011, p. 12). Operating in the ‘zone of uncertainty’ (Davidson et al., 2013) is a continuous condition to which wine tourism businesses have to constantly respond. This gives rise to the so-called evolutionary perspective of resilience, which sheds light into ‘the dynamic interplay of persistence, adaptability and transformability’ (Davoudi, 2012, p. 306).

Conclusions The aim of this study was to employ the resilience framework in order to examine the future prospects of Greek wine tourism. Based on key stakeholders’ perceptions, we addressed the main concerns in this area, by classifying the identified threats into economic, social and environmental. As a final point, it should be noted that the current chapter does not claim to provide definitive answers or build a comprehensive theory; instead, it seeks to highlight the significance of adopting a holistic approach in investigating the complex wine tourism sector. Our findings may offer some insight into this area, indicating implications for both policy makers and planners involved in the design of long-term wine tourism strategies. The conceptualization of shocks and stressors that affect the resilience of the Greek wine tourism system proposes a ‘roadmap’ towards the development of the sector in a sustainable manner.

144  Maria Alebaki and Dimitri Ioannides

Notes 1 The studies of Alonso & Bressan (2015) and Flint, Golicic, & Signori (2011) have focused on the resilience of the wine sector in general. 2 Examples include the Association of Winemakers of Nemea in Peloponnese (2011), of Naoussa (2014), and Drama (2015) in Macedonia; and the Wines of Athens (in 2014). 3 Greek Ministry of Agriculture, personal communication, 17 September 2016. 4 Following Flint et al.’s (2011) approach, the wine producers selected for this study were key decision makers. All interviews were conducted in Greek. 5 This project was funded under the Action ‘Research & Technology Development Innovation Projects’, AgroETAK, MIS453350, in the framework of the Operational Programme ‘Human Resources Development’. It was co-funded by the European Social Fund through the National Strategic Reference Framework (Research Funding Program 2007–2013), coordinated by the Hellenic Agricultural Organization DEMETER. 6 ‘Extroversion – business competitiveness (2007–2013)’ and ‘Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation’ (EPAnEK, 2014–2020) (Aspridis, Sdrolias, Blanas, Kyriakou, & Grigoriou, 2013). 7 20 cents per litre or 15 cents per 750 ml bottle.

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9 The sustainability of small business resilience The local tourism industry of Yogyakarta, Indonesia a decade after the crisis Heidi Dahles

Introduction Small-scale businesses in the local tourism industry of Yogyakarta have shown remarkable resilience during the long-term crisis (1996–2006) that had a profound impact on the Indonesian economy at large and the Indonesian tourism sector in particular (Dahles & Susilowati, 2013; Dahles & Susilowati, 2015; Dahles, Koning, & Susilowati, 2015; Susilowati, 2010). The ‘decade of crises’ started with the Asian economic downfall in 1997 which initiated social unrest, political riots, and, in 1998, a change of government. While politically still in transition, the most important tourism destination of the country, the island of Bali, was the scene of terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2005. In 2003, the outbreak of the SARS epidemic again reduced the volume of international travel in the region. The tsunami of 2004 and the earthquake that struck Yogyakarta in 2006 destroyed the livelihoods of many local people. The majority of small businesses survived, and some even thrived, as they benefited from flexible specialization, diversification, and combination of different sources of income within and across sectors. In doing so, these enterprises demonstrated the much-admired resilience of both smallscale economies (Portes, 2010) and the tourism sector (Robinson & Jarvie, 2008). After ten years of recovery it has become obvious that those small businesses that diversified within and across the tourism sector in Yogyakarta’s local tourism industry applied a strategy that contributed to the resilience of their enterprise. In concurrence with the Stockholm Resilience Centre, resilience is understood as the capacity of a system to deal with change and continue to develop (Stockholm Resilience Centre 2015, p. 3). Looking back at two decades of crises and recovery, this chapter raises the question whether the strategies that contributed to the remarkable resilience in times of crisis also helped establish a sustainable future for the small businesses in Yogyakarta’s local tourism industry. Resilience is viewed as a strategy to develop a measure of sustainability (Anderies et al., 2013; Davoudi, 2012; Fiksel, 2006). Accordingly, the study challenges the idea that

150  Heidi Dahles crisis affects all businesses in the same way and that there is a standard solution that fits all (Dahles & Susilowati, 2015). As businesses form an integral part of a wider social-ecological system, recovering from crisis requires more than a few remedial steps to reinstate a perceived pre-crisis normality. Instead, the ability of small tourism businesses to be adaptable and flexible is paramount to their capacity to overcome crisis and build capacity for the future. The data underlying this chapter have been generated in a series of studies, initiated, conducted, or supervised by the author, focusing on local tourism businesses in the non-star-rated hospitality sector in the city of Yogyakarta in Indonesia (Dahles & Bras, 1999; Dahles, 2001, Susilowati, 2010; Dahles & Susilowati, 2013; Dahles & Susilowati, 2015; Dahles, Koning & Susilowati, 2015). Based on ethnographic methods, in particular participant observation, the research revolved around ways in which these businesses responded to significant fluctuations in tourist arrivals caused by a combination of financial crisis and political turmoil, terrorist acts, health hazards and natural disasters starting in the late 1990s and continuing into the mid-2000s. This chapter is structured as follows. The next section critically reviews selected literature on resilience in general and business resilience in particular. The chapter proceeds with a discussion of the methodology applied to generate the data underlying the analysis presented in this chapter, followed by a brief outline of the tourism industry of Yogyakarta to provide the setting for the ensuing discussion of resilience strategies of Yogyakarta’s small businesses during crisis across two crucial sectors of the local tourism industry: the accommodation and souvenir sector. Empirical findings will be interpreted in dialogue with the relevant literature and finally, the implications for conceptual and policy frameworks are discussed.

Literature review A number of comprehensive reviews have been published of the burgeoning literature on the concept of resilience and its position vis-à-vis the concept of sustainability (see for example Brand & Jax, 2007; Davoudi, 2012; Lew, Ng, Ni, & Wu, 2016). Suffice to say, for the purpose of this study the concept of resilience is applied as an instrument for analysing social-ecological systems under pressure (Anderies et al., 2006; Folke, 2006; Walker et al., 2006). This study contextualizes resilience by emphasizing its social, economic, and institutional dimensions (e.g., Folke, 2006; Olsson et al., 2004, 2006; Janssen, 2006). The concept of resilience is viewed as closely intertwined with the concept of sustainability following scholars who view sustainability as the ‘broad social goal and resilience is how it can be implemented’ (Lew et al., 2016; Fiksel, 2006; Anderies, et al., 2013). Extant literature suggests that resilient systems possess two distinct characteristics, namely functional redundancy and cyclical change. Functional redundancy, or the presence of multiple components that can perform the same function, can provide ‘insurance’ within a system by allowing some components to compensate for the loss or failure of others. Investment in diversity and redundancy

The sustainability of small business resilience  151 can enhance the resilience of livelihoods because it enables people to adjust in response to changes in the market or the environment (Davoudi, 2012; Lew et al., 2016). In addition, the idea that change is endemic to systems, has led scholars to distinguish four distinct phases of change within a system, also known as Holling’s double-looped adaptive cycle consisting of growth and conservation, followed by creative destruction and reorganization (Allen et al., 2014; Holling, 1986). This adaptive cycle implies that resilience diminishes as systems mature and their demise makes way for alternatives to develop and innovations to materialize. Conversely, ‘business resilience’ is a distinct subfield of resilience research that has its own evolving conceptual basis (Goble et al., 2002). In a business context, resilience addresses the ‘capacity for an enterprise to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of turbulent change’ (Fiksel, 2006, p. 16; Hamel & Välikangas, 2003). Scholars writing about business resilience argue that the effective response of businesses to rapid change and shocks is critical for economic development. Businesses are able to respond flexibly to a changing environment, overcome exogenous shocks, and remain competitive, but they will lose these capacities the more rigidly they are organized (Williams & Vorley, 2014, pp. 258, 260). Echoing the idea of adaptive cycles, resilient businesses respond to change in that they are able to recover from perturbations and to show adaptive capacity which may lead to far-reaching changes in the overall business concept and hence, innovation (Fiksel, 2006). Small businesses are particularly responsive to exogenous shocks as they are more flexible, adaptable, and innovative than large enterprises (Williams & Vorley, 2014, p. 258). One may argue that this flexibility is enhanced if small business operations comprise functional redundancies that offer alternatives and make them less vulnerable to disruptions. However, there are many nuances to the adaptive cycle, which are highly relevant to understanding (small) business resilience. There is a wide variety of responses to exogenous changes and shocks among small businesses (Williams & Vorley, 2014, p. 259). Generally, three strategies of small business adaptation can be distinguished: (1) return to a state of normality, (2) capacity for adjustments or, more profoundly, (3) embrace radical change (Davoudi, 2012). The first strategy is to mobilize resources in order to ‘weather the storm’ and return to a state of perceived normality. In this respect, resilience is assessed in terms of equilibrium or the ‘resistance to disturbance and the speed by which the system returns to equilibrium’ (Davoudi, 2012, p. 300, citing Holling 1973, 1986). The second strategy assesses resilience as the capacity for absorbing shock and gradual change. Business concepts and processes transform and alternatives are embraced enhancing its functional redundancy, and the enterprise may emerge from crisis stronger (Adger, 2003; Scott & Laws, 2006, p. 8). The idea is that businesses achieve a new equilibrium, but this equilibrium is situated at an enhanced level of flexibility. A third approach to resilience envisions crisis as a necessity to bring about a fundamentally different state. This approach challenges the thought of equilibrium. Instead, change is seen as endemic to business and crisis constitutes just an aggravated condition of change (Berkes & Folke, 1998, p. 12; Carpenter et al., 2005). At this level, business concepts and operations change profoundly, and

152  Heidi Dahles the nature of the business may transform drastically within and across sectors and may generate new sources and forms of leadership tailored to crisis management. These strategies may occur simultaneously or consecutively in a system described as a ‘panarchy’, a nested set of adaptive cycles (Allen et al., 2014). Panarchy theory can contribute to a better understanding of the variety of responses to abrupt changes in complex systems. As Russell and Faulkner (2004, p. 561) point out, it is often in times of crisis that unpredictability triggers innovation as ‘(e)ntrepreneurs will find a gap amid the chaos, create an opportunity and set about changing the status quo, bringing new standards into existence’.

Research approach This chapter builds on the author’s long-term research and engagement with local tourism businesses in Yogyakarta since 1992, that which continues to the present day. During the past 25 years, several researchers, senior and junior academics, Masters students and PhD candidates participated in the research. Dr Titi Susilowati Prabana in particular continued the project during the decade of crisis. This chapter is based on an aggregated compilation of findings presented in numerous publications throughout the years spanning the larger research project. The research approach follows the interpretive tradition in social research in that it aims to understand how small business owners, as knowledgeable actors, interpret their own and other people’s actions and behaviour (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). Since human sense-making is viewed as being constructed and negotiated (Schwartz-Shea, 2006), the analysis revolves around the ‘description of persons, places and events’ rather than attempts at generalizing across time and space (Janesick, 1998, p. 50). In order to gain an in-depth understanding of the local tourism sector over time, long intervals were spent with the people under research to become familiar with their ways of running their business. The data gathering was organized around a business life history approach that investigates personal biographies in tandem with business histories (Dahles, 2004; Koning, 2010). In-depth and repeat interviews with business owners were held in order to explore the nature and structure of the business, the development of the business, the background of the owners and their family, challenges faced, solutions found, and coping strategies employed under ever-changing conditions. On-site observations complemented the method of interviewing as interviews were usually conducted in the setting of the business. During interviews, business was conducted as usual which provided a unique understanding of daily routines and validation (or questioning) of information obtained. Following the categorization from the Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics ICBS), the local tourism industry in Yogyakarta features micro and small-scale enterprises. The ICBS defines enterprises that employ up to four persons as micro enterprises; those that employ five to 19 workers are identified as small industries, while medium businesses employ between 20 and 99 workers.1 Following this classification, the majority of the firms studied are micro and small enterprises. Additionally, the selected firms exhibit employment structures typical of small

The sustainability of small business resilience  153 enterprises (cf. Mintzberg, 1992, p. 21) involving waged and family workers, malleable job descriptions, a flexible work force and simple management structures. The basic units of research were guesthouses and silver workshops. In total, 17 guesthouses and 11 silver workshops were followed through the years (during which ownership may have changed). Their owner-managers were interviewed repeatedly and on different occasions. Strategies of data collection and data analyses changed over the years depending on the background and language proficiency of the researcher conducting the interviews and the transformation of the research setting adding new levels of comparison to the analysis (for a detailed explanation please refer to Dahles & Bras, 1999; Dahles, 2001; Susilowati, 2010; Dahles & Susilowati, 2015; Dahles, Koning &, Susilowati, 2015).

Kampong tourism in Yogyakarta The city of Yogyakarta, centrally located on the island of Java, is Indonesia’s second tourist destination after Bali and is renowned as a cultural tourism destination. The majority of its population of about 400,000 lives in urban neighbourhoods or kampongs that make up the residential areas in the city. In these kampongs, small-scale tourism businesses run by local people thrived from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s. This kampong-based tourism industry catered to individual travellers from Europe, Australia, and, to a lesser degree, the United States. When crisis struck in the mid-1990s, international tourist arrivals dropped dramatically, never to reach pre-crisis levels again (Dahles & Susilowati, 2010). Kampongbased tourism in Yogyakarta is largely concentrated in two neighbourhoods, Sosrowijayan and Prawirotaman, while a third kampong, Kotagede, is the home of the city’s famous silver industry (Dahles, 2001). The neighbourhood of Sosrowijayan, a lower-class residential area, accommodates backpackers from all over the world. It is a densely populated neighbourhood with humble houses established by migrants from across the Indonesian archipelago. When international ‘shoestring’ tourism gained popularity in the 1970s, some families who could spare a room started to accommodate travellers. Eventually, the kampong came to feature home-based low-budget tourist facilities, home-stays, or small guesthouses, losmen in the local vernacular, catering to mostly young international budget travellers (Dahles, 2001). The neighbourhood of Prawirotaman, a modestly upmarket residential area, used to cater to ‘middle-class’ international travellers. The neighbourhood emerged as a housing estate for the families of the (unpaid) servants and military men of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, carrying the honorary titles of the lower Javanese aristocracy. To make a living, the families established hand-painted batik manufacturing in their spacious homes and courtyards. When the traditional batik industry declined because of the mechanization of batik production, some of the local aristocracy refurbished their homes to accommodate international tourists (Dahles, 2001). As international tourism became an important component of local livelihoods in Yogyakarta’s kampongs, the traditional silver workshops in the old ‘silvertown’ of Kotagede that used to provide silverware for the Sultan’s palace and

154  Heidi Dahles the local aristocracy, were absorbed into the sprawling local tourism industry. The neighbourhood of Kotagede is located about five kilometres southeast of Yogyakarta’s city centre. Tourists were attracted to this neighbourhood as it featured an abundance of silver workshops where the manufacturing process could be observed and souvenirs such as jewellery, cutlery, vases, chandeliers, and trays could be bought at a reasonable price. The Kotagede silver producers saw their income increase and developed their businesses, hired more workers, built more workshops, and produced more merchandise. Notwithstanding this expansion, the silver production remained family-based with individual families running their own workshops and, sometimes, attached retail outlets. They employed a flexible workforce. There are two major employment systems, the factory-based system and the putting-out system. In the factory-based system, entrepreneurs hire craftsmen to work in their houses forming production lines. Everybody in the production line specializes in a different task in the process to complete a product. In the putting-out system, a coordinator hires a number of craftsmen to work in his house in order to supply those who ordered products from him. Conversely, the coordinator may hire a number of craftsmen who work from their own homes. Usually, these systems were combined (Dahles, Koning, & Susilowati, 2015).

Strategies of resilience Weather the storm When crisis struck in the mid-1990s, occupancy rates fell in the accommodation sector of Sosrowijayan and Prawirotaman, and significantly fewer customers made it to the retail shops in Kotagede. In an initial response, business owners turned to their savings to compensate for their declining income. The use of financial savings was not uncommon in the tourism sector to bridge the seasonal fluctuation in tourist arrivals. The more prosperous business people also cashed in family jewellery and other privately owned valuable items. The silver producers resorted to selling raw silver as production was slowing down. In the most pressing situations they melted their silver stocks and sold the silver to pay for their day-today living expenses (Dahles, Koning, & Susilowati, 2015). In times of tourism growth, many small business owners had expanded their presence in the local tourism sector by adding tourism-related side-business activities to their core enterprise. Many losmen owners engaged in offering excursions to local and regional tourist attractions, transportation, and money changing services, or ran a restaurant or souvenir shop. When crisis persisted, many of these side-businesses were closed to cut down expenditure. Rarely did these businesses change hands, as there was no cash for new investments. Usually these activities were simply terminated and possible assets (such as vehicles or furniture) were sold. This downscaling coincided with the reduction of the labour force. Instead of massive lay-offs, local tourism entrepreneurs resumed to adjusting employment arrangements. Although more and more employees became redundant for lack of

The sustainability of small business resilience  155 work, business owners decreased working hours or lowered salaries, and left the decision to resign to their employees. Despite increasing financial pressure, the business owners felt obliged to protect and support their workers. The workers in turn felt obliged to avoid conflict and accepted a lower salary or resigned to ease the pressure on their employer. The informal sector which is a prominent feature of the Indonesian economy, absorbed labour and provided the flexibility required for staying in business during the crisis (see Dahles & Susilowati, 2013). While the crisis endured, increased numbers of silver producers in Kotagede resumed the ‘putting-out system’ which is a form of subcontracting. Under favourable economic conditions, the silver workshops would use subcontracting arrangements to engage more craftsmen if the bulk of orders exceeded the capacity of the workers in their shop. During the crisis, the reverse applied as the workshops did not have enough work to engage their workers. Therefore, many employees were encouraged to accept a change in their work arrangements with their employer and moved into outsourcing. The workers who owned their tools left the workshop and worked from home. They were provided with raw silver and received payment upon delivery of the finished product (Dahles, Koning, & Susilowati, 2015). As local businesses reduced their operating costs, they sought alternative revenues to support their families and businesses. Many guesthouse owners and silversmiths engaged in other income generating activities such as managing a batik cooperative, trading in rice, working as real estate brokers, or renting out space in their houses for other businesses. Those who held qualifications beyond the tourism sector engaged in different kinds of jobs and trades while continuing their core businesses or relied heavily on unpaid family labour (Susilowati, 2010). All these strategies, such as spending savings, downsizing, reducing labour costs, and seeking alternative revenues were survival strategies. Resources were mobilized in order to keep the core business floating until conditions improved and a return to the pre-crisis situation would occur. The core business itself, namely the guesthouse or the silver workshop, did not change in the early phase of the crisis. Guesthouse owners simply locked rooms that remained unused and silver producers reduced the volume of production. However, as the crisis continued, more profound adjustments were called for with many businesses combining the above strategies with modest investments to adjust to a changing market. Only a few businesses owners failed to change and eventually closed down and moved away. Embracing gradual change The most prominent business intervention spawned by the ongoing crisis was the shift from the foreign to the domestic market. The size of the Indonesian population, some 230 million people, constitutes a massive potential market for the local tourism industry. The switch to the domestic market was supported by the Indonesian government’s leisure policy that created a demand by facilitating ‘time’ to their citizens for travel. Concerned about declining international tourist arrivals, the Indonesian government stimulated domestic tourism through intensive promotion

156  Heidi Dahles in 1997, followed by an increase of national holidays after the first Bali bombing in 2002. These measures had a positive effect on the flow of domestic tourists to a variety of popular tourist destinations, including Yogyakarta. While international tourism arrivals continued to decline, the number of domestic visitors booking overnight accommodation in the city increased steadily (Dahles & Susilowati, 2015). The majority of guesthouse owners in Sosrowijayan and Prawirotaman responded to the market shift (Dahles & Susilowati, 2015). First of all they reduced room rates to a level that was affordable for domestic tourists. However, more comprehensive adjustments were called for in order to accommodate these visitors. While short of cash, they had to invest in room renovations and adjustments as the needs of domestic tourists are different from those of foreign visitors. In particular, rooms designed for single and double occupancy had to be converted to accommodate large families or groups. In addition, bathrooms had to be remodelled to provide Indonesian squatting toilets and mandi bath conveniences, while cooking facilities had to be installed in the rooms to allow for the preparation of simple meals. Conversely, some accommodation owners returned to the boarding house business they ran before tourism became prominent in Yogyakarta. As the city hosts many schools and institutes of higher education, attracting students from all over Indonesia, there is always demand for cheap student accommodation. Similarly, as the neighbourhood of Sosrowijayan borders the red-light district of Yogyakarta, some accommodation owners allowed local sex-workers to occupy their rooms. While most accommodation owners closed down their side-businesses that catered to foreign tourists in times of international tourism growth, modest investments in new business initiatives occurred. These initiatives resonated with the market shift and catered either to the taste of domestic visitors or local residents. In particular, restaurants, cafés, canteens, and food stalls became an area were accommodation owners invested their dwindling resources as only modest investments were required for a start-up (Dahles & Susilowati, 2015). The Kotagede silver producers, they had also switched attention to the domestic retail market (Dahles, Koning, & Susilowati, 2015). Earlier, the silver industry had developed their businesses according to foreign tastes and budgets and this focus enabled them to maintain a relatively high price level. The shift to the domestic market was seen as a step back in terms of both the quality of the silver products offered and earnings generated. With the shift to the domestic market, the silver producers had to revise their pricing policy. Substantial discounts had to be offered to attract domestic customers due to the weaker purchasing power of the domestic buyer compared to foreign buyers. Hence, workshop owners had to accept lower profit margins. To adjust to the domestic market, they concentrated on producing cheaper and smaller items such as accessories and jewellery. Many shops started to buy cheap silver products from other places in Indonesia for resale. These products were machine made, mass-produced, and of lower quality, but inexpensive. The above strategy did not lead to any innovations in the local silver production and, instead, represented a severe deviation from the image of Kotagede as a traditional silver producing village.

128,660

2008

24.64

32.09

–24.49

0.08

8.13

5.34

–2.33

18.53

6.89

–6.93

–71.63

–20.96

2.11

6.50

Growth %

1,156,097

1,146,197

836,682

1,747,195

1,688,599

1,234,690

888,360

739,274

540,996

440,986

309,135

638,552

901,575

837,265

Arrival

0.86

36.99

–13.52

3.47

21.00

26.09

20.17

36.65

22.68

42.65

–51.59

–29.17

7.68

30.7

Growth %

Domestic tourism

1,284,757

1,249,421

914,827

1,850,683

1,792,000

1,390,611

979,137

832,219

619,410

514,347

387,946

916,399

1,253,117

1,181,530

Arrivals

Total

2.83

36.57

–14.58

3.27

45.14

28.22

17.65

34.36

20.47

32.58

–57.66

–27.00

6.06

22.56

Growth %

Sources: Dinas Kebudayaan dan Pariwisata Propinsi DIY, 2003; Baparda DIY, 2005; Dinas Pariwisata Propinsi DIY, 2009.

78,145

103,224

2006

2007

103,401

103,488

95,626

2003

2004

90,777

2002

2005

78,414

73,361

1999

92,945

78,811

1998

2000

277,847

1997

2001

344,265

351,542

1995

1996

Arrivals

Year

International tourism

Table 9.1  Yogyakarta international and domestic tourism arrivals, 1995–2008

Earthquake

Bali bombings II

Bali bombings I

Regime change

Monetary crisis

Forest fires Kalimantan, Sumatra

Impacts

158  Heidi Dahles While in the accommodation sector many businesses came to embrace alternative opportunities that reduced their dependence on international tourism as the only source of income in order to prepare for greater flexibility in an unpredictable market, silver producers encountered more obstacles as the contraction of the international tourist market represented a loss that could not be compensated by other market niches. Inevitably, their livelihood came under pressure.

Radical change? For many local business owners, tapping into domestic tourism was a step that logically followed from their pre-existing presence in the tourism market. This required some adjustments to their business but continued operations as usual. Branching out into new, unexplored business areas and transforming the nature of their businesses drastically within and across sectors, posed a challenge that only a few owners considered. Radical change did not materialize in Yogyakarta’s kampong businesses. While maintaining their core business firmly grounded in tourism, a handful of accommodation owners prepared for a reorientation towards a market that transformed in a profound manner. A small number of accommodation owners ventured into opportunities created by Indonesian middle-class consumer preferences, such as phone shops, tattoo studios, motorbike, and mountain bike rentals. In attempting to benefit from the Indonesian middle-class taste for foreign food, one Sosrowijayan guesthouse owner opened an upmarket steak house at the outskirts of Yogyakarta. To be able to establish the steakhouse, the owners sold all the land they had purchased before the crisis. A chef from Jakarta was hired to add allure to the cuisine. However, the owners had miscalculated both the appreciation of haute cuisine among Indonesian middle class and their willingness to spend relatively more on dining out. After only a few years, the restaurant closed its doors for lack of patrons. Notably, these scant new initiatives all sprung up in Sosrowijayan, where people had faced many challenges over the years and businesses were less consolidated. In the more prosperous neighbourhood of Prawirotaman, such risky undertakings were lacking (Dahles & Susilowati, 2015). Here, owners were more inclined to wait for ‘normalcy’ to return. However, this expectation was bitterly disappointed when an earthquake struck in 2006. The neighbourhoods of Prawirotaman and Kotagede were severely affected. Many buildings collapsed and economic activities were paralysed for months. Many tourism businesses in Prawirotaman never recovered. Buildings were not repaired and owners sold off the land to developers and left the city. A decade after the crisis, the neighbourhood is undergoing radical transformation as major hotel and restaurant developments driven by external investors have changed its character completely. Kotagede still bears the scars of the disaster. Many of the destroyed buildings have not been restored and the silver shops they once accommodated ceased to exist. Their owners gave up the trade, or relocated production to a poor rural area to the east of Yogyakarta where most of their contract workers resided.

The sustainability of small business resilience  159

Discussion and conclusion Local tourism businesses in Yogyakarta showed a striking resilience to the sustained crisis in the Indonesian tourism industry. In terms of the strategies outlined earlier, the businesses showed resilience in three different ways: survival, adaptation, and modest innovation (see Table 9.2). When crisis hit in the late 1990s, local business owners mobilized available assets, reduced operational costs, and generated additional income to keep their core business intact. During the first three years (which retrospectively can be named the first adaptive cycle marked by economic and political upheaval), business owners, confronted with declining international tourism for the first time since establishing their businesses, took measures to weather the storm while expecting tourists to return to Yogyakarta soon. As the crisis continued and accrued assets became depleted, more pro-active measures were called for. In the years of the Bali bombings (2002–2005) when the second and third adaptive cycles occurred, most businesses embraced the switch to the domestic market as the number of domestic visitors to Yogyakarta kept growing. Only a few business owners who did not respond to the challenges or focused on a return to normality went bankrupt and closed down in the process. Surprisingly, so did some businesses that opted for drastic innovation, such as the upmarket steakhouse for which the local clientele was not ready. The majority kept going by drawing on their adaptive capacities which were developed during two decades of tourism growth. A resilient business effectively adjusts its operations, management, and marketing strategies to sustain under dramatically changing conditions (Fiksel, 2006). In particular during and immediately after the 2006 earthquake, myriad of strategies were applied across the three neighbourhoods under study. New adaptations in business operations, management, and marketing strategies, resulted in a transformation of the overall business concept (Fiksel, 2006). Such strategies included new business Table 9.2  Strategies of resilience Survival

Adaptation

Innovation

• Spend savings • Sell assets • Convert stocks to saleable assets • Downsize business • Close side-businesses in tourism sector • Reduce wages and staff • Change employment arrangements • Generate alternative non-tourism revenues

• Switch to domestic market • Offer discounts • Adjust guesthouse to family and group accommodation • Diversify clientele • Offer new products to accommodate domestic tastes

• New business start-ups in non-tourism sector • Target upmarket local clientele • Relocate (silver) production to lowincome area

Prominent during first adaptive cycle 1996–1999

Prominent during second and third adaptive cycle 2000–2005

Observed during fourth and subsequent adaptive cycles in 2005 and beyond

160  Heidi Dahles start-ups in sectors that catered to both (domestic) tourists and local markets, such as restaurants and food stalls, handicraft manufacturing, bike rentals, and tattoo studios. Time and again, the accommodation businesses were able to recover from the disturbances caused by yet another crisis. In particular where business could draw on redundancies (Brand & Jax, 2007; Davoudi, 2012, p. 323; Lew et al., 2016) such as sector-specific subsidiary businesses, enterprises showed the necessary elasticity to weather the storm and to generate resources to adapt to changing market conditions. In the silver industry, such redundancies were lacking because of the nature of the industry. Instead, workshop owners resumed to transforming employment relations which allowed for a reduction of production costs. However, this industry in general showed less resilience in view of the continuing crisis. If, in the business context, resilience is demonstrated by the capacity of enterprises to innovate and grow while undergoing dramatic change (Fiksel, 2006; Scott & Laws, 2006), this is evidenced among a few pioneering accommodation businesses in Yogyakarta’s kampongs. A few branched out into new sectors and some emerged from the crises revitalized. As Russell and Faulkner (2004) have shown, resilience is strongest among businesses that sense opportunities in situations of chaos and embrace change. However, in contrast to the literature that celebrates drastic change as the preferred route to resilience, the current study suggests that in the small-scale tourism sector, there is reluctance to branch out into new sectors and seek new areas of investment. Most businesses maintained their core enterprise firmly rooted in tourism. Radical change, a strategy of building resilience that in pertinent literature is recommended as most effective, did not materialize in Yogyakarta’s kampong businesses. In reflecting on the extant literature on business resilience, it is plausible to conclude that the three strategies of survival, adaptation, and innovation were not distinct responses to crisis, but were applied at the same time. Adaptation, in a myriad of ways, was the most common and successful response, whereas businesses with few assets remained focused on survival strategies waiting for pre-crisis normality to return. A few businesses ventured into new start-ups in sectors unrelated to tourism. Some of these targeted consumer tastes particularly of domestic middle classes. At this level of resilience, businesses display a considerable adaptive capacity leaving them less dependent on and vulnerable to one particular market niche (Williams & Vorley, 2014). The analysis of small business responses to the protracted crisis in Yogyakarta established that an entrepreneurially-led response was an effective catalyst for business resilience. It is often in a challenging and insecure environment that opportunities are created bringing about business innovation and growth. As an economic activity embedded in the household and community economy, tourism businesses showed the flexibility that enabled them to downsize and diversify across sectors in times of crisis, changing from side-businesses to core business and back again to new side-businesses. This functional redundancy was a major factor contributing to the resilience of the businesses and the lack thereof, such as in the silver industry, contributed to their demise. Based on these findings, the study endorses the resilience thinking of the Stockholm Resilience Centre

The sustainability of small business resilience  161 that asserts that systems with many different components, be they species, actors, or sources of knowledge, are generally more resilient than systems with few components (Stockholm Resilience Centre 2015, p. 3). In line with panarchy theory claiming that resilience is built through a nested set of adaptive cycles (Allen et al., 2014), it is clear that the businesses that diversified within and across the tourism sector during the crisis have been most successful in sustaining their operations. They opted for a resilience strategy that contributed to the sustainability of their enterprise. The successful adapters, however, remained dependent on tourism. New business initiatives thrived in the margin of a tourism-based core business and this raises the issue whether the once crisis-proof resilience strategy generates new vulnerabilities, in particular in a post-tourism era. After a decade of recovery, Yogyakarta has swiftly developed into a modern Asian city reflecting the rapid transformation of Indonesia into a developed nation. In hindsight, the investments in the food sector, such as cafés, food stalls, and restaurant, prepared a major shift in orientation for the city as a whole. Currently, Yogyakarta is reinventing itself as ‘culinary destination’ and is developing into the centre of Javanese food tourism. This change is driven by financiers from Jakarta, Bali, and Surabaya, but also from overseas such as China, Singapore and the Middle East. While this longitudinal in-depth study provided relevant insights into small firm behaviour under crisis, a full understanding of (the limits of) business resilience requires further inquiry into the lingering aftermath of Indonesia’s decade of crisis.

Note 1 For the definition of micro, small-scale, and medium-sized enterprises as applied in Indonesia: www.bps.go.id/aboutus.php?table.

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Part III

Tourism as a socio-economic driver of change

10 Strategies for building community resilience to long-term structural change in the Mackay and Whitsunday regions of Queensland, Australia Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-Lee Moyle, and Robyn Keast

Introduction The global economic climate is subject to regular fluctuation, and can result in structural changes for many regional communities. Economic structural change is a shift or change in economic conditions which affects how the market operates (Laitner, 2000) and is often caused when the functioning of an industry changes or a new entity enters the economy. Recently, structural change has been intensified by technological advancements, expanding markets, and more fluid international borders which have flow on internal national impacts to sub-regional levels (North, 2005). Economic structural change can be both, can have both short and long-term positive outcomes for a region, including providing new economic opportunities through the creation of businesses and employment, as well as revitalizing stagnant markets and economies (Connelly & Lewis, 2010). However, there are also negative short and long-term impacts, particularly as prolonged exposure can interfere with the functioning of a community, as well as create instability and increase the region’s susceptibility to future negative changes (Connelly & Lewis, 2010). In addition to impacting the economic system, structural change can also have a negative impact on the social, environmental, and institutional systems of a community. Within Australia, economic structural change has been driven by a number of sectors. However, the prominence of the tourism and resources sectors within Australian regions has intensified the impacts of structural change driven by these sectors (Connolly & Lewis, 2010). The increased intensity of structural change in recent years has led to more adaptive approaches, such as resilience, being explored within regional development approaches (Benson & Garmestani, 2011). However, resilience applications, and ultimately strategies, specifically for managing longterm structural change are often limited, mainly focusing on the development of resilience frameworks (Bec, McLennan, & Moyle, 2016; Raco & Street, 2012). This chapter will provide more nuanced insights into strategies that build resilience to long-term structural change driven by the tourism and resources sectors.

168  Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-Lee Moyle, and Robyn Keast

Resilience and long-term structural change: a review of the literature Resilience as a change management tool Change management within the context of resilience focuses on harnessing adaptive capacities to address change and the associated impacts (Gallopín, 2006). Within complex systems, such as institutions and communities, resilience is underlined by social-ecological resilience interpretations that adopt an evolutionary perspective of resilience, where adaptation and transformation are central to addressing and managing change (Ruiz-Ballesteros, 2011). Social-ecological resilience incorporates the theoretical underpinnings of social, ecological, and economic resilience, which integrates both the physical and natural environments (Adger, 2000). As a change management approach, social-ecological resilience does not necessarily attempt to control the force of change; rather it adopts reflexive actions to achieve desirable outcomes from the ensuing change (Davoudi et al., 2012). In doing so, complex adaptive systems thinking is fostered. Connectivity, learning, and participation are also central to resilience applications as a mechanism to manage change (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2014). In particular, attention is given to redefining power and governance structures to build local community empowerment, and engagement (Magis, 2010). This way of thinking has expanded resilience applications within regional development, to manage political, social, environmental, and economic change in community systems (Hassink, 2010). These applications are commonly labelled ‘regional’ or ‘community’ resilience. Community resilience is the process of communities adapting to a range of internal shocks (Berkes & Ross, 2013). However, specific attention is being given to manage change in relation to economic sectors. Research on resilience to economic change has predominantly explored changes created by a sector or the external changes impacting a sector (Hill, Wial, & Wolman, 2008; Simmie & Martin, 2010). Tourism is one such sector that has seen an increase of resilience applications to manage change. In this context, the most common application is in relation to disastrous events, often focused on rebuilding tourism businesses and communities to events such as terrorism, human error, and extreme weather events (Biggs, Hall, & Stoeckl, 2012; Orchiston, 2013). Although resilience applications for tourism are largely focused on rapid forces of change, applications exist for managing slow, gradual forces of change. In particular, studies have explored tourism resilience to climate change (Becken, 2013). Moreover, communities are employing resilience as a change management approach for addressing change driven by the tourism sector. As such, the environmental change caused by tourism has been a focus of a number of community resilience studies, exploring issues such as environmental degradation, economic fluctuation, and infrastructure development (Ruiz-Ballesteros, 2011; Strickland-Munro, Allison, & Moore, 2010). The resources sector is another economic sector which has received increased attention from resilience applications, particularly for its impact on the community system. In particular, resilience has been applied to the resources sector as a

Strategies for building community resilience   169 mechanism to manage the associated changes the sector has on the environmental and social systems (Gibson & Klinick, 2005). However, applications have not employed a social-ecological interpretation, rather drawing from engineering interpretations, and the concepts of resilience and sustainability are used interchangeably (Azapagic, 2004; Hilson, & Basu, 2003). For applications to slow and gradual change, specifically change surrounding economic sectors, social-ecological resilience encompasses the sustainable management of resources (Derissen, Quaas, & Baumgartner, 2011). However, sustainable management can be challenging for regions that contend with change driven by economic sectors which have conflicting resources, such as the tourism and resources sectors. Although several studies demonstrate the ability for the tourism and resources sectors to co-exist (Huang, Zhou, & Ali, 2011; Moyle, McLennan, Becken, & Brown, 2014), change is often intensified between these two sectors as they often experience rapid fluctuation, influenced by external factors. Many Australian regions, including Mackay and Whitsunday, have experienced economic structural change, stemming from the tourism and resources sectors (Connolly & Lewis, 2010). Thus, effectual strategies are needed to build resilience to economic structural change driven by the tourism and resources sectors to establish sustainable management processes. Management strategies for addressing structural change From a management perspective, emerging approaches for building resilience are moving away from the notion of control towards strategies that enable conditions to fluctuate within defined boundaries (Biggs, Schluter, & Schoon, 2015). Although resilience strategies for managing structural change are limited, there are existing management approaches which have attempted to address this issue (Connolly & Lewis, 2010). Approaches to manage economic structural change are largely categorized as response strategies for regional development. That is, they are strategies which are implemented once significant economic change has occurred, and this change is often driven by rapid or unexpected events (Tobin, 1999). These include developing support networks for affected groups and establishing resource sharing centres (Berke, Kartez, & Wenger, 1993). Long-term, proactive plans are also emerging within response strategies. This is primarily through the implementation of scenario planning, often leading to the development of mitigation plans, which assist communities to prepare for change and reduce risk. Strategies encompassed within mitigation plans have included building up cash reserves, diversifying assets and investigating debt reduction policies, among others (Cutter et al., 2008). Some authors continue to argue that mitigation plans are not sufficient for communities that have to contend within ongoing structural change. This is often due to the focus of mitigation plans being to resist change, as well as the limited support mitigation plans afford if change were to occur (Tobin, 1999). Consequently, resilience approaches are emerging within regional development strategies for managing economic change, as resilience recognizes the process of slow, continual

170  Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-Lee Moyle, and Robyn Keast change, whilst also embracing the notion of adaptation in response to change (Newman & Dale, 2005). These are predominantly classified as social-ecological resilience approaches, which build upon and extend existing response strategies for a more proactive approach to change management (Cote & Nightingale, 2012). A resilience perspective can be adopted to manage change shifts towards improving weaknesses and vulnerabilities across the entire community system, in addition to strengthening potentially affected groups or areas (Bec et al., 2016; Gallopín, 2006). Principles for building resilience within community systems have been extensively discussed, drawing from the principles proposed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (2014). These include diversifying the economy, developing education systems, improving communication channels, and building community capacity (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2014; Zautra, Hall, & Murray, 2008). However, as previously mentioned, resilience strategies for managing economic change have not been adequately developed to guide the implementation of these principles (Norris et al., 2008). Moreover, structural change driven by multiple economic sectors further complicates the application of strategies (Bec et al., 2016; Martin, 2012), supporting the need for the development of approaches specifically to building social-ecological resilience to long-term structural change driven by the tourism and resources sectors.

Research method and study context In May 2015, a questionnaire was conducted with residents from the Mackay and Whitsunday regions to better understand the types of approaches needed. Through open-ended questions, respondents were asked to propose strategies to address vulnerable or weak areas of the community, ultimately building resilience to the changes currently faced by the community. A total 392 residents completed the questionnaire; 276 residents from the Mackay region and 116 residents from the Whitsunday region. A thematic analysis revealed common themes under which the community vulnerabilities and proposed strategies sat. The responses were not a representative of the community opinions, but they offered insight into the most identifiable vulnerable areas of the community and highlighted a range of possible approaches to improve the management of structural change. The questionnaire responses underpin the data utilized for this chapter. Mackay and Whitsunday regions Mackay is located on the eastern coast of Queensland, Australia (see Figure 10.1), with a population of approximately 121,900 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013). The agriculture, tourism, and resources sectors underpin Mackay’s economy. Although Mackay is not considered a mining region, its close proximity to large mining areas, major highways, and railway lines has facilitated the region’s development of mining and resource-based activities. Consequently, the resources sector is Mackay’s most dominant economic sector in terms of employment and revenue (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016).

Strategies for building community resilience   171 Given Mackay’s reliance on the resources sector, a recent downturn presented long and short-term challenges for the economy (Warren, McDonald, & McAuliffe, 2015). Consequently, the tourism sector in the region received increased attention. The region has a strong business tourism market, driven by the resources sector, attracting approximately 692,000 visitors per annum (Tourism Research Australia, 2015a). It also has the potential for a strong leisure tourism industry given its coastal location, warm weather, and close proximity to the world renowned Great Barrier Reef and to Eungella National Park. The Whitsunday region is located adjacent to Mackay on Queensland’s central coast (see Figure 10.1), with a population of approximately 36,000 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013). The region comprises 74 islands in the Whitsunday passage and also includes the adjacent mainland coast of Australia, comprising the towns of Proserpine, Collinsville, Airlie Beach, Cannonvale, and Bowen. Similar to Mackay, the tourism, agriculture, and resources sectors underpin the economy. Tourism is the region’s largest economic sector in terms of employment (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016), with the Whitsunday Islands located in the heart of the World Heritage Listed Great Barrier Reef. The tourism market is driven by leisure travellers, receiving approximately 687,000 visitors per annum (Tourism Research Australia, 2015b). However, this sector is a major driver of structural change, particularly influenced by external forces, such as the fluctuation of the Australian dollar and political activity. The resources sector, on the other hand, is also a dominant force of structural change within the Whitsunday region, with mining activity taking place in the areas of Collinsville and Bowen. The resources sector is also seen to be impeding the tourism sector, through the conflicting use of resources, creating further structural change for the region.

Research findings and discussion The data collected from the study revealed numerous strategies to assist with building community resilience to long-term structural change, specifically driven by the tourism and resources sectors. Five themes categorized the emerging strategies, aligning with the resilience principles and strategies presented in previous studies. The themes included economic diversification, employment opportunities, stakeholder cooperation, communication and planning, and social capacity building. Within these themes, specific recommendations were proposed by respondents to address and strengthen vulnerable areas of the community, as well as manage the impacts of structural change, to ultimately build community resilience. Economic diversification Diversifying the economy was the most common theme emerging within the findings for building resilience (‘We rely so much on mining, but this isn’t good for the long-term. We need to diversify’ [238_Mack]). This is a common resilience strategy employed within existing studies, particularly to manage economic change (Newman & Dale, 2005). Within the present study, developing a balanced

172  Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-Lee Moyle, and Robyn Keast

Darwin

Cairns

Whitsunday Mackay

Brisbane

Perth Sydney © d-maps.com

Canberra Adelaide 500 km 300 mi

Hobart

Figure 10.1  Map of the Mackay and Whitsunday regions Source: Adapted from www.map.net.au/.

economy, through sustainable resource management, was suggested as being central to economic diversification. To achieve this, regions should give more attention to renewable resources and invest in sectors and activities which do not deplete natural resources or compromise the viability of other sectors (‘to expand our economy, we should look at options that do not negatively affect tourism- our dominant industry’ [565_Whit]; and ‘Council needs to consider the environment before they pursue any more economic activities …need to stop chasing money and start chasing sustainability’ [469_Whit]). For multiple economic sectors to be viable, respondents highlighted that resource sharing should be promoted, with clearly defined thresholds in place for resource consumption and impact (‘There needs to be resource sharing, not having one sector in control of all the resources … put limits on mining’ [306_ Mack]). This approach follows the principles developed by Barbier (1987) and MacNeill (1989) for sustainable economic development, which emphasize that short-term economic gain should not drive approaches. Rather the focus should be on maintaining natural resources and developing long-term cohesion between

Strategies for building community resilience   173 sectors (Barbier, 1987). More recent studies have supported these principles, with sustainability and resource management central to economic viability (Barbier, 2011; Giddings, Hopwood, & O’Brien, 2002). Additionally, skill diversification was presented by respondents as an important economic strategy for building resilience. The premise of this strategy was to diversify the skills of residents, to enable easier transition into new forms of employment, potentially in different economic sectors, during periods of change (‘more training so people who lose job in mining can use skills in other sectors’ [106_Mack]; and ‘utilize capabilities developed for mining to service other industries’ [292_Mack]). This concept has been examined within the literature, commonly termed livelihood diversification (Cinner & Bodin, 2010). However, this study has extended existing literature by considering the broader community, rather than focusing on individual livelihoods. Strategies for achieving skills diversification can consist of training offered through a range of mediums both formal and informal. Although formal training was acknowledged, the findings placed emphasis on establishing informal training, such as the development of voluntary community projects, as a strategy for encouraging residents to expand and diversify skills as a precaution for future events (‘Get people involved in volunteer work that will help them to build their skills AND will help the community e.g. building houses or infrastructure for the disadvantaged where a lot of useful trades can be taught’ [340_Mack]). This view substantiates the change management literature which encourages knowledge and skill sharing to overcome present and future change (McKenzie, Truc & van Winkelen, 2001), whilst voluntary efforts draw on community development approaches for sustainable development (Ayas & Zeniuk, 2001). It was acknowledged that although informal training does not necessarily provide the expertise required for employment, it prepares individuals for employment by establishing a foundation for these skills to be developed if needed in the future (‘they can get skills by volunteering and this will help them get jobs because they won’t be completely foreign to the trade- at least they know the basics … they will get to see if they are good at it and if they like it and they can practice so they get better at it’ [340_Mack]). Employment opportunities Whilst economic diversification creates new employment opportunities, the findings from this research revealed a need for additional strategies that specifically aid community members to secure local employment. A lack of local employment opportunities was impeding economic and social resilience of both regions, as an increase in local unemployment was contributing to community vulnerability. Government support and intervention was seen by respondents as a central element to the strategies identified to improve local employment opportunities. Most notably, the development of new legislation is a key approach for addressing employment challenges faced by both regions (‘We need council support to help locals find employment’ [177_Mack]).

174  Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-Lee Moyle, and Robyn Keast The creation of more entry-level positions was acknowledged as an area which would improve the resilience of the community, as residents identified that a number of young people were leaving the region due to a lack of employment opportunities. To address this issue, strategies included the development of government initiatives for the private sector, such as incentives for business to hire young and/or inexperienced workers (‘Financial rebates from council are needed for companies to take on young and inexperienced workers, mainly those straight from university. Competition is high and without experience most aren’t competitive’ [381_Mack]). Similar incentives to provide more employment opportunities for young workers have been established at local and state levels both in Australia and internationally, often through apprenticeship schemes and training grants (Lehmann, 2000). However, whilst such initiatives can increase graduate employment, Lehmann (2000) found that incentives have been used as an opportunity for cheap labour, and often contradict existing equal employment schemes that aim to promote the hiring of older workers. Consequently, approaches need to create new employment opportunities, rather than developing strategies which specifically assist with the employment of young workers. Drawing from corporate social responsibility approaches, the development of new policy and legislation which establishes stricter guidelines for mining operations is proposed as a strategy for encouraging organizations to employ local residents. On this point, Cheshire, Everingham, and Pattenden (2011) found that stricter regulations enforced by local government on mining companies assisted in increasing local community involvement in mining projects. The implemented legislation set out strict guidelines for corporate social responsibility initiatives, such as detailing minimum requirements for local employment within the organization’s workforce and stipulating the provision of training programmes for local community members. Whilst specific legislation was not developed for employment structures of mining companies in Cheshire et al.’s (2011) study, the legislation encouraged greater integration between the community and the mining companies. This resulted in stronger, more cooperative partnerships, which in turn led to more benefits being received by the community, including an increase in local employment (Cheshire et al., 2011). For the Mackay and Whitsunday regions, stricter regulations are needed for FIFO employment to assist with generating local employment, as well as creating more favourable perceptions of the resources sector. As one respondent proposed, Government should only use 457 workers if they have a skill that we require and it something that locals don’t have. It should be a legal requirement that locals have priority and laws should strongly ENFORCE this with large penalties. Otherwise it’s taking away the locals’ opportunities for work. [177_Mack] Thus, tightening government policy and establishing legislation which prohibits preference being given to commute employees is a strategy for improving local

Strategies for building community resilience   175 employment opportunities and ultimately building resilience. Furthermore, developing legislation which encourages entrepreneurial and innovative initiatives is another strategy to build resilience among the social and economic systems of the communities (‘Make it easier for us to start a business or try something new … too much red tape is making this impossible’ [544_Whit]), to stimulate local employment opportunities. Stakeholder cooperation To build resilience to structural change, respondents acknowledged that strategies must also be implemented to strengthen the social and institutional systems to create a balanced community and ensure that vulnerable aspects of the community do not adversely impact the economic strategies implemented. Stakeholder cooperation and shared power for decision making were noted as being central to building resilience within the social system. Whilst the present study supports these approaches for community engagement, the findings suggest that participatory governance is the most effective strategy for establishing stakeholder cooperation (‘Need to build more of a community to get people (and industries) working together not against’ [110_Mack]; and ‘it’s not just about community engagement, it’s about having locals participate in decision making, politics and having control over the region’ [522_Whit]). Participatory governance is an approach where power and control are shared among internal and external community stakeholders and decisions are jointly made. It also encourages cooperative action through the development of shared values and goals (Gilchrist, 2009) giving people a focus around which they can cohere. However, participatory governance relies on voluntary participation (Fung & Wright, 2001), and attempts to increase the body of people feeling ‘engaged’ enough to participate. As a change management strategy, participatory governance restructures local leadership to assist the community in shaping the economy, as well as the social and environmental systems, towards favourable objectives in response to structural change. The findings of this study encourage approaches which share leadership among stakeholder groups and argue that this is the most suitable approach for managing community actions (‘Let locals be involved and have a voice about decisions … everyone including government and mining companies have expertise, so let’s combine [our knowledge] to make decisions so we are all happy’ [483_Whit]). Communication and planning Closely linked to the notion of stakeholder cooperation, the findings suggested improving communication within the two regions would contribute to building resilience, as it encourages knowledge and information to be shared and utilized for managing change (‘If they share information with us, we can provide them with information and at the end of the day, all parties can act with more knowledge’ [63_Mack]). This supports previous studies which highlight the importance of strong communication for the operation, management and organization of a

176  Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-Lee Moyle, and Robyn Keast community, as well as for improving cooperation between stakeholders (Vries, Bakker-Pieper, & Oostenveld, 2009). Strongly linked with communication was the notion of planning. Respondents noted the need to develop long-term plans, as they considered that short-term planning was restricting the capacity of the community to be resilient. For longterm planning, forward thinking was a significant concept acknowledged by respondents of both regions that needed to be harnessed within regional planning strategies (‘Prepare for the next DOWNTURN’ [203_Mack]). This approach to planning differs from previous resilience studies, which tend to focus on response planning to best prepare for and manage the aftermath of disastrous events (Norris et al., 2008). However, the change management literature encompasses forwardthinking strategies for long-term planning that proactively prepare for change in the community system (Maguire & Cartwright, 2008). Several of the recommendations emerging from the present research align with economic policy approaches in the change management literature, such as developing risk and mitigation plans, as well as tightening monetary policy (Greenspan, 2004). Planning for the next boom and bust mining cycle was repeatedly proposed as a strategy for building resilience within the two regions, particularly Mackay which is greatly influenced by fluctuation in the resources sector (‘Let’s see how we can use the next boom to make sure the downturn isn’t as severe next time’ [202_Mack]). Such strategies included the development of policy to manage growth in the resources sector, to develop risk management plans, and to diversify investments including investment in other sectors. One respondent also suggested developing and expanding existing action plans (‘Disaster action plans can help with action plans for economic change… much of the disaster change impacts the economy so these should be synonymous… this will help us use and manage our resources’ [522_Whit]). Furthermore, respondents highlighted the need for strategies to consider and plan for multiple outcomes stemming from long-term structural change, such as the impact structural change has on resource availability (‘Plans should be assessing our assets and ensuring they are used in a sustainable matter’ [118_Mack]). This finding aligns with and could be facilitated by scenario planning, which is a wellestablished strategy in the change management literature (Peterson, Cumming, & Carpenter, 2003). The strategies emerging from the present research encouraged the use of scenario and action planning for the sustainable management of resources. That is, using scenario planning to assess how community resources are impacted by, or can be utilized to address, different forms of change, particularly long-term structural change (‘Improve the quick response of supporting resources to any implemented change… plan for the change and allocate resources for the expected and the unexpected’ [486_Mack]). Yet resource management, from the perspective of sustainable resource planning, has not been adequately discussed as a key factor of community resilience (Benson & Garmestani, 2011). As the relationship between sustainable resource management and community resilience is an emerging area, further research is warranted before scenario planning can be effectively implemented in this capacity to build resilience.

Strategies for building community resilience   177 Additional strategies can also be drawn from broader literature to improve planning and communication with the two regions. Building on the concept of ‘crowdsourcing’, where information pertaining to a specific topic is sought from the broader population, Seltzer and Mahmoudi (2012) identified the potential use of this strategy to address and provide feedback on collective community issues. Within a regional planning context, this approach could involve establishing an online community forum where information can be contributed and shared between all regional stakeholders. This would consist of an ongoing process, where information was frequently updated (Seltzer & Mahmoudi, 2012). Using data mining techniques to manage big data, Kim, Trimi, and Chung (2014) suggest that patterns can be identified within the data and information can be used to inform short and long-term planning approaches. This strategy can assist with improving communication and planning in the region, whilst also fostering community consultation. Social capacity building In addition to education being a strategy for local employment, improving education was repeatedly proposed by respondents as a strategy to build resilience among community members. More specifically, strategies focused on educating community members on how best to manage current and future changes, including how to reposition change as an opportunity (‘Need to teach people how to think differently… having more knowledge can open up someone’s perspective to be more understanding of things and their surroundings’ [68_Mack]). Education can also be a mechanism to assist the community to understand the patterns of economic structural change to promote long-term planning and forward thinking, as well as build social capital (Berkes & Ross, 2013). The academic literature presents a number of approaches to educate community members on broad community issues, which can also be utilized to educate residents of the Mackay and Whitsunday regions about long-term structural change and ways to manage change in this capacity. These strategies include establishing community workshops and information sessions, making information available online, and engaging with social media platforms to generate awareness (Berkes & Ross, 2013). Developing, improving, or diversifying education institutions was identified as another means for building resilience to structural change, as it contributes to social improvement. Within the Mackay and Whitsunday regions, respondents noted educational institutions to be limited. A strategy to improve and diversify educational institutions within the Mackay and Whitsunday regions involves developing partnerships between education institutions of different regions to deliver stronger and more extensive services for rural communities (Arnold, Newman, Gaddy, & Dean, 2005). This can include expanding the variety of on-campus courses offered at the universities in Mackay. More specifically, it was suggested that the Whitsunday vocational education and training institution (TAFE) can affiliate itself with reputable ‘universities to deliver some undergraduate and postgraduate courses’ [609_Whit]. The respondents also revealed that social wellbeing and morale was low in both regions due to a lack of social services or due to existing services not

178  Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-Lee Moyle, and Robyn Keast adequately meeting the needs of the community. The resilience literature places emphasis on the strength of the social system, as it can dictate the resilience of other systems within the community. Thus, improving social infrastructure and services can provide the foundations to manage change (Jordan & Javernick-Will, 2013). For the Mackay and Whitsunday regions, strategies can include reducing medical waiting times, making medical services more affordable, and establishing community support services and programmes for community groups, such as providing mental health support for the wives of FIFO workers. It was also frequently suggested by respondents that developing a recycling programme in the Whitsunday region would improve both the social and environmental system. This was clearly expressed by one respondent: There has to be better services to cope with these changes. E.g. having more support and services for drug and alcohol addiction, support services specifically for families and the people losing jobs, and improved medical and even simply having basic services i.e. recycling. This will help to cope with these changes better and maybe even improve quality of life. [491_Whit] Respondents also proposed the development of new social infrastructure as a means of building social resilience. Both regions suggested more affordable recreational facilities for the youth population, such as a cinema in Cannonvale or Airlie Beach or community creative arts programmes for each region. The findings suggested that developing recreational infrastructure encouraged positive change within development plans and made each region more liveable to retain population levels and discourage city migration (‘focusing on making this a happier place with more activities will make more people want to stay… especially the young ones because we have an ageing population’ [477_Mack]). Improving the social system provides residents with the motivation, support, and capabilities to address other issues in the community. Individuals who are also happier with their social lives are also more likely to volunteer or participate in activities which helped to tackle community issues such as environmental degradation (Sturmer & Snyder, 2010).

Conclusion The findings presented in this chapter detail a number of strategies to assist resilience building within communities undergoing structural change. Table 10.1 outlines the proposed strategies which contribute to the resilience literature by expanding the understanding of resilience for managing long-term structural change driven by the tourism and resources sectors. These strategies also have implications for policy makers for long-term planning and change management. First, they provide insight into the affected and vulnerable areas of the community resulting from long-term structural change. Second, the proposed strategies have practical implications for future applications of resilience to manage structural change, supporting, and building on existing approaches.

Strategies for building community resilience   179 However, the present research has explored the perceptions of residents, without drawing attention to the perceptions of key stakeholders. Future research could explore the perceptions of change of decision makers, local government employees, business owners, representatives from the tourism and resources sectors, and other key stakeholders, to strengthen the understanding of the change management strategies currently being employed in the regions to further develop the proposed approaches. Table 10.1  Resilience strategies for managing structural change Strategy

Plan of action

Economic diversification

Implement sustainable resource management: • Invest in renewable resources • Invest in sectors which don’t deplete natural resources • Promote resource sharing among economic sectors

Skill diversification

Provide formal and informal training: • Expand courses offered at education institutions • Develop voluntary community projects to share skills

Increase local employment

Develop policy and legislation: • Stricter guidelines for mining companies: increase percentage of local employment, reduce FIFO employment and increase local training • Support/encourage entrepreneurial initiatives

Stakeholder cooperation

• Engage local residents through different participatory mediums e.g. online forums, local meetings, discussion panels • Establish participatory governance

Open communication

• Make up to date information readily available • Establish feedback mechanisms where local residents can provide input

Long-term planning

Implement forward thinking within plans: • Develop risk management and mitigation plans • Develop policy to manage resources sector growth • Diversify investments • Greater focus on resource management • Implement scenario planning • Implement ‘crowdsourcing’ practices to engage the broader population in discussions on community issues

Improve education opportunities

• Expand/diversify courses offered at education institutions • Establish informal communication mediums (e.g. workshops, information sessions, social media) to educate local residents on local issues

Improve social infrastructure

• Establish affordable recreational facilities for youth population • Reduce medial wait times • Improve affordability of core services (e.g. medical) • Establish community support services • Develop a recycling program (Whitsunday region)

180  Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-Lee Moyle, and Robyn Keast

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Strategies for building community resilience   181 Cote, M., & Nightingale, A. J. (2012). Resilience thinking meets social theory: Situating social change in socio-ecological systems (SES) research. Progress in Human Geography, 36(4), 475–489. Cutter, S. L., Barnes, L., Berry, M., Burton, C., Evans, E., Tate, E., & Webb, J. (2008). Community and regional resilience: Perspectives from hazards, disasters, and emergency management. Columbia, SC: Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute. Davoudi, S., Shaw, K., Haider, L. J., Quinlan, A. E., Peterson, G. D., Wilkinson, C., Funfgeld, H., McEvoy, D., Porter, L. & Davoudi, S. (2012). Resilience: A bridging concept or a dead end? ‘Reframing’ resilience: Challenges for planning theory and practice interacting traps: Resilience assessment of a pasture management system in Northern Afghanistan urban resilience: What does it mean in planning practice? Resilience as a useful concept for climate change adaptation? The politics of resilience for planning: A cautionary note. Planning Theory & Practice, 13(2), 299–333. Derissen, S., Quaas, M. F., & Baumgartner, S. (2011). The relationship between resilience and sustainability of ecological-economic systems. Ecological Economics, 70(6), 1121–1128. Fung, A., & Wright, E. O. (2001). Deepening democracy: Innovations in empowered participatory governance. Politics & Society, 29(1), 5–41. Gallopín, G. C. (2006). Linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity. Global Environmental Change, 16(3), 293–303. Gibson, G., & Klinick, J. (2005). Canada’s resilient north: The impact of mining on aboriginal communities. A Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous Community Health, 3(1), 115–139. Giddings, B., Hopwood, B., & O’Brien, G. (2002). Environment, economy and society: Fitting them together into sustainable development. Sustainable Development, 10(4), 187–196. Gilchrist, A. (2009). The well-connected community: A networking approach to community development. Bristol: The Policy Press. Greenspan, A. (2004). Risk and uncertainty in monetary policy. The American Economic Review, 94(2), 33–40. Hassink, R. (2010). Regional resilience: A promising concept to explain differences in regional economic adaptability? Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 3(1), 45–58. Retrieved 23 March 2016 from http://ec.europa.eu/environment/enveco/ resource_efficiency/pdf/transition_costs.pdf. Hill, E., Wial, H., & Wolman, H. (2008). Exploring regional economic resilience. Paper presented at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley. Hilson, G., & Basu, A. J. (2003). Devising indicators of sustainable development for the mining and minerals industry: An analysis of critical background issues. International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, 10(4), 319–331. Huang, G., Zhou, W., & Ali, S. (2011). Spatial patterns and economic contributions of mining and tourism in biodiversity hotspots: A case study in China. Ecological Economics, 70(8), 1492–1498. Jordan, E., & Javernick-Will, A. (2013). Indicators of community recovery: Content analysis and Delphi approach. Natural Hazards Review, 14(1), 21–28. Kim, G.-H., Trimi, S., & Chung, J.-H. (2014). Big-data applications in the government sector. Communications of the ACM, 57(3), 78–85. Laitner, J. (2000). Structural change and economic growth. The Review of Economic Studies, 67(3), 545–561.

182  Alexandra Bec, Brent Moyle, Char-Lee Moyle, and Robyn Keast Lehmann, W. (2000). Is Germany’s dual system still a model for Canadian youth apprenticeship initiatives? Canadian Public Policy, 26(2), 225–240. MacNeill, J. (1989). Strategies for sustainable economic development. Scientific America, 261(3), 154–165. Magis, K. (2010). Community resilience: An indicator of social sustainability. Society & Natural Resources, 23(5), 401–416. Maguire, B., & Cartwright, S. (2008). Assessing a community’s capacity to manage change: A resilience approach to social assessment. Canberra: Australian Government, Bureau of Rural Sciences. Martin, R. (2012). Regional economic resilience, hysteresis and recessionary shocks. Journal of Economic Geography, 12(1), 1–32. McKenzie, J., Truc, A., & van Winkelen, C. (2001). Winning commitment for knowledge management initiatives. Journal of Change Management, 2(2), 115–127. Moyle, B., McLennan, C., Becken, S., & Brown, R. (2014). Learning to play nice: Conflict, synergy and strategies for coexistence between tourism and the resource sector. Paper presented at the CAUTHE, The University of Queensland: Brisbane. Newman, L., & Dale, A. (2005). Network structure, diversity, and proactive resilience building: A response to Tompkins and Adger. Ecology and Society, 10(1), r2. Retrieved 12 October 2015 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol10/iss1/resp2/. Norris, F. H., Stevens, S. P., Pfefferbaum, B., Wyche, K. F., & Pfefferbaum, R. L. (2008). Community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness. American Journal of Community Psychology, 41(1–2), 127–150. North, D. C. (2005). Understanding the process of economic change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Orchiston, C. (2013). Tourism business preparedness, resilience and disaster planning in a region of high seismic risk: The case of the Southern Alps, New Zealand. Current Issues in Tourism, 16(5), 477–494. Peterson, G. D., Cumming, G. S., & Carpenter, S. R. (2003). Scenario planning: A tool for conservation in an uncertain world. Conservation Biology, 17(2), 358–366. Raco, M., & Street, E. (2012). Resilience planning, economic change and the politics of post-recession development in London and Hong Kong. Urban Studies, 49(5), 1065– 1087. Ruiz-Ballesteros, E. (2011). Social-ecological resilience and community-based tourism: An approach from Agua Blanca, Ecuador. Tourism Management, 32(3), 655–666. Seltzer, E., & Mahmoudi, D. (2012). Citizen participation, open innovation, and crowdsourcing: Challenges and opportunities for planning. Journal of Planning Literature, 28(1), 3–18. Simmie, J., & Martin, R. (2010). The economic resilience of regions: Towards an evolutionary approach. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 3(1), 27–43. Strickland-Munro, J. K., Allison, H. E., & Moore, S. A. (2010). Using resilience concepts to investigate the impacts of protected area tourism on communities. Annals of Tourism Research, 37(2), 499–519. Stockholm Resilience Centre. (2014). Applying resilience thinking: Seven principles for building resilience in social-ecological systems. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Sturmer, S., & Snyder, M. (2010). The psychology of prosocial behaviour: Group processes, intergroup relations and helping. Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell. Tobin, G. A. (1999). Sustainability and community resilience: The holy grail of hazards planning? Global Environmental Change Part B: Environmental Hazards, 1(1), 13– 25.

Strategies for building community resilience   183 Tourism Research Australia. (2015a). 2015 Tourism demand for Mackay, QLD. Tourism Region Profiles, 2015. Retrieved 15 August 2016 from http://tra.gov.au/Tourism_ Region_Profiles/Region_profiles/index.html#. Tourism Research Australia. (2015b). 2015Tourism Demand for Whitsundays, QLD. Tourism Region Profiles, 2015. Retrieved 15 August 2016 from http://tra.gov.au/ Tourism_Region_Profiles/Region_profiles/index.html#. Vries, R. E., Bakker-Pieper, A., & Oostenveld, W. (2009). Leadership = communication? The relations of leaders’ communication styles with leadership styles, knowledge sharing and leadership outcomes. Journal of Business and Psychology, 25(3), 367–380. Warren, S. M., McDonald, D., & McAuliffe, D. (2015). Homelessness in Queensland mining communities: A down payment on Australia’s wealth or inevitable product of a neo-liberalist society’s response to the cyclical fortunes of mining. Journal of Social Inclusion, 6(1), 103–119. Zautra, A., Hall, J., & Murray, K. (2008). Community development and community resilience: An integrative approach. Community Development, 39(3), 130–147.

11 Collaborative capacity building as a resilience strategy for tourism development in indigenous Mexico Pilar Espeso-Molinero

Introduction Indigenous communities around the world are turning to tourism as an instrument for economic growth, environmental preservation, political strength, and cultural recovery (R. Butler & Hinch, 1996; 2007; Carr, Ruhanen, & Whitford, 2016; Lemelin & Blangy, 2009; Notzke, 2006; Zeppel, 2006). Traditional Indigenous territories hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity and, although Indigenous peoples represent only 5 percent of the world’s population, they constitute an important part of its cultural diversity (UN, 2009), thus becoming a natural pole of tourist attraction. Despite their ancestral knowledge and wisdom of nature and its cultural uses, Indigenous entrepreneurs often lack the capacity to operate successful ecotourism and Indigenous tourism enterprises (Briedenhann & Wickens, 2004; Nepal, 2005; Whitford & Ruhanen, 2014). In order to address this issue, training programs have been implemented in remote areas to allow tourism entrepreneurs and community members to become more skilled in the principles of ecotourism and tourism management. This is the case in Mexico, where the three levels of government (federal, state, and local) have promoted numerous tourism vocational training, capacity building, and sustainable certification programs to consolidate the tourism sector (Ibáñez Pérez, 2011; Sui-Qui & Leng, 2015). Unfortunately, such programs, following the sustainability paradigm, have often focused on technical knowledge, quality standards, and controls, which have left no room for internal creativity and adaptation. The economic, sociocultural, and natural world of Indigenous peoples is rapidly changing and new approaches to tourism training and capacity building are needed for tourism to contribute to the wellbeing of communities and individuals alike. In such a state of change, the concept of resilience thinking has emerged as an alternative (or rather a complement) to the sustainable development paradigm and is gaining momentum among tourism scholars (Lew, Ng, Ni, & Wu, 2016). In this

Collaborative capacity building  185 new light, “sustainability must be conceived as a transition, journey or path, rather than an end point or an achievable goal” (Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004, p.275) and therefore resilience or “the capacity to buffer change, learn and develop [can be used] as a framework for understanding how to sustain and enhance adaptive capacity in a complex world of rapid transformations” (Folke et al., 2002, p.437). The purpose of this research is to understand the principles underpinning resilience theory and the adaptive approach, and to apply them to capacity building and training mechanisms in order to contribute to the literature on sustainable tourism development and Indigenous tourism. This chapter looks at an inclusive, practical, and flexible training approach, namely, tourism collaborative capacity building (TCCB). Using the case study of the Lacandon of Chiapas, one of the smallest Indigenous groups in Mesoamerica, it explores how TCCB can help Indigenous communities to confront the sociocultural, economic, and ecological changes that they are currently facing. By combining scientific and traditional knowledge TCCB has encouraged entrepreneurs to recover cultural memory and be more empowered, creative, and innovative in the way in which they use their cultural and natural resources. TCCB was developed and tested at four Lacandon companies in the communities of Nahá and Lacanjá Chansayab, in the Lacandon Rainforest, Mexico. Acknowledging the importance of reflexivity in critical studies and aware of my positionality in this research, this chapter is written in the first person.

Literature review Resilience thinking Although it has recently become the new buzzword in development studies, the concept of resilience has a much longer history (Davoudi, 2012). After forming part of common vocabulary for centuries, the concept of resilience first appeared in mathematical theory, before being applied with great success to the field of ecology in the 1970s (Holling, 1973, 1978) and then in the social sciences at the turn of the twenty-first century (Adger, 2000; Folke et al., 2002; Holling, 2001; Scoones, 1999). Its application to the field of tourism, although slow, has its origins in the works of Russell and Faulkner (1999) and McKercher (1999) who first applied the chaos/complexity theory to tourism systems, acknowledging the disorder, nonlinearity, and disequilibrium that characterize the behavior of tourism components and drivers. Building on this approach and the need for transdisciplinarity in tourism research, Farrell and Twining-Ward (2004) applied the principles of ecosystem ecology by conceptually applying the adaptive cycle or “Holling loop” and the panarchy model (Gunderson & Holling, 2002) to complex adaptive tourism systems. However, it is only recently that the resilience approach has “become a distinctive paradigm for community planning and development” (Lew, 2014, p.15). The importance of this new approach relies on a paradigm shift. From a classic Newtonian worldview “which considers the universe as an orderly

186  Pilar Espeso-Molinero mechanical device” (Davoudi, 2012, p.301), efficient, constant, and therefore predictable, resilience thinking holds a perception of the world as unregulated, uncontrollable, and chaotic. Earth and its components are organized in systems subject to constant flows of energy, materials, and information that act and react to each other in unpredictable manners. Among these drivers of change, humanity has a crucial role, as an active and passive actor in ecosystem dynamics (Biggs, Schlüter, & Schoon, 2015; Scoones, 1999). Systems of people and nature, or social-ecosystems, are therefore inherently unstable and behave in nonlinear ways. As Holling (1978, p.35) explains, “systems are dirty, changing, growing, and declining. That is the source of their resilience and diversity.” In evolutionary resilience (Davoudi, 2012), also called the synoptic approach (one of the three main approaches to resilience planning), the panarchy of the model of nested adaptive cycles suggests that changes in social-ecological systems occur on distinct scales, at different temporal speeds and in various timeframes. Similarly, disturbances can come from both “fast variables,” such as natural disasters or economic crises, and “slow variables,” such as gradual cultural changes brought about by globalization (Lew, 2014). “Understanding how regime shifts occur can help policy-makers and resource managers to avoid, manage or engineer them” (Cochrane, 2010, p.175). The implications for development research are paramount as past events no longer serve to predict the future and therefore planning and capacity building cannot follow established guidelines. Moreover, rigid management can cause a system to slide from a fairly stable state into another of lower utility (Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004). In evolutionary resilience “stability and equilibrium are rejected as temporary illusions” (Lew, 2014, p.15) and consequently research, planning, management, and capacity building must search for new alternatives. “A resilience thinking approach tries to investigate how these interacting systems of people and nature … can best be managed to ensure a sustainable and resilient supply of the essential ecosystem services on which humanity depends” (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2014, p.3). Farrell and Twining-Ward (2004, p.286) prompt tourism scholars to reconceptualize tourism research through “a transformation from disciplinary to interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary thinking,” with greater attention being given to place-based studies and the use of nonlinear tools and concepts. Different authors consider adaptive management (AM) as a useful instrument for resilience-building in social-ecological systems (Cundill, Leitch, Schultz, Armitage, & Peterson, 2015; Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004; Folke et al., 2002). This perspective is applied here to capacity building processes in Indigenous tourism contexts, as will be discussed below. Indigenous tourism and the need for capacity building research In a world of constant change, traditional societies are confronting intense challenges. Indigenous communities suffer from “discrimination, marginalization, extreme poverty and conflict” (UN, 2009, p.v). For Indigenous people tourism

Collaborative capacity building  187 represents not only an opportunity to reverse this situation, but also forms “part of their strategy for cultural survival” (Hinch, 2004, p.247). Governments, international donors, and NGOs are incorporating tourism initiatives in their development strategies and plans. However, quite often, they follow a “topdown” approach that fails to respond to the cultural traditions and values of native communities (Altman, 1993; Sofield, 1993; Whitford & Ruhanen, 2010). Nonetheless, the problems of Indigenous tourism development do not only stem from inappropriate planning. The commercial success of tourism enterprises also depends on the ability of new entrepreneurs to manage their initiatives effectively. Several authors contend that the management of Indigenous small businesses has important limitations, primarily linked to the lack of professional experience, general education, and business training (Bennett, Lemelin, Koster, & Budke, 2012; Briedenhann & Wickens, 2004; Fuller, Buultjens, & Cummings, 2005; Fuller, Caldicott, Cairncross, & Wilde, 2007; Nepal, 2004, 2005; Whitford & Ruhanen, 2014). After reviewing 329 tourism development case studies in 92 countries, Moscardo (2008b) identified the lack of tourism knowledge as a crucial barrier to effective tourism development. Fundamental aspects of business management such as planning, financial control, marketing, research, and the development of new products are typically beyond the capacity of small Indigenous teams without proper training. This weakness has far-reaching consequences. According to Moscardo (2008b) it limits the ability of local actors to participate in the planning process of sustainable tourism initiatives, which ultimately also affects their involvement in the implementation process; but most importantly “when there is limited local knowledge of tourism, few, if any, local leaders emerge, and external agents hold the balance of power over tourism development decision” (p.8) perpetuating long-term dependency, limiting potential positive impacts, and increasing the risk of negative outcomes. Aref (2011) confirms Moscardo’s views. After interviewing 175 community leaders in Shiraz (Iran), he found that, besides the lack of knowledge, skills, and education, centralized government restricted community access to decision-making, limiting the sense of ownership with regard to tourism initiatives. Conversely, case studies in South Africa (G. Butler, 2016) and Canada (Lemelin, Koster, & Youroukos, 2015) show how capacity building is a crucial intangible indicator for business success. Capacity building processes are therefore essential to overcome the mentioned barriers and generate the human capital required to meet the challenges imposed by an industry that is foreign and unfamiliar for most Indigenous people. Given the obvious need for tourism training in peripheral regions, Moscardo (2008b) detected a disturbing lack of literature on the subject. Besides the twelve practical chapters comprising her compilation (2008a), little research has been conducted on tourism capacity building issues and practices. Since then, exceptions to the rule are the tourism development studies on capacity dimensions and the mechanisms employed to assess them (Aref, Redzuan, & Emby, 2009; Aref, Redzuan, & Gill, 2010; Aref, 2011; Bennett et al., 2012; Koutra & Edwards, 2012), community demands and expressed needs (Wu & Tsai, 2016), as well as

188  Pilar Espeso-Molinero a number of works on capacity building programs and processes (Eger, 2016; García & Ricalde, 2001; Giampiccoli, Jugmohan, & Mtapuri, 2014; Manyara & Jones, 2007; Nadkarni & Venema, 2011; Nepal, 2004; Pastor-Alfonso & EspesoMolinero, 2015; Simmons, Bushell, & Scott, 2010; Victurine, 2000; Weiler & Ham, 2002). Adaptive capacity building Any community, including the individuals that define it, has intrinsic capabilities (Frank & Smith, 1999). Following Amartya Sen’s principles of capacity as freedom (1999), this work understands community capacity as “the characteristics of a community that enable it to mobilize, identify and solve problems” (Aref et al., 2010, p.172). “Capacity building therefore concerns the development of skills and abilities that will enable others to take decisions and actions for themselves” (Laverack & Thangphet, 2009, p.173). Trying to better understand these skills and abilities, resilience thinking theory has focused on resilience assessments at an individual (Seaman, McNeice, Yates, & McLean, 2014) and community level (Jones, Ludi, & Levine, 2010) and the elements needed to build it in complex social-ecological systems (Biggs et al., 2015). The intrinsic factors associated with individual and community resilience (Table 11.1), as well as the main elements required to build it (Table 11.2), provide important clues about desirable outcomes when training people and groups to deal with change and uncertainty. Whereas there is dearth of literature on capacity building and training in the field of tourism, this is not the case in other disciplines such as agriculture, education, and health where research abounds (Moscardo, 2008b). The same can be said for the field of resilience studies, where the literature on climate change (Christmann & Aw-Hassan, 2015; Shaw et al., 2009), disaster risk reduction (Sharpe, 2016), public health issues (John, Gopalakrishnan, & Javed, 2015) or even a combination of both (Huang et al., 2011) has explored the nuances of adaptive and participatory capacity building processes in the face of change. Table 11.1  Assessment of individual and community resilience Individual resilience

Community resilience

• Intelligence and academic ability • Self-efficacy, mastery and high selfesteem • Autonomy and internal locus of control • Social competence • Capacity for problem-solving, planning and foresight • Expressiveness, warmth and affection • A secure base • The ability to establish and access networks of support

• Availability of key assets • Institutions that allows fair entitlement • Appropriate channels to analyze and disseminate knowledge and information • Systems that foster innovation • A flexible forward-looking decisionmaking governance

Sources: column 1, Seaman et al. (2014, p.17), column 2, Jones et al. (2010)

Collaborative capacity building  189 Table 11.2  Building social-ecological resilience • • • •

Maintain diversity and redundancy Manage connectivity Manage slow variables and feedbacks Foster complex adaptive systems thinking • Encourage learning • Broaden participation • Promote polycentric governance systems

• Learning to live with change and uncertainty • Nurturing diversity for reorganization and renewal • Combining different types of knowledge for learning • Creating opportunity for selforganization towards social-ecological sustainability

Sources: column 1, Biggs et al. (2015); column 2, Folke (2003)

Learning from research in these fields, Moscardo (2008a) recommends the areas that require special attention in any tourism capacity building exercise. These recommendations include: (1) the need to provide not only knowledge, but also the analytical capacity to define and solve problems; (2) to foster local leadership and entrepreneurship; (3) to train in technical and managerial skills in areas of particular need; and mainly (4) the importance of establishing processes that generate motivation and confidence among participants. To this list we should add the following: (5) the need to adapt to cultural, local, and business contexts when developing training programs (Frank & Smith, 1999; Giampiccoli et al., 2014; Simmons et al., 2010); (6) the importance of incorporating the views of stakeholders through participatory processes (Laverack & Thangphet, 2009; PastorAlfonso & Espeso-Molinero, 2015); and (7) the significance of overcoming the strict limits of tourism training, with the aim of achieving a holistic development of the communities involved (Giampiccoli et al., 2014; Moscardo, 2008a). In consonance with resilience theory, planning, management, and governance should be flexible, adaptive, and experimental, fostering social learning though place-based studies and nonlinear tools (Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004; Gunderson & Holling, 2002). Building on previous works, Gunderson and Holling (2002, p.27) argue that “ecosystems are moving targets, with multiple futures that are uncertain and unpredictable. Therefore, management has to be flexible, adaptive, and experimental at scales compatible with the scales of critical ecosystem functions.” They also claim that “the same criteria, with several additions unique to human systems, are equally necessary for models of human institutions, organization, and society.” I argue that for adaptive management or governance to happen, training programs and capacity building processes have to follow the same basic principles. Farrell and Twining-Ward (2004, p.287) call for place-based studies, but point out that “conclusions drawn from a small destination cannot yet be readily transferred to the much larger region (up-scaling), nor can they be reversed (through downscaling)” and therefore nonlinear techniques have to be devised. The literature on participatory and adaptive capacity building for resilience, climate change, and public health shows that learning should be experiential, transformative, and social (Armitage, Marschke, & Plummer, 2008); “adaptation seems to be more likely if credible information is localized, visualized, and coconstructed” (Shaw et al., 2009, p.448); and participatory processes should include

190  Pilar Espeso-Molinero traditionally excluded agents, give voice to local needs and build on natural and cultural resources, local knowledge, and the creativity of human groups (PastorAlfonso & Espeso-Molinero, 2015).

Case study Lacandon tourism An examination of Mexican public policies shows that although rural tourism has not been a priority on the national tourism agenda, it has indeed been a strategic objective for other public bodies. Over the last 20 years, different departments of the Mexican government, at all levels, have been promoting tourism initiatives in rural areas to overcome poverty, promote social empowerment, and improve natural conservation (López & Palomino, 2012; Pastor-Alfonso & Gómez López, 2010; Pastor-Alfonso, Gómez López, & Espeso-Molinero, 2012). In Mexico, as in many developing countries, the target of social, economic, and environmental policies are often Indigenous communities. This is the case of the State of Chiapas, where numerous public actions are focused on improving Indigenous living conditions. However, despite important investments made in the area, the literacy rates – an important indicator for this study – fall below minimum standards. According to the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI), 63 percent of the population of Chiapas is without basic educational skills. This figure increases when it comes to Indigenous people (27.2 percent), since 25 percent of them are illiterate. In the case of women, the illiteracy rate is 32 percent, peaking at 43.3 percent if they only speak their native language (CDI, 2009). This is the situation of almost 1 million people divided into an estimated 56 linguistic groups. One of the smallest linguistic groups living in the rainforest of Chiapas is the Maya Lacandon or Hach Winik (True People). In the 1940s, Alfonso Villa Rojas, a prominent Mexican ethnologist, described the Lacandon as “the most primitive, isolated and poor group of all who live in the Republic’s southeast” (1985, p.53). Today, several families in Lacandon Maya communities have become tourism entrepreneurs. In quite a short time span, the Lacandon have moved away from a subsistence economy, based on traditional knowledge and the use of natural resources, towards dependence on a globalized industry that requires complex knowledge of technical issues such as business management, financial planning, marketing research, and product development. Moreover, in Mexico, as Farrell and Twining-Ward (2004, p.284) noted elsewhere, the “principles of stability, equilibrium, predictability, and the reductionist idea that management actions can be accurately controlled and predicted, continue to pervade contemporary tools such as carrying capacity, environmental impact assessment, and tourism planning.” Tourism planning in rural Mexican areas has followed a traditional top-down strategy with a central focus on building accommodation facilities. Public investment has been concentrated almost exclusively on the construction of small lodges with similar

Collaborative capacity building  191 structures and designs (López & Palomino, 2008). The application of standardized strategies, the use of economies of scale, and the imitation of successful models imported from elsewhere has led to the “serial reproduction of culture” (Richards & Wilson, 2006) or “McDonaldization” (Ritzer, 1996) of Indigenous products and destinations. By ignoring the history, traditions, living culture, or sense of place of Indigenous people, these strategies are jeopardizing the basic resources from which ethnic and cultural tourism can be derived, while contributing to the erosion of local identities (Espeso-Molinero, 2016). This homogenization of structures and designs is not only affecting the tourism infrastructures. Green certifications and quality management systems in line with the orthodox ecology doctrine are dominated by standards and measurements. The capacity building programs that support them prepare Indigenous entrepreneurs to comply with normative systems. Training initiatives are also centrally planned and standardized and, consequently, reinforce the isomorphism process (EspesoMolinero, 2016). Studies show that when homogenisation of norms occurs, the explorative ability of social actors drops, leading to a situation where the network members all think in the same way and may believe they are doing well while they are actually heading towards unsustainable pathways. (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2014, p.7) The Lacandon entrepreneurs had to deal with several management limitations, such as a lack of experience and training, the insufficient motivation of some of the founders, or a lack of understanding of finance and business practice. As a result, several subsidized lodges have gone out of business or are in a desperate situation. However, through a process of natural selection, nowadays the surviving lodges are progressively attaining international quality standards, ecotourism certifications, and a consistent number of visitors. Even though external policies are influencing the current destination landscape through the homogenization of tourism offerings, the Lacandon entrepreneurs are showing resilience capacities by deploying endogenous resistance strategies and trying to incorporate their own distinctive contributions to their business. Proof of that resistance is their active involvement in research projects with external institutions, such as the agreement with the University of Alicante (UA) and the Intercultural University of Chiapas (UNICH), under which this research has been conducted. Collaborative research In a recent global overview of 403 works on Indigenous tourism, Whitford and Ruhanen (2016, p.1080) conclude that: The challenge now is to gain a more comprehensive understanding of Indigenous tourism from the perspective of Indigenous stakeholders, approaching its complexity in an iterative, adaptive and flexible style, and

192  Pilar Espeso-Molinero with affected stakeholders involved in the research process, knowledge creation and its outcomes. Since 2008, lodge owners, craftsmen and women, tour guides, and drivers from different Indigenous communities in the Lacandon Rainforest have been collaborating with an international multidisciplinary team of external researchers from the UA and the UNICH. In order to better understand and adapt to the new realities Indigenous people are facing, this long-term project is being structured around a series of self-reflective cycles of participatory action research (PAR) (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005), responding to different needs identified by the Indigenous co-researchers (Chilisa, 2011). In January 2011, reflecting on the results of a sociocultural tourism impact study (see Pastor-Alfonso & Gómez López, 2010) the entrepreneurs expressed their interest to continue research with the development of training programs. Indigenous families identified a lack of technical knowledge as one of the main limitations to their business development. Through two more cycles of PAR the communities and the external researchers explored alternative approaches to tourism capacity building in the rural Indigenous context. The first cycle was devoted to community-level training programs dealing with different tourism industry issues, such as complex tourism systems, cultural and natural interpretation, and product development; with a special focus on women and young men, both traditionally excluded groups in gerontocratic societies (see Pastor-Alfonso & Espeso-Molinero, 2015). After observing and reflecting upon the outcomes of the community-level capacity building cycle, we planned for another training program, this time at a company level. Between June and July 2012, four Maya Lacandon owning and operating companies in Lacanjá and Nahá (municipality of Ocosingo) collaborated in the implementation of a TCCB research program. Training skills for tourism product development At the community capacity building level, the entrepreneurs showed creativity and interest for the development of Indigenous tourism products. Notwithstanding the rich cultural and natural legacy of the Lacandon people, there was an almost complete absence of tourism activities ready for consumption, confirming what López and Palomino (2008) had found in Mexico as a whole. Due to this, in addition to the homogenization progress diagnosed, the research topic selected for the company-level training program was tourism product design as a tool for differentiation, tourist retention and increased spending by tourists. As part of this PAR phase, I developed a systematic approach to product design based on a constant dialogue between traditional and Western knowledge (see Espeso-Molinero, Carlisle, & Pastor-Alfonso, 2016). I also worked with the Indigenous companies on testing it through a collaborative capacity building research process. At each business unit we formed a creative team composed of the manager and four to six staff and family members. Recognizing that

Collaborative capacity building  193 “[t]he researcher is ever the outsider” (Ryan, 2005, p.2) I completed each creative team by incorporating an external point of view in the process. Depending on the activities I also played the part of facilitator, tourist, and observer. The creative teams’ clear and distinctive role helped me to participate in the internal dynamics of the host group. The activities were planned to last four days at each company, and the final aim of the process was to design an experiential tourism activity based solely on the natural, cultural, human, and business resources of each creative unit, without adding any additional cost. The systematic approach to product design or the Indigenous tourism product design (ITPD) model was grounded on Western tourism knowledge incorporating elements from new product development (Kotler, Bowen, & Makens, 2002), the Experience Economy (Pine II & Gilmore, 1998) and the design thinking approach (Brown, 2008). Divided into four phases, namely vision, situation analysis, creative process, and implementation, the ITPD model was tested through teamwork sessions. Each session had its own dual learning objectives (traditional and Western) combining, through the process, emic and etic perspectives to generate new integrated knowledge. The framework fostered dialogue between perspectives, values, and understandings helping to reach common grounds. Using creative and adapted technical tools such as service blueprints (Bitner, Ostrom, & Morgan, 2008), photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997), visual thinking (Arnheim, 1969), rapid prototypes (Brown, 2008), mind maps (Buzan & Buzan, 2000) and so Table 11.3  Designed products Company name

Location

Activity

Designed products

Crocodile Sanctuary Tres Lagunas

Lacanjá

Lodge and restaurant

• “Seed, plant and give life to the Rainforest”: participation in the reforestation program of Tres Lagunas

Top Che

Lacanjá

Lodge and restaurant

• “From water and earth to your plate”: an experience of conviviality and Lacandon gastronomy • “Lacandon Handicrafts workshop”: a hands-on workshop to design your own Lacandon jewellery

Ya’ax Ha

Nahá

Restaurant and convenience store

• “A visit to the Grandmas”: a journey through the lives and works of Lacandon women • “The Lacandon life cycle”: from birth to death in Lacandon cosmology

Nahá Ecotourism Campsite

Nahá

Lodge and restaurant

• “Threats to the Lacandon Jungle”: an awareness tour about the challenges of conservation in the Lacandon rainforest • “The Lacandon night”: a night-time and socializing cultural activity

194  Pilar Espeso-Molinero on, the four creative teams were able to design new experiential activities (Table 11.3) closely linked to Lacandon values and perspectives, while responding to the needs of international tourism demand (Lynch, Duinker, Sheehan, & Chute, 2011; McIntosh & Ryan, 2007; Ryan & Huyton, 2000; Ryan & Higgins, 2006). The capacity building approach combined experiential, transformational, and social learning (Armitage et al., 2008). By applying practical tools to the real context, the creative teams were able to visualize the desirable future, reflect on the current situation and local strengths, imagine different products and activities, conceptualize a feasible option and experiment it through rehearsal and tourist feedback. The program allowed them to acquire “specific technical and managerial skills in [a] target area”, namely product development (Moscardo, 2008b, p.10), while also surpassing the strict limits of traditional training programs with a holistic approach to development (Giampiccoli et al., 2014; Moscardo, 2008a). The systematic approach to product development produced rapid, tangible results facilitating engagement and motivation with the training program. This, combined with the purpose-oriented and problem-solving method and the use of creativity techniques, spawned a feeling of accomplishment (Espeso-Molinero et al., 2016) and fostered pride, ownership and confidence among the participants (Moscardo, 2008b; Seaman et al., 2014). Furthermore, the constant dialogue between scientific knowledge and traditional inputs helped to overcome conflicts of values. During the training process I stayed at the host campsites and experienced the tourism services offered by each company. The place-based approach facilitated capacity practice twofold. On the one hand, it helped me to better understand the characteristics of each business/family unit, thus fostering adaptation to specificities. On the other, it lent the process greater flexibility, adjusting the time and length of the capacity-working sessions to business and family needs (Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004; Gunderson & Holling, 2002). Moreover, by working at a company level, other family members, such as elders and children, were present during the whole process, thus extending the capacity building outcomes to traditionally excluded agents and motivating young members of the family to get involved (Pastor-Alfonso & Espeso-Molinero, 2015). Although the existence of internal power dynamics in any group is widely understood, the creativity format employed in this study created a relaxed and fun atmosphere allowing all team members to express their knowledge and ideas freely. Building the training process on the participants’ prior knowledge and past and present experiences reinforced positive feelings about the capacity and agency of Indigenous people, supporting “affirmative development strategies that build on community assets and capacities rather than attempting to redress – and thereby emphasising – needs or lack” (Nepal, 2004, p.173). Working in an Indigenous context, with high rates of illiteracy and where several community members only spoke Maya Lacandon, the use of visual tools provided an important support for participants and even encouraged inclusivity (Pastor-Alfonso & Espeso-Molinero, 2015) by attracting the attention of family members that did not speak Spanish, the language of the training program.

Collaborative capacity building  195 Tourism collaborative capacity building (TCCB) The positive experience of this case study needs to be systematized and escalated to actually have an impact on the Lacandon forest and elsewhere. However, in light of resilience theory, “properties, behaviors and processes, and controlling variables, tend to differ” and therefore lineal practices do not offer a solution to the complexity of tourism systems (Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004, p.287). Considering these factors, capacity building processes need to be co-constructed with local agents employing traditional and scientific knowledge and have to be “tailored to the needs of the community actors” (Wu & Tsai, 2016, p.66). However, some common themes arise from the theory and the practice of this case study that can assist policy-makers and practitioners to better conceive capacity building programs. Mirroring the phases of the ITPD model, the TCCB framework is structured around four progressive phases: visualize, reflect, imagine, and experiment: 1

2

3 4

By visualizing the imagined future, the participants decided on a common destiny, collectively setting the themes and objectives of the capacity building program and helping the group to work in the same direction (Laverack & Thangphet, 2009). Reflecting on resources and assets, constructing the training process on the participants’ prior knowledge and past and present experiences reinforces positive feelings and self-confidence, thus supporting “affirmative development strategies” (Nepal, 2004). Following the principles of creative thinking, TCCB focuses on the quantity of ideas and concepts opening up possibilities for innovation, diversity, and redundancy (Biggs et al., 2015). Its experimental character, through the practical testing and rehearsal of new concepts, including the revision, reflection, and reconsideration of ideas, encourages an understanding of change and the need for constant adjustment and innovation.

Transversal to these progressive phases, TCCB need to incorporate a set of basic principles in order to become a useful instrument to guide policy measures (see Table 11.4). Training local facilitators in these principles and helping them to adapt the process to local circumstances and expressed needs could lead to a nonlinear capacity building approach (Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004).

Conclusion In a world of constant change and unpredictability, Indigenous peoples around the world are trying to adapt to a globalized economy. Governments, international donors, and NGOs are supporting tourism initiatives and capacity building programs in remote rural areas to support this adaptation process. However, these programs often follow an orthodox approach to the management of cultural and natural assets, reinforcing the notion that control, normativity, and linear initiatives

196  Pilar Espeso-Molinero Table 11.4  Principles of TCCB • • • • • • • • •

Locally-based Adaptive and flexible Experiential and experimental Inclusive, participatory and co-constructed Knowledge integrative Problem-solving and applied Supported by creativity Visual and practical Fun and enjoyable

will foster sustainability. Under this paradigm public tourism programs tend to homogenize destinations and people’s capabilities, ill-preparing entrepreneurs to confront the challenges of a complex, constantly changing industry. In Mexico, for instance, where Indigenous peoples suffer from marginalization, extreme poverty, and conflict, public initiatives have focused on the provision of standardized tourism infrastructure, failing to develop an environment of freedom, locality, creativity, and independence. This chapter contributes to the field of tourism development studies by building on resilience theory and an adaptive approach to expand the theoretical concept of capacity building and through the application of a case study in collaboration with four Indigenous tourism companies in the Lacandon Rainforest of Mexico. Through an adaptive capacity building approach, based on the dialogue between traditional and Western knowledge and the use of creativity tools as an experimental, practical, problem-solving method, the management and staff of the four companies were able to learn specific managerial skills, revitalize local knowledge, and design new tourism activities. The process also had the capacity to motivate participants, while spawning a feeling of pride, ownership, and accomplishment. The case study illustrates the potential of the tourism collaborative capacity building (TCCB) approach to inform community development policy decisions and programs by incorporating a systematic approach and some critical principles. The proposed approach comprises four phases – visualize, reflect, imagine, and experiment – and considers that any capacity building program should be locally based; adaptive and flexible; experiential and experimental; inclusive, participatory and co-constructed; knowledge integrative; problemsolving and applied; supported by creativity; visual and practical; and last but not least, fun and enjoyable. Rather than concentrate exclusively on specific technical knowledge, training programs need to build overarching capacities to allow individuals, communities, and societies to participate actively in processes of change. Through collaborative training approaches based on the principles and phases of TCCB, local community capacity building programs can promote leadership and entrepreneurship, while helping local communities to decide the terms and conditions of the commodification of their own culture. In this way, complex social-ecological tourism systems can build positive capacities, unlock adaptive creativities, and further the knowledge dialogue between traditional and scientific wisdom.

Collaborative capacity building  197

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Collaborative capacity building  201 V. Brust (Eds.), Facilitating sustainable innovation through collaboration: A multistakeholder perspective (pp. 185–201). New York, NY: Springer. Sofield, T. H. B. (1993). Indigenous tourism development. Annals of Tourism Research, 20(4), 729–750. Stockholm Resilience Centre. (2014). Applying resilience thinking: Seven principles for building resilience in social-ecological systems. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Sui-Qui, T., & Leng, H. (2015). Review on the development of a sustainability indicator system in agenda 21 for tourism in Mexico. International Review for Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development, 3(2), 4–21. United Nations (UN). (2009). State of the world’s Indigenous peoples. (No. ST/ESA/328). New York: United Nations. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Victurine, R. (2000). Building tourism excellence at the community level: Capacity building for community-based entrepreneurs in Uganda. Journal of Travel Research, 38(3), 221–229. Villa Rojas, A. (1985). Estudios etnológicos: Los mayas. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Wang, C. C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education and Behavior, 24(3), 369–387. Weiler, B., & Ham, S. H. (2002). Tour guide training: A model for sustainable capacity building in developing countries. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 10(1), 52–69. Whitford, M. M., & Ruhanen, L. (2010). Australian Indigenous tourism policy: Practical and sustainable policies? Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 18(4), 475–496. Whitford, M. M., & Ruhanen, L. (2014). Indigenous tourism businesses: An exploratory study of business owners’ perceptions of drivers and inhibitors. Tourism Recreation Research, 39(2), 149–168. Whitford, M. M., & Ruhanen, L. (2016). Indigenous tourism research, past and present: Where to from here? Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 24(8–9), 1080–1099. Wu, C., & Tsai, H. (2016). Capacity building for tourism development in a nested socialecological system-case study of the south Penghu archipelago marine national park, Taiwan. Ocean and Coastal Management, 123, 66–73. Zeppel, H. (2006). Indigenous ecotourism: Sustainable development and management. Wallingford: CABI.

12 Resilience and tourism development in rural China Huangling Village in Jiangxi province Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew

Introduction Although the issue of tourism impacts has been central to understanding rural tourism in general (e.g., Hall & Tucker, 2004; Lankford, 1994), as well as to the study of contemporary rural China (Cui & Ryan, 2011; Ying & Zhou, 2007), the integrated understanding of how tourism development acts as an agent of both positive and negative change in rural regions is a relatively neglected area of research (Xu et al., 2014). The study of tourism impact has traditionally been conceptualized and analysed independently from the familiar disciplinary perspectives of the physical, economic, and socio-cultural sciences (Bachleitner & Zins, 1999; Nyaupane, Morais, & Dowler, 2006), and it is here that an integrated research approach that crosses these disciplinary perspectives should be on the agenda. Resilience theory provides a systems framework that allows a re-examination of tourism impacts beyond traditional academic separations. This chapter offers such a theoretical re-thinking, followed by a case study, and shows that a resilience analysis of tourism impacts that synchronizes economic behaviour, social structure and ecological factors is more effective for assessing and understanding tourism impacts than traditional disciplinary approaches alone. Since its effectiveness in addressing the social-economic problems facing rural regions has long and widely been recognized (Sharpley & Vass, 2006; Walpole & Goodwin, 2001), rural tourism has been promoted, encouraged, and relied on, to varying degrees, by governments. One such government seeking a solution to rural socio-economic problems through the implementation of rural tourism is that of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where the countryside is now being challenged more than ever before by issues of agricultural restructuring, declining service provision, rural-to-urban migration, communication and infrastructural deficits, and the degradation of the natural environment (Lukashina, Amirkhanov, Anisimov, & Trunev, 1996). At the end of 2015, the Chinese central government released its Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, in which it foregrounded rural development as a national policy at the core, dubbing it ‘accelerate agricultural modernization to achieve a

Resilience and tourism development in rural China   203 comprehensive well-off rural society’ (Xinhua, 2015). Rural tourism was widely promoted as a significant catalyst for achieving the goals of extending the benefits of China’s rapid modernization into rural areas and improving rural livelihoods. According to the vision of the PRC State Council, about 6000 model tourism villages will be developed nationwide by 2020, and over 100,000 agricultural leisure and village tourism locations will be developed, with 3 million country guesthouses that are expected to receive over 2 billion tourists a year and directly benefit 50 million rural residents (Xinhua, 2015). Despite the importance accorded to tourism as a major tool for rural reconstruction in China, as shown by a large number of relevant research papers on the topic (Xu, Zhang, & Lew, 2014), there is limited knowledge about the systematic impacts of rural tourism on Chinese rural areas from a resilience perspective. Accordingly, this chapter uses the case of a rural village in China that has experienced recent tourism infrastructure development to explore social, institutional, economic and environmental resilience (Figure 12.1). The chapter argues that a fundamental understanding of resilience in rural tourism is significant and calls for further assessment and development of sustainability and resilience indices for rural tourism villages in China. The empirical study presented here also explores the expediency of studying resilience in tourism research and attempts to broaden our understanding of resilience in the context of rural China.

Figure 12.1  View of the old Huangling Village after its renovation for tourism Source: Jiaxiang Cao (used with permission).

204  Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew

Literature review The concept of resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances caused by change while maintaining its functions, structure, and identity (Walker, Holling, Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004; Allen, Angeler, Garmestani, Gunderson, & Holling, 2014; Lew, Ng, Ni, & Wu, 2016). In a rural context, it can be described as how well a rural area can simultaneously balance its various functions over time (Heijman, Hagelaar, & Heide, 2007), including ecological, social, economic, and cultural. As such, rural resilience refers to the positive adaptation of a rural area in the face of adversity and change (Schoon & Bynner, 2003). In China, rural resilience is urgently in demand because the cascading adversity and change caused by the constants of rapid urbanization and industrialization, which are forcing new challenges and transformations in the countryside nationwide (Walker et al., 2004). Since the mid-1980s, China’s rural economic development has stagnated and deteriorated, mainly because of the heightened political importance of China’s urban areas. For example, the discrepancy between the prices of urban goods and relatively more expensive rural goods, along with the gap between urban development and lower levels of rural development, have both expanded significantly since the mid-1990s (Zweig & Fung, 2007). Changing contexts and adversities presented a series of challenges to rural areas in China, including: changes in their demographic structures due to massive rural-to-urban migration; dwindling employment opportunities, standards of living and relative accessibility; and changes in rural culture (Fleischer & Pizam, 1997; Guo, 2006). One evident and profound change in China has been rural depopulation. From 1996 to 2008 the rural population in China decreased by 135.2 million due to out-migration to urban areas (Liu, Wang, & Long, 2010). In some instances, the dwindling rural population caused the observable phenomenon of a ‘hollow village’ with no visible residents (Liu, He, Wu, & Webster, 2010). Associated with the population outflow is the capital outflow, resulting in little investment in the rural economy and a lack of incentives in revitalizing rural settlements. At the same time, potentially productive farmland sits unused. Despite these profound transitions in their social, economic, and environmental landscapes, most rural areas in China lacked the resilience capacity to adapt in a manner that could maintain a satisfactory level of system relationships. Most of rural China lost its resilience as it entered a state of decay. China, however, still has a large rural population, accounting for 44 per cent of the country’s total 1.357 billion people (The World Bank, 2016). This high level of rurality suggests that the ultimate success of China’s overall economic and social modernization will require the development and regeneration of rural areas (Chen, 1997). In this way, rebuilding the resilience of rural China is pivotal to the overall health of the country. It is important to realize that rural resilience is often context specific, and in the context of contemporary China, rural tourism has been utilized as an engine to increase the rural system’s ability to ‘tolerate’ (Heijman et al., 2007) external

Resilience and tourism development in rural China   205 shocks to its structures and functions. Creating employment in non-agricultural sectors is seen as the best response to diminishing agricultural incomes, as well as for poverty alleviation and environment protection (CNTA, 2007). Given the potential for rural tourism to act as both agent and process in building resilience capacities, a series of programmes created by the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) for promoting rural tourism development have offered both financial incentives and policy support to rural governments (Su, 2011). Reported numbers indicate that national efforts seemed to be paying off: in 2015 there were 1.2 billion rural tourist trips taken in China, totalling 84.8 per cent of the country’s population; there were around 20 million peasants engaging directly in rural tourism businesses nationwide; and the benefits of rural tourism were estimated to over impact 70 million peasants (CNTA, 2016), or about 12 per cent of China’s rural population. Yet, in an operational sense, building rural resilience is far more than simple figures. Wider debate within and outside of China over revitalizing rural regions through tourism also recognizes its negative impacts. At a micro level many descriptive studies purport to show positive economic outcomes for rural areas from tourism development (e.g., Yan & Barkmann, 2006; Zeng & Ryan, 2012), but this over-optimistic view has been questioned by, for example, Donaldson (2007) who analysed how the tourism industry’s structure and distribution in some rural areas has created an unexpected divergence between economic growth and a growth in poverty. Additionally, commentators have also noted that problems of ‘investment efficiency’ (Zhao, 2004) and ‘leakages of local resources’ (including natural, cultural, and infrastructure) (Zeng, 2008) are common during the process of rural tourism development. Researchers have been also concerned that much rural tourism development simply neglects local communities and local people (Weng & Peng, 2014; Xu, Wan, & Fan, 2014). China’s political reality determines that, at least in current rural China, the ideal western-styled ‘community involvement’ approach for tourism development is only found in the research literature; it has been replaced with a more complicated attitude combined with passion, expectation, disappointment, and passiveness from local communities, and occasionally even protest against tourism operators (Ying & Zhou, 2007). These findings indicate that the tourism industry may revitalize rural areas to be resilient and creative in addressing changing circumstances, while simultaneously bringing emerging challenges that threaten sustainable tourism development and the resilience of the rural system.

Methodology and study context Methodology General resilience is not a characteristic of any one activity, but rather of the system as a whole (Berkes & Folke, 1998; Foster, 1993). While general resilience is less understood than specific resilience, it is believed to comprise some combination of measures of specific resilience (Woods, 2006). Some forms of specific resilience

206  Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew are considered better indicators of general resilience because they are more tightly integrated with the systems overall (Folke et al., 2010; Simonsen et al., 2014). Hence it is necessary to study how different activities contribute to the general resilience of a place. Tourism is just one of these activities, though it can play a central role in some communities. Rural resilience is also contextual, which means that in an operational sense, building resilience through tourism involves placespecific measures and not a one-size fits all approach (Reich, Zautra, & Hall, 2010). To understand the contextualized community resilience under tourism in rural China, this fieldwork investigation was undertaken over a four-month period (September to December 2015), using a variety of techniques, including participatory observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and secondary materials such as village statistical records, administrative documents, and other notes and literature. During this period, the lead author was immersed in the fieldwork site and lived with the villagers. The in-depth interviews provided information on the relationships among different stakeholders in tourism development. Some 155 informants, comprising village cadres, managers and staff of a private tourism development company, local villagers (both running and not running a tourism-based businesses), tourists, and officials from local governments were interviewed. The multiple research strategies employed help to counterbalance the biases or flaws arising from the employment of only a single method of design and procedure. Study context Huangling is a small rural village with 139 households and 612 inhabitants in Wuyuan County (or Prefecture), Jiangxi Province. Huangling is a singlesurnamed village, in which over 70 per cent of residents are related to one another. The geographic position in which it is situated (steep hillsides comprising small plots of terraced fields at about 280 metres above sea level) makes agricultural and other productive activities difficult. Since the mid-1990s, roughly two-thirds of the labour force from Huangling has been working in cities, as residents migrated to seek greater opportunities. Huangling became a semi-hollowed out village, characterized by low land-use efficiency, many empty houses, patches of abandoned land, and severe migration of its young and educated population. Huangling village is also a typical example of the Hui Culture – one of the most influential and traditionally Han-Chinese cultures that peaked during the late feudal period of China, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. As early as the mid-1980s, artists and photographers were seekimg out vernacular places, like Huangling. Gradually, the residents found that they could earn some extra money by accommodating these occasional domestic backpacker tourists. However, because this small economic boom brought by tourism was limited and unstable, the Huangling community never developed an awareness among its residents of the potential value of tourism development, and household incomes continued to rely primarily on migrant remittances, at least prior to 2009. The year 2008 was a watershed for Huangling. After multiple studies and comparisons among villages, a local tourism enterprise, the Wuyuan County

Resilience and tourism development in rural China   207 Rural Culture Development Co. Ltd. (hereafter referred to as the ‘CRC company’) and the local Jianwan Zhen (town) government signed a contract to develop the Huangling Tourism Resort. The Jianwan Zhen government transferred the tourism developmental and operational rights to the CRC company because it lacked sufficient capital to conserve and maintain this vernacular village. More importantly, this new venture coincided with new, nationwide policies to bridge China’s endemic rural-urban wealth gap and improve rural livelihoods. An agreement was reached between the CRC company and the Huangling community in 2009 on the allocation of tourism revenues from the Huangling Tourist Resort development project: the CRC company would pay an annual ‘resource fee’ of 350,000 yuan (US$51,210) to the Huangling community which would increase by 100,000 yuan (US$14,630) every five years. In addition, the CRC company would build a Huangling New Village at the foot of the mountain tha would replace the dwellings in the traditional hillside village with more modern and comfortable ones in the new community. The traditional architectures and decor in the mountain village, which is now owned and managed by the CRC company for sightseeing, have been preserved professionally. They have not been replaced by modernized rural dwellings, in what has become known in China as ‘the rural house-building craze’ (Sargeson, 2002). In addition, through purchases, rent agreements, and exchange mechanisms, the CRC company is also effectively managing and maintaining the terraced agricultural fields for sightseeing. Though the Huangling Tourist Resort is a relative newcomer to the rural village tourism destination trend in China’s domestic tourist market, its popularity is evidenced in provincial and national media coverage, in guidebooks, and in the 400,000 tourists who visited the destination in 2015. All of the residents have moved out of the old Huangling village and into the new village (Figure 12.2). The CRC company built a cable car to carry tourists to the old village tourist zone, charging 145 yuan (US$21) for the cable car ride and the entrance ticket (WHTR, 2016). The former residents can enter the old village for free but would need to pay for the cable car (100 yuan). Villagers and tourists can also drive to the old village tourist zone. The old Huangling village resort area contains a variety of tourism activities and facilities, including: 1 2 3 4

a 68-room luxury hotel operated by the CRC company in renovated traditional buildings; a high-quality restaurant established and run by the CRC company; a range of fee-based tourist activities developed by the CRC company; tourist shops (such as souvenir and gift shops, and snack and coffee shops) in buildings that have been renovated by the CRC company; some are operated by the company, while most are rented to Wuyuan County residents and new immigrants to the area.

Tourist services are also provided in the Huangling New Village. All the residential buildings in the first row of houses operate some form of tourism business. Some villagers who live in the second row also run their own tourism

208  Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew

Figure 12.2  The Huangling new village and tourist cable car leading to the old village resort area Source: Xiaoqing Chen (used with permission).

businesses, while those who live in the back two rows might only sell some local vegetables and hand made products during the high tourist seasons (March to June, and October to November). Overall, and in the context of rural development in China, tourism and the operational approach adopted by the CRC company demonstrate a feasible way to revitalize the resilience of a community like Huangling village.

Rural tourism as a catalyst for social-ecological resilience Based on many years of research, the Stockholm Resilience Centre (Simonsen et al., 2014) proposed a set of seven principles that define community resilience. These include: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Maintaining diversity and redundancy. Managing connectivity. Managing slow variables and feedback. Fostering complex adaptive systems thinking. Encouraging learning. Broadening participation. Promoting polycentric governance systems.

Resilience and tourism development in rural China   209 Each of these provides a framework for assessing the community resilience of Huangling village in the context of tourism development. Maintaining diversity and redundancy through economic diversification Tourism development has triggered a growth in the income of the villagers and in the creation of jobs in Huangling. Along with adjacent villages, the traditional livelihoods of Huangling’s residents centred on agricultural production. However, informal interviews with Huangling villagers indicated that weak and unstable grain yields were common due to the barren soil, water shortages, and oldfashioned irrigation facilities. As a result, agriculture was an insufficient income generator, which was reflected in their average per-capita net income in the 1980s being the lowest in their area (Table 12.1). From 2012, however, the situation was completely reversed, with Huangling’s average villager net income being much higher than all seven villages adjacent to them. To assess the economic diversification of rural tourism, it is necessary to account not only for the growth of income generated, but also for the types of income sources. Figure 12.3 shows that tourism has diversified both the household income structure and the economy of Huangling village. The data are based on a survey of 139 households, 61 of which were directly or indirectly involved in tourism activities. The results show that 44 per cent of the household incomes directly relied on rural tourism development, including employment in the CRC company (23 per cent) and running a tourism-based business (21 per cent). There is also a sizeable portion of villagers’ incomes indirectly coming from tourism activities (23 per cent), including ‘Others’ (such as leasing the ground floor of a building for a tourism commercial business) and ‘Selling agricultural products’ to locals, tourists, and tourism industry. These results show the ways that rural tourism development has come to play a significant role in the improvement of Table 12.1 Growth of average villager net income in Huangling and nearby villages (RMB) Year

Huangling Shangjintian Xiajintian Xiaoyong

Jinkeng

Yuankou Limukeng

1980

94

129

107

110

109

117

121

1985

291

301

349

356

381

321

377

1990

501

624

615

593

596

587

629

2008

4,165

4,377

4,573

4,271

4,489

4,528

4,697

2009

4,513

4,752

4,824

4,658

4,977

4,531

5,075

2010

4,983

5,671

5,144

5,294

5,300

5,484

5,789

2011

5,597

6,521

5,856

5,991

6,146

6,395

6,892

2012

7,988

7,410

6,669

6,894

6,991

7,215

7,697

2013

8,981

8,088

8,161

8,198

8,047

8,290

8,391

2014

9,895

9,072

9,002

9,138

9,041

9,108

9,012

Source: Adapted from Statistical Charts of Rural Cooperative Economy, Government of Wuyuan County

210  Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew household incomes and livelihoods in Huangling village. On the other hand, traditional livelihoods, such as subsistence agriculture and migrant work play a much less significant role in household incomes in comparison to the past. The most distinct and significant change in Figure 12.3 is seen in the sharp decline in the share of migrant work among Huangling villagers, although it is still commonly practised as the key backbone of economic life in neighbouring villages. Since the mid-1990s, agricultural workers from Huangling village have sought employment in cities. Although agricultural production fell due to a decrease in the workforce, the remittances that migrants sent home had positive effects on household incomes. Gradually, migrating to cities to work as itinerant labourers and traders became the primary source for of income in this traditional agricultural village region. The downward trend in migrant work in Figure 12.3 indicates that incomes generated from tourism-related businesses grew faster than that from those working in cities, and that tourism has now become the main income generator for Huangling villagers. The steady flow of visitors allows for profits to be shared throughout most of the village, reaching around 44 per cent of the family incomes in Huangling. These were received from the sale of souvenirs and by providing accommodations and other tourist services (Figure 12.4). Tourism has fostered the creation of new jobs, including tour guides, nong jia le1 operations, catering staff, tour bus drivers, and jobs with the CRC company. The community also engages in other complementary activities (such as vegetable gardens, orchards) for their own and tourist consumption, and some villagers whose dwelling face the road have let their ground floors to new migrants to the area who come to open commercial businesses.

60% 49%

50% 40% 31%

12%

Pre-tourim

0%

3%4%

2% 0% Others

0%

Working in the government

5% 0%

Working in CRC company

Construction

Migrant working

0% Agriculture

11%

6%7%

Small business

9%

Sell agricultural products

10%

23%

21%

17%

20%

Tourism-based business

30%

Post-tourism

Figure 12.3  Changes in household income structure in pre- and post-tourism at Huangling village

Resilience and tourism development in rural China   211

Figure 12.4  Tourists and tourist shops on the main road in old Huangling Village Tourist Resort after renovation for tourism Source: Xiaoqing Chen (used with permission).

Restoring and maintaining connectivity The disconnection of Huangling village from modern China in pre-tourism times was both physical and ideological. Its poor infrastructure and physical remoteness isolated Huangling residents. Locals said that previously the only transport was an unreliable bus service and a poor road, and walking was the most common means of transportation before 2010. Regarding the ideological disconnect, China’s cities and other major urban areas were more directly linked to the state and Communist Party (CCP) apparatus than were rural areas. In a country where party and state are so intricately linked, those connections served as important measures of the significance of urban versus rural areas in Chinese society. The outflow of population from Huangling village since the mid-1990s was the result of these patterns of inequality and ideological disconnectivity. By the 2000s, large scale migration to the cities was already an established feature of Huangling village, where the number of emigrants peaked in 2008, accounting for approximately two-third of the village’s labour supply. Huangling also fell into the top quarter of labour-exporting villages in the Wuyuan County prefecture. Associated with the population outflow were capital and skills outflows, resulting in little investment in Huangling’s economy and a lack of incentives in revitalizing this rural settlement. The unidirectional and unabated flows of resources from rural to urban, in turn directly increased the disconnectivity of Huangling.

212  Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew With tourism development, Huangling experienced the inflow of diversified capitals, which has restored its connectivity to the urban centres and to the nation as a whole. Tourism connected Huangling with the outside world physically through funding by local governments and the CRC company to pave the main dirt road with asphalt. This road connects the village with nearby highways heading north to the provincial capital of Nanchang and northeast to Hangzhou. Moreover, tourism development restored the village’s social connectivity by attracting returning migrants, as well as new immigrants who have no familial ties to Wuyuan County, but are attracted by its business opportunities. The problem of the loss of human capital was significantly reversed. Returnees and new immigrants readily embraced employment opportunities generated by tourism, and growing tourism commercialization has been able to absorb the increasing local workforce without notably reducing average profit and benefits. Tourism development, as a centripetal force, has created a return flow of migration in Huangling and the immediately adjacent villages of Limukeng and Xiaoyong, where the return flows were more prominent than those further away (Table 12.2). Based on surveys, more than one-quarter (25.98 per cent) of all households in Huangling have had various family members return, and most of the returnees were involved in the tourism industry. These former migrants, compared with the non-migrants, were also preferred for CRC company employment because they were more accustomed to the managerial discipline of the modernized enterprises. More importantly, returning migrants can strengthen the connectivity between their natal community and the outside by channelling economic and social capitals, such as external investments, skills, information, and ideas. These resources are significant because rates of out-migration tend to be lower in rural localities where development involves improving access to cultural and economic conveniences, rather than just increasing output (Murphy, 1999). The increased inflow of information precipitated by returnees expands opportunities for rural residents to respond to market signals independently of the local state. For example, the young and the educated had previously fled the countryside to work in China’s coastal regions for higher incomes and better lives. Now, however, such labourers are returning to their natal community to run small tourism-related enterprises using new information networks, technologies, and managerial experiences, and an Table 12.2  Return migrations in Huangling and nearby villages Year 2011

Huangling Shangjintian Xiajintian Xiaoyong 22

2

0

7

Jinkeng 0

Yuankou Limukeng 1

9

2012

30

1

1

6

1

3

5

2013

33

0

0

4

0

2

4

2014

31

0

1

6

3

0

7

2015

33

3

2

14

1

3

10

Total

159

6

5

37

5

9

35

Source: Adapted from Statistical Charts of Rural Cooperative Economy, Government of Wuyuan County

Resilience and tourism development in rural China   213 understanding of domestic tourism market and marketing that they learned in the cities. In general, their firms are more successful than other local household-run tourism enterprises. Furthermore, their successes attract even more return migrants, enabling more accumulated capital to enter the rural tourism industry, and restoring and maintaining the social and economic connectivity of villages like Huangling. On the national scale, as an extension of the current role of rural tourism in connecting rural areas and diffusing urban culture into the countryside, the central government hopes that rural tourism will eventually promote a complete urbanization of the countryside in the form of ‘rural townization’ (Murphy, 1999). To this end, rural tourism is seen as both the agent and the process of cultivating connectivity between rural areas and the nation. In other words, rural tourism, in the current context of China, becomes a way to promote connectedness of the rural to the nation through domestic travel. The essence of this connectivity is based in the integration of rural agricultural modernization and rural quality of life policies through the development of rural tourism. Managing slow variables and feedback As a lived experience, tourism can be a messy business in which individual aspirations may collide with the plans of larger commercial businesses. Undulating tensions between the CRC company’s ambitions for rural tourism and the personal goals for a life worth living in Huangling have resulted in sometimes fraught relationships between the myriad stakeholders involved. From a practical perspective, it is impossible to satisfy the full range of individual opinions, perspectives, desires and interests that exist in any one village. Huangling village demonstrates how, once tourism becomes a steady and predictable source of income, most families and households will choose to participate in the industry, but not without exacerbating some old, and sometimes new, inequalities. The lead author received one negative assessment of an interviewee’s sense of how tourism impacted her life while conducting an informal interview with a 39-year-old woman at her snack booth. Her response was entirely different from most of the answers that had been received. She said that she worked as a construction worker in the CRC company in 2011, but soon lost this predictable source of income because, as she herself candidly said, with a bit of a pride in her voice, ‘I avoided taking on hard work.’ After being dismissed, she began to run her small business (a snack booth), but she repeatedly stressed that, for the clear majority of villagers, their lives were without any improvements in the posttourism period. The negative assessments of this female interviewee might be interpreted as a reaction to her dismissal from the CRC company. However, the story points to the importance of examining intra-village relationships in tourism development. For example, in Huangling New Village the advantageous location of the first row and second row of residences has given them commercial opportunities that have caused divisions and conflicts among the villagers. Emotional expressions

214  Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew of envy and anger by respondents about this issue revealed the depth to which rural tourism development was creating new disappointments. These sensitive reactions and social variables need to be carefully monitored and managed to prevent them from becoming a threat the whole tourism industry in this area (Carpenter et al., 2012). Fostering complex adaptive systems thinking The impacts of tourism in Huangling village are not only physically tangible, such as the construction of buildings and the flow of returning migrants, but also have intangible psychological and behavioural effects. In the Huangling case, complex adaptive thinking emerges from the significant role that tourism has come to play in the lives of residents. This is expressed in the attitudes, impressions, and subjective connectedness of local people (Walker et al., 2004) to tourists, to each other, to their self-defined community, and to the larger country and world. First is the intangible behaviour related to commodification and commercialization, such as obtrusive trading and bargaining behaviours, typically caused by tourism development. Guided tours were the only services included in the ticket price in visiting the Huangling Tourist Resort, and the three months of fieldwork uncovered some unsavoury practices. For example, some tour guides, all of whom were local villagers, colluded with souvenir storekeepers, and small restaurant and family inn owners by escorting visitors to their establishments to gain commissions. A cycle developed where, as more tourism-based businesses opened, commercial competition becomes more severe and the owners came to depend more on tour guides for tourists. On the other hand, the more the tour guides earned from these tacit agreements, the more intensively they would seek to take tourists to these businesses. This deceitful behaviour could be disastrous to tourist satisfaction, and the long-term reputation and sustainability of the destination could be threatened. Tourism development encourages Huangling residents to learn to think in a ‘touristic’ manner to successfully adapt their tourism industries to attract potential visitors (clientele). But they need to be careful in how far they push tourism commodification, which can be contrary to the interests of tourists. For tourists who visit the village, seeing rural livelihoods and landscapes in all their olfactory and tactile realities are part of the anticipated and desired experience. Realizing this, village residents and the CRC company adopted, in part, the strategy of ‘being different’ from other nearby tourism destinations to distinguish Huangling village, which was defining itself as a newcomer within the existing rural tourism market in Wuyuan County prefecture. Villagers began to re-appreciate and resurrect their nearly extinct crafts, such as bamboo weaving, wood and stone carving, and local wine making. Traditional tensions between the farmer and environmental conservations were lessened as the development of tourism brought about a substantial change in the way the villagers relate with the natural environment. Some harmful practices (such as the clearing of mountain forests) were significantly curtailed with the growth of tourism, thereby

Resilience and tourism development in rural China   215 somewhat reducing pressure on the environment and allowing it to recover from past exploitations. The increase (or at least change) in complex adaptive thinking of among Huangling village residents who intersect with the destination is a result of the processes brought by tourism. Through their adaptive attitudes and activities, residents and the tourism industry have worked out values and goals in the destination community to create inscribed landscapes. Currently, the CRC company has not implemented any strong regulations against tourism commercialization. It is, after all, a business aiming at economic profit, and which gains most of its income from ticket sales. Consequently, commercialization is encouraged by attracting more tourists. While the tourism industry has, in effect, helped to raise resident awareness to preserve the natural environment and cultural heritage, it has yet to lead to management changes in the CRC company in regulating some of the potentially problematic commercialization activities as a way of sustaining rural culture as an attraction in rural tourism development for the long run. As such, excessive commodification and commercialization continues to be a challenge in the development of Huangling. Encouraging learning through self-organization Tourism as an exogenous driver of change has resulted in enormous physical and psychological shifts in Huangling village in a short period of time. In the pretourism period, the small plots of terraced fields spread over the side of a mountain were considered the least favourable fields for agriculture, while the physical isolation and the poor infrastructure of the village created difficulties for economic development in Huangling village, causing it to be poor and backward. However, the village was also celebrated for its authentic rustic character and pure natural environment, which eventually became the basis of its tourism industry. The very features that made the village undesirable took on new cultural meanings and values through tourism. This required the peasant residents to learn to adopt and embrace the new emerging ideas, based on their prior knowledge. The CRC company, as an outside capital source, also faced the issue of learning to bring this rural village into the fold of its commercial operations, that is, to enable them to be touristic-oriented so they could successfully build a village-based tourism industry to attract visitors. Huangling residents, at least initially, lacked an understanding of how to implement learning into their commercial practices, which resulted in a high degree of repetitive copying in the tourism products they provided. For example, the souvenirs for sale in the five stores in the Huangling New Village were much the same as in other souvenir stores in rural or urban destinations throughout China: components of the ancient houses, metal furnishing, porcelains, jewellery, Chinese calligraphy and paintings, Chinese traditional pens and inks, and so on. The CRC company also had some difficulties in self-organizing and creating a proper learning approach in its strategic, long-term planning for the Huangling Tourist Resort. The result was tourism development and management that was sometimes unscientific and irrational, with decisions that appeared random and uninformed. As

216  Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew an example, when the construction of the resort was almost finished, the board of directors suddenly decided to build a glass skywalk across the valley located at the border of old Huangling village and Xiaoyong village. Some tourists complained to the lead author that the modern and man-made bridge was not suitable to the ‘rural idyll’ of Huangling village and that it was a disruption in their experiences of the place. In addition, one tourist complained that some small peasant-run restaurants offered urban foods, like hamburgers, and said ‘when I travelled to a rural village such as this one, I really savour the opportunity to taste local food; the serving of hamburgers made me unsettled in staying here’. These issues indicate that the planners and managers in the Huangling destination need to be providing greater attention and opportunity for learning and education that can bridge the knowledge-practice gap in the community. The CRC company, as the dominant force in charge of tourism development and management, should cultivate the ability and organization to create, disseminate and exploit knowledge assets that will ensure the sustained and resilient viability and success of the rural destination in a competitive tourism market. This applies both within the company’s own operations and how it fosters local tourism involvement. Broadening participation The mostly harmonious development of its tourism industry would not have been possible without the understanding and supports of Huangling residents. Since its soft opening in 2012, income distribution from tourism has benefited Huangling villagers in the form of cash stipends to individual villagers from the CRC company totalling 350,000 yuan (US$51,210) annually. This distribution functions as a kind of benefit-sharing, through which the CRC company has transformed the whole community into tourism stakeholders and participants. Improving the public welfare of the community, such as building a local elementary school and an ancestral hall, is another way that the company motivates villagers to participate in creating and maintaining a favourable environment for the tourism activities. By 2015, according to the figures provided by the human resource manager, the CRC company had directly provided 49 contract jobs and 31 seasonal jobs for Huangling residents, accounting for nearly 13 per cent of the village’s total population of 612 people. On the other hand, the lead author conducted a household survey with a 45-year-old woman in Huangling village who, when asked for her thoughts on the potential negative consequences of tourism development, quickly responded, ‘Shangjintian is against tourism; they ruined and blocked the road’. ‘They’, referred to people from Shangjintian village. One 60-year-old man said that the ‘relationship was never very good between Huangling and Shangjintian’. Both villages were considered and compared by the CRC company for investment in 2008, and the selection of Huangling for tourism development has exacerbated pre-existing tensions. The temporary road blockage, though a relatively minor and isolated case, demonstrates the degree to which some nearby villagers opposed Huangling’s development as a tourism destination. Huangling was targeted in

Resilience and tourism development in rural China   217 this way mostly because it had been selected to be the first to have access to opportunities to participate in, and reap the benefits from, tourism. Promoting polycentric governance systems The inherent stabilities of Huangling village’s internal social and cultural structures gave it the capacity to negotiate with outside capital in governing its tourism development and operations. The rural community’s traditional social and cultural structures, being characterized by their small size, consanguinity, and clannism, have hardly changed in over a century. These characteristics give many rural communities much stronger degrees of solidarity than newer and more urban communities in present-day China, which enables them to speak with greater unity. For example, in 2012, the first year the CRC company paid the 350,000 yuan stipends to the community, the total amount was based on pre-tax profits, which meant that the actual allocation was effectively reduced after taxes. The Huangling village committee (which had been selected through a grassroots election) represented the whole community in successfully negotiating with the CRC company to base all future ‘resource fee’ payments on post-tax profits. It is their stable social structure that enables the community to talk to the company from an equal position. In fact, the CRC company’s decision-making level consists of eight managers, three of whom are Huangling residents. Allowing the Wuyuan County Rural Culture Development Co. Ltd. (the CRC company) to have absolute domination in rural tourism development might drive the community away from a long-term, sustainable development path. A balanced participation approach, as is evident in the Huangling village experience, provides the type of polycentric governance system that enhances community resilience, while sustaining the destination’s future development of tourism.

Conclusion These research findings contribute to expanding the existing literature on rural tourism in China through the concept of community resilience. The findings can be regarded as empirical evidence of how a rural community can respond, reorganize, and rebuild its resilience in the particular context of tourism development in China. The Huangling community’s experience indicates that the Chinese context may be most adept in strengthening resilience capacities for • • •

Principle 1. Maintaining diversity and redundancy, as seen in economic livelihood diversification that tourism enables. Principle 2. Managing connectivity, as evidenced by the variety of ways that contemporary villagers are connected to urban centres for knowledge and resources. Principle 6. Broadening participation, as indicated by the company’s policies toward local villager involvement in tourism activities.

218  Xiaoqing Chen and Alan A. Lew •

Principle 7. Promoting polycentric governance systems, with the example of the village and the company being two centres of negotiating power.

However, the process of recovering resilience through rural tourism in Huangling village has not been without problems. Tourism as an exogenous driver of change creates new inequalities and psychological dislocations, both of which have not received enough attention and potentially threaten the resilience of the Huangling community. From the perspective the seven principle of resilience (Simonsen et al., 2014), the case study of Huangling village indicates that resilience areas which require greater attention in the Chinese context appear to include: • • •

Principle 3. Managing slow variables and feedback, with a major variable being the attitudes of those who do not perceive a personal economic benefit from tourism development. Principle 4. Fostering complex adaptive systems thinking, with the challenge of short-term, narrow-minded decision making for economic profit having long-term negative impacts on the authenticity and uniqueness of a destination. Principle 5. Encouraging learning through self-organization, which requires a concerted effort to overcome the knowledge-practice gap at all levels of action to ensure an informed and effective response to a constantly changing social-ecological context.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a preliminary exploration of the aspects and means by which tourism could be a resilient tactic for a rural village and the ways in which it could be studied. There are many villages in China that are currently undergoing tourism transformations similar to Huangling village. Most share the experience of an exogenous private or semi-private company that is the source of investment capital and development power. Beyond that similarity to Huangling village, the relationships among different interest and power groups can vary considerably, with the disempowerment of local villagers being a common outcome (Han, et al., 2014; Xu, Zhang, & Lew, 2014). The approach to assessing community resilience, as outlined above, is effective for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of tourism communities that are particularly sensitive to global environmental and economic changes. If tourism is to persist in making a positive contribution to sustainable rural development, it is vital to have a better understanding of how a community’s resilience can be enhanced as it embraces change.

Note 1 ‘Nong jia le’ is a distinctively Chinese version of rural tourism (Su, 2011), which is loosely translatable as ‘peasant family happiness’ (Chio, 2011), or ‘joyous village life’ (Donaldson, 2006), or ‘happy farmer’s home’ (Su, 2011). Rural agricultural peasants convert a portion of their homes into a restaurant and sometimes into accommodations for urban tourists.

Resilience and tourism development in rural China   219

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13 Learning from Dabang, Taiwan Sustainability and resilience in action in indigenous tourism development Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall

Introduction This chapter is positioned at the juxtaposition of writings on sustainable development, tourism and community, and explores how these relate to resilience thinking. Development is seen as the movement from a current towards a future preferred state. The concept has a long history, initially being regarded as having a predominantly economic content but evolving to encompass notions of equity and self-determination (Telfer & Sharpley, 2002). In the form of sustainable development, the Brundtland Commission emphasized possible tensions between economic growth and environmental quality, thereby underemphasizing the importance of culture which should also be sustained (WCED, 1987). More recent conceptualizations of sustainability, such as sustainable livelihoods, have taken a more people-centered and pragmatic perspective, and have also emphasized the importance of the institutional arrangements through which decisions are made for these influence strongly access to resources and, ultimately, the wellbeing of those affected (Tao & Wall, 2009a, 2009b). Lew et al. (2016) advocated the concept of resilience, emphasizing the necessity of adaptation and the role of geographic scale in community responses to environmental vicissitudes. Resilience theory also contributes the adaptive cycle model, as a way of understanding how communities respond to and recover from significant changes. These concepts inform the broad yet practical perspective that is adopted here. Tourism is, globally, a large and expanding economic activity with far-reaching consequences for the places that are visited. It is a form of global change that impinges upon and is influenced by other forms of global change, which are often superimposed upon one another and interact in such places as mountains, coasts, and cities where tourism is often concentrated. The impacts of tourism vary with the form that it takes and the settings in which it occurs, but the fact that it has witnessed substantial growth globally for more than a century, with only a few downturns, has attracted the attention of developers and, increasingly, of poor communities that are seeking ways of enhancing wellbeing. Accordingly, tourism is seen as a development opportunity in many places, even though it may be a risky activity, success is not assured and many negative impacts, in addition to often positive economic impacts, have been widely documented (Wall and Mathieson,

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  223 2006). Thus, tourism may have the potential to supplement and diversify existing economies, but also has the potential to bring adverse consequences if not designed and managed well. The word “community” has many meanings (Iorio & Wall, 2012). Here it is used to refer to a group of people who have many common interests and live in a shared location. Later in the chapter, the focus of attention will be given to an indigenous community in Taiwan. However, although almost all members of this community are Tsou, this does not mean that the residents are homogeneous for they are comprised of people of different gender, age, education, occupation, priorities and power, among a multitude of other possible discriminating variables. Communities, including indigenous ones, may or may not seek to become tourism destinations. In fact, community-based tourism, although not without its critics (Agrawal & Gibson, 1999; Blackstock, 2005), has attracted considerable attention in the tourism literature for at least a decade, as has the interest in indigenous tourism (Butler & Hinch, 1996), with these two literatures exhibiting substantial overlap. This contribution, then, addresses aspects of the development of tourism in an indigenous community. Many poor communities have turned to tourism as a means of diversifying and strengthening their economies, often with the assistance of external inputs. They may, for example, receive financial support, infrastructure construction, and expertise and technical advice from government agencies, NGO groups, universities, or private enterprises. However, success is not assured and many such initiatives eventually fail, particularly after the termination of external assistance. In fact, in many cases, few lasting jobs have been created, especially when considering the considerable amounts of aid money expended, and often the major beneficiaries have been the consultants rather than the people that they were hired to help (Harrison, 2008; Singh, 2012). This chapter documents the tourism initiatives taken in Dabang, a Tsou indigenous community in the central mountains of Taiwan, whose tourism developments were facilitated through action research, to extract lessons that underpin successful collaborative, community-based, tourism development, success being indicated by the ongoing involvement of local people and the establishment and survival of tourism businesses, as well as replication elsewhere. The discussion has a strong relationship to resilience for a number of reasons. The place that is the subject of discussion has very little flat land and is prone to extreme environmental events, such as typhoons and earthquakes, that periodically disrupt existing systems, isolating communities through the dislocation of transportation networks that make it difficult for residents to leave or for visitors to arrive (Figure 13.1). This makes tourism, as well as other economic activities, precarious. But it also provides an opportunity to examine how a community reorganizes itself and develops an adaptive capacity for change. Tourism is seen as a means of diversifying an economy rather than replacing other activities. Building adaptive capacity, however, requires a long-term perspective, whereby emphasis is placed on strengthening local capabilities so that residents will be in a stronger position to make and implement livelihood decisions in an uncertain and changing environment.

224  Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall

Dabang Village

© d-maps.com

Chiayi

40 km 20 mi

Figure 13.1  Location and landscape of Dabang Source: Authors

Conceptualizations The adaptive cycle The adaptive cycle model in resilience theory (Holling, 2001, 2004) suggests that social-ecological systems respond to changing conditions by moving through a circular sequence of stages. These stages typically start with the system selforganizing itself to take advantage of an available resource. Exploitation of the resources leads to growth and development. Over time, the system matures and consolidates into a rigid path dependency around that resource, which makes it vulnerable to shocks that can cause a collapse of the existing organization structure. Such a collapse is followed by a chaotic period of reorganization, which if successful leads to a new stage of growth and development. If the reorganization is unsuccessful it can lead to either a weakened system or to its complete extinction. The adaptive cycle model has its correlate in the tourism area life cycle model (TALC) proposed by Butler (1980). The TALC suggested that tourism destinations move through stages of exploration, development, consolidation, and potential stagnation and decline. These stages reflect the adaptive cycle model’s stages of resource exploitation and growth, system consolidation, and system collapse (Walker, Holling, Carpenter & Kinzig, 2004; Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004). However, both the adaptive cycle and the TALC models recognize that while stagnation is very common, not all systems experience a major collapse before entering a stage of reorganization. The adaptive cycle model explains this better

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  225 than does the TALC by suggesting that a system can reorganize itself at any point on a growth curve because humans have the capacity to recognize and speculate potential system failures, and to potentially plan and respond to prevent them. In addition, the recognition of new resources can ignite a new stage of exploitation and growth, without necessarily disrupting the existing system. The initial introduction of tourism activities for the first time in a community, for example, would correlate to growth surrounding the exploitation of a new (use of) resource. The new resource could be human-made, such as a new resort or new fame related to a successful movie. It could also be nature based, although for tourism there is always an element of marketing and image creation involved. The repositioning of an established tourism destination or individual resort would be an example of a system moving directly from the consolidation stage to reorganization. The degree and extent of repositioning may be large or small, but either way it represents a degree of reorganization intended to maintain the system and avoid entering a collapse. In the case of Dabang, members of the community approached the first author in 2002 to seek assistance in exploring the possibilities of tourism development. Being a poor community and observing apparently successful tourism initiatives in other indigenous communities in the mountainous interior of Taiwan, interest was expressed in assessing the possibility of attracting tourists as a means of stimulating their sluggish economy, while also respecting the cultural and environmental qualities of a fledgling tourism destination. When the project commenced, Dabang was only visited by occasional hikers attracted to the high mountains. It was, therefore, a self-organizing, bottom-up initiative, in which the social system recognized a potential resource and sought assistance to reorganize itself to exploit that resource. In the TALC model, Dabang was in the early stages of exploration and community involvement in tourism development. Sustainable development Although pre-dating early classic formulations of sustainable development (for example, Our Common Future presented sustainable development primarily as a tension between economy and environment, and had little to say on culture and even less on tourism) and discussions of resilience in the tourism literature, the three interacting domains of economic development, environment and resources, and socio-cultural attributes have been widely adopted as underpinning notions of most modern-day definitions of sustainability. These three components of sustainable development have often been discussed and the main contents of each are well documented (Wall & Mathieson, 2006). However, all three aspects are interrelated and are hard to separate in a community because any one can potentially influence the others. Various interest groups emphasize particular aspects that reflect their own interests. The need for balance, especially between environment and economics, is often mentioned, but this leads to a focus on compensatory mechanisms rather than synergistic relationships. Progress needs to be made on all three dimensions of sustainability at the same time, even though progress on one may be easier than another depending upon the circumstances.

226  Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall To make this perspective on sustainability more relevant to the local community of Dabang, drawing upon academic literature and following discussion with community leaders, it was decided to place community-based ecotourism at the core. Furthermore, to encompass concerns about resource conservation, community benefits and the provision of satisfying experiences for visitors, the three supporting elements were modified to become “environmental quality,” an “amiable community,” and “satisfied people” (both visitors and residents) (Figure 13.2). Such broad conceptualizations of sustainability, on their own, were not enough to satisfy the concerns of local residents who had very practical needs and identified a variety of “How to?” issues that they felt should be addressed. Such issues, included: “How to ensure that local people would benefit in a sustainable manner?” “How to develop ecotourism products and programs of an appropriate quality that would attract and satisfy tourists?” “How to promote environmental and cultural education through tourism?” and “How to manage and minimize negative impacts that might occur as a result of tourism development?” Thus, the conceptual framework was revised again (Figure 13.3). The periphery of Figure 13.3 specifies seven areas of concern requiring attention if the objectives of sustainable community-based ecotourism were to be met. Through discussions in the community, it was expected that these could be met by undertaking the following tasks: develop ecotourism plans for Dabang, establish mechanisms for implementation of the plans, inventory resources and build a resource database, monitor resource quality, and investigate

Environmental quality

Communitybased ecotourism

Amiable community

Figure 13.2  Community-based ecotourism Source: Authors.

Satisfied people

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  227

Environment and resource quality

Vision/leadership for sustainable welfare

Organization and cooperation

Adaptive impact control

Community management

Resource management Communitybased tourism

Regular empowerment program Travel business management

High-quality tourism supply system

Market value of local resources

Figure 13.3  Considerations in community-based tourism Source: Authors.

perceptions of impacts, develop rules for local businesses, residents, and visitors, develop and test eco-tour programs, and develop business and marketing plans. Residents of Dabang believed that if these things were done, the resilience of the community would be increased through the utilization of unused resources and the diversification of economic opportunities. The above discussion provides the conceptual context for the community-based development initiative in Dabang as well as the key tasks that were accepted as being likely to meet the issues identified by community leaders. These issues and activities will be revisited later in the chapter.

Methods The work that underpins this chapter is essentially a case of tourism development in an indigenous community, the process of development being stimulated by action research. Thus, the community will be described and then action research will be discussed briefly.

228  Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall Study site Dabang village is situated at the end of the Alishan Mountain Range in Alishan Township, Chiayi County, Taiwan. It lies along the upper part of the Tsengwen River at an elevation ranging between 800 to 1,500 meters above sea level. Dabang village is comprised of the village center and the adjacent Dade-an and Iskiana areas. The population of the village is about 1,027 (2014), with Tsou people (one of 16 officially-recognized aboriginal tribes in Taiwan) making up 95 percent of the total. Tea, bamboo shoots and seasonal vegetables are the main economic crops. Due to a favorable combination of elevation and location, Dabang supports a rich diversity of plant life characteristic of tropical, subtropical, and temperate climates. This area also possesses abundant old-growth forests of broad-leafed trees which are the habitat of a variety of wildlife (Wang, 2001) (Figure 13.4). Dabang village is a Tsou tribal center. It has a strict patriarchal structure with well-organized small and large clans. Tribal affairs are conducted by men in the kuba, a traditional Tsou pavilion where meetings are held. Women must keep away from the kuba. Dabang village has preserved most traditional Tsou ceremonies. The processes of maintaining the kuba, trimming the holy tree, welcoming the ancestral spirits, entertaining them and sending them off are elaborate with rhythmic music, singing, and dancing. Every July, Dabang holds the Homeyaya harvest festival and in February it hosts the Mayasvi war ritual festival (Wang, 2001). Some villagers also continue to hunt in the traditional Tsou way. These

Figure 13.4  Dade-an is an old-growth forest area near Dabang Village, Taiwan Source: Tsung-chiung Wu.

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  229

Figure 13.5  Homeyaya harvest festival, Dabang Village, Taiwan Source: Tsung-chiung Wu.

traditions and events differ markedly from those found in mainstream Taiwan and, as such, they are of potential interest to outsiders. Action research The activities undertaken in Dabang and which form the basis for this chapter are best viewed as an example of action research (Zuber-Skerritt, 1996; Winter, 1989). This is because the primary emphasis was to support the undertaking of initiatives to address problems and opportunities indentified by people in Dabang. The aim was to strengthen the ability of the community to address current issues and future problems, thereby enhancing the resilience of the community. Thus, a series of specific activities was undertaken that involved the mutual setting of goals and objectives, the collection and sharing of information, and analysis and assessment leading to the undertaking of concrete actions. The activities involved the taking of initiatives together, the exchange of information, and ‘learning by doing’. In this process, while listening to and responding to the suggestions and concerns of residents, the first author adopted a leadership role, by organizing activities and suggesting optional ways of proceeding. Information and insights were shared among all those involved so that all could contribute and could learn and potentially influence what would be done. Thus, the research involved partnership and collaboration between members of the Dabang community and

230  Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall a university-based researcher. The first author was able to introduce concepts and insights gained from academic experiences and literature, as well as from a university-based research team, whereas local residents shared their knowledge, including traditional knowledge, each learning from the others. Project activities One day in early July 2003, three local teachers from Dabang primary school contacted the first author to seek assistance in the development of an alternative type of indigenous tourism in their beloved homeland. They wanted help with the establishment of a form of ecotourism, which they interpreted as requiring respect for culture and environment, providing educational experiences and bringing benefits to residents of Dabang. Thus, a four-year (1+3 years) project was developed for Dabang village. The project was supported strongly and funded by the Alishan Scenic Area Administration, a regional office of the Taiwan Tourism Bureau. The project was viewed as an experiment through which feasible community-based indigenous tourism actions could be identified and strategies for implementing sustainable ecotourism development could be explored from which other indigenous communities might learn. Thus, the overall objective of the project was to take the principles of community-based indigenous tourism and use them to create action plans which could be adopted and implemented by indigenous communities, thereby strengthening their livelihood portfolios. Accordingly, Dabang village became the center of an indigenous ecotourism project that would simultaneously incorporate environmental, socio-cultural, and economic aspects of community development and, if successful, would increase the resilience of the community by diversifying its economy in a culturally acceptable way. The first year (2004) was used to establish trust and develop an understanding of local circumstances by documenting the historical and current situations. A series of tasks was set for the following three years (2005–2007): (1) development of an indigenous tourism development plan for Dabang; (2) creation of implementation strategies and action plans; (3) the building of a community resource database; (4) the establishment of a community-based monitoring strategy; (5) completion of resident and visitor perception surveys; (6) formulation of behavior regulations for visitors, local businesses, and residents; (7) development and implementation of indigenous tours; (8) development of a community-based process and plan of resource commodification for tourism-related businesses; and (9) marketing and promotion. In all of the above tasks, emphasis was placed on providing assistance to local people rather than undertaking the tasks for them. As indicated earlier, a substantial number of shared activities was undertaken and space limitations constrain the ability to discuss each of these in detail. For example, resource inventory, product development, marketing, and monitoring are particular tasks that required attention. In some cases, external expertise was brought in to share information, raise awareness of options, and to offer advice. In other circumstances, students provided labor and assisted in the evaluation of data. However, in all cases, a major emphasis was placed on members of the community

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  231 actually doing things for themselves, in part so that they would have ownership of the activities and outcomes, and also so that they would have the confidence and abilities to undertake such activities when required in the future. This approach meant that procedures were strongly influenced by the objectives identified by participants and their abilities to undertake specific activities. For example, after suggestions by external partners had been made, local residents decided what to monitor and how this was to be done in line with their concerns and capabilities. By 2007, a template for community-based indigenous tourism had been designed and implemented in collaboration with the Dabang community. At this point, the project team decided to withdraw from the role of providing assistance in the implementation of indigenous tourism in Dabang. The main reason for the withdrawal was to change the relationship from that of a consultant to being a partner, even though both the Alishan National Scenic Area Administration and the community wanted to continue the existing arrangement. Instead, in 2008 and 2009 the team shifted to supporting the Dabang community in the compilation of monitoring reports, organizing meetings to devise local strategies for controlling tourism impacts, and providing consultants on an as-needed basis for the village.

Accomplishments Action plans Three sets of action plans were created based on the framework (Figure 13.3) as key elements in the development of a form of community-based indigenous tourism which could contribute to the long-term wellbeing of Dabang. The first set of action plans was designed to enhance environmental stewardship. Under this principle, emphasis was placed upon: the inventory and maintenance of local resources, the construction of tourist facilities, and monitoring changes in local resources, by understanding both residents’ and tourists’ perceptions of impacts, and by development of adaptive management strategies for impact control. The second set of action plans addressed economic viability. Plans focused on the creation of commercial tourism products through use of local resources, the marketing of Dabang’s indigenous tourism to selected tourist markets, development of an operational mechanism for cooperation among tourism suppliers in the community, and enhancement of the quality of tourism supply. The third set of action plans was directed at community capacity building. These plans emphasized the generation of visions for indigenous tourism that incorporated its likely contributions to community wellbeing; launching and facilitating empowerment programs, including skill development and training courses on a variety of subjects through workshops and interactive field trips; and setting up a network to form a bridge between the community and external stakeholders. Issues and responses Community-based approaches to tourism development have been widely supported as means to achieve sustainable development but implementation has proven to be

232  Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall more complex than expected. In part, this is because much less attention has been paid in the literature to the complexity and heterogeneity of communities: members of a community have different socio-economic backgrounds, beliefs and opinions; current community states vary in natural, human and cultural resources, geographical location, infrastructure and social capital; and each community has its own social network and political system (Iorio & Wall, 2012). The introduction of learning and other transformational processes, from awareness, to interest, involvement and belief, takes time and involves challenging tasks. The merits of local control, resident participation, and bottom-up decision making have been emphasized in the literature. In the case study location, environmental stewardship, economic viability, and community capacity building were also deemed to be important. Attention will now return to the issues and tasks that were identified in the conceptualization in order to illustrate the challenges that had to be faced and how they were dealt with. A holistic approach is taken while some tasks address more than one issue or need; for example, capacity building, community-based impact monitoring and controls, and pro-community tourism production are not isolated topics. Issue 1: environmental concerns Environmental matters received early attention. People can readily participate in cleaning up their environment with immediate results and quick positive feedback is important to encourage ongoing participation. Furthermore, a quality natural environment is appealing to tourists and a fundamental aspect of good living conditions. It is often linked to landscape aesthetics and outdoor recreation opportunities. However, in an indigenous community, it will likely be necessary to incorporate traditional knowledge and indigenous aspects of quality. For example, traditional construction methods and ways in which indigenous people work or cope with their environment with minimal modern technologies can be cost-effective and of interest to novelty-seeking tourists. Several trails were constructed using local labor, materials, and techniques. In order to embed a sense of Tsou culture, bamboo bridges and Tsou-style pavilions were built. A “hunters’ trail” was constructed to exhibit knowledge about the fauna and flora, and the setting of traps. No interpretation signs or facilities were placed on the trail in order to encourage visitors to hire a local interpreter. Issue 2: resource assessment and monitoring The inventory and monitoring of resources are prerequisites for product development and control of impacts. This work is typically done by external actors (consultants or an academic research team) due to the scientific knowledge and precision required. Few communities can afford to hire such people; in any case, such an approach detaches the tasks from the community. In the absence of involvement in the resource assessment and protection processes, even if a few villagers were hired to provide labor for a scientific research team, few would be

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  233 aware of “global” environmental issues, the broader value of their resources, or perceive that these things are relevant to them. In the Dabang project, a group of resource experts was invited to work with key local individuals. First, the resources experts identified and illustrated environmental threats in the field with local people. Then they worked together to determine what resources were important to Dabang and what should be monitored. Resources were categorized according to the Tsou’s folk-use (such as dining, housing, and religious events) and this format was also used in environmental interpretation programs. The project team and resource experts simplified the monitoring forms and process, and locals were trained to implement the simplified community environmental monitoring plan. After further modifications, a resources monitoring template was designed that could be implemented routinely by a group of trained locals. The project team analyzed the data and produced tables and figures periodically for the community to detect changes, discuss possible causes, and worked with the community to come up with coping strategies. The locals participating in the monitoring practices became the local resource experts. They were able to understand local and global environmental issues, could react to address threats and explain these to other villagers, and could speak for their community. Photographs taken during the resource inventory were later used in posters and web sites used to market the emerging tourist destination. Issue 3: economic impacts Potential economic benefits are one of the most important reasons for indigenous communities to consider tourism as a development strategy and as means of enhancing resilience. However, there are many challenges, including increased pressure on their resources and possible loss of cultural meaning and identity. Often, the quantity of jobs created is small and the distribution of benefits is inequitable. Thus, the generation of sufficient economic benefits, their retention in the community and maintenance of the essence of local characteristics are critical issues. Tourism inevitably involves commodification, since experiences are sold to tourists, so it is important to ensure that benefits accrue to the community at acceptable cultural costs. The project team worked with local people to create souvenirs made from local raw materials and labor. First, training courses introduced the concept of commodification and product innovation, and villagers, especially local artists, were taken on field trips to stimulate their thinking. Then, to encourage creativity, a contest was held for local people to design souvenirs with the following criteria: at least 50 percent of material should come from local sources; there should be a clear relationship to the local culture and market feasibility. The competition was adjudicated by experienced external judges. The top two designs were selected to go through production, packaging and marketing processes to become tourism commodities. However, the souvenirs are produced by a group of local people working part-time and not by the artists alone. A standardized production process

234  Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall was created by working with a designer and the allocation of likely revenues was discussed with part-time workers. Thus, the products were of local design and hand-made but efficient and voluminous production was possible. Local economic benefits were assured through the shared distribution of profits. Issue 4: the supply system Tourism supply includes many things: for example, lodging, dining, transportation, recreation opportunities, information and communication. Linkage among these functions influences the stability and quality of supply. The ability to access and communicate with outsiders is fundamental to marketing. However, most indigenous communities are located in remote areas with small populations, with limited experiences or capacity to deal with tourism businesses elsewhere. Tourism businesses in indigenous communities are usually very small, such as home-based bed and breakfasts or part-time guides. In recognition of this situation, in addition to the provision of training to acquaint villagers with aspects of tourism business, a “one center” supply system was proposed as a headquarters where individual operators could work together to service tourists. The center also undertook communication and marketing functions by coordinating supply in order to deliver quality tourist services and by acting as a call center. The center also facilitated the negotiation of several important tasks: establishing rules of cooperation among operators, standardizing operation requirements to ensure stable service provision, holding regular meetings to support cooperation arrangements, and the setting aside of a small portion of the income for the community. Issue 5: community Community-based means “for the community, by the community.” This means that common needs and threats to the community should be put forward and addressed rather than imposing the “imported” agendas of others which are guided by such alien concepts as sustainable development or environmental and cultural conservation. Tourism should contribute to the long-term wellbeing of the community. Ideally, this should include villagers not directly involved in tourism for it is necessary to gain support from the community as a whole. At the same time, the current status of the community should be considered for it influences whether or not it can initiate and manage indigenous tourism development in the absence of external inputs. In reality, it may not be possible, especially at the start-up stage, to take initiatives without external help. Moreover, it takes time for habits and values to change so that external assistance is welcomed. The nature of external involvement is an important issue and many tourism development initiatives have soon failed following withdrawal of external inputs. In Dabang, a special common fund comprised of a proportion of the revenues of tourism businesses was established. The common fund was used to enhance the general welfare of the community, such as by providing winter clothes for the

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  235 elderly and paying for maintaining trails. Standardized operational procedures were introduced, as has been mentioned in several places above, for residents were working with new ideas, but elders were consulted to check for consonance with traditional viewpoints and to ensure that residents had higher priority than tourists, for instance in the use of public areas and facilities. In the absence of the desire for voluntary change and cooperation from the community, it was foreseen that there would likely be retrogression to initial conditions. Therefore, the project team was very careful about its relationships with the community. For example, efforts were made to contact diverse groups within the community and to work with skeptical groups to emphasize the honesty of goodwill. Such people were invited to participate in project events and befriended where possible. The experience of early benefits, such as a clean environment, increased sales of agricultural products and new skills, were learned through participation in project tasks, building trust between the project team and the community as a whole. The team members positioned themselves as professional companions and the local community always had the final say, even if it was very different from initial plans proposed by the project team. The development of tourism requires diverse knowledge, skills, and social networks. Thus, a network of external contacts was created from which the community could draw as desired. Developmental gaps were identified with community leaders and the community was linked with external experts in a variety of domains. This was done to ensure the continuation of learning and involvement opportunities through access to advice from external experts while ensuring that the visions and concepts of the latter met the needs of the community in its current development stage. Experts could work with the members of the community to modify operations to increase local benefits, encouraging community-building through informal friendships through which long-term support could be accessed. Issue 6: capacity building Capacity building and empowerment programs are often required to strengthen the abilities and confidence of indigenous people, thereby contributing to resilience by increasing the ability to respond to challenges. Many indigenous communities have received occasional funding or support for training programs. However, these have rarely provided sufficient capacities to deal with the development needs of indigenous tourism and related challenges. This is because the quality and quantity of the skills and knowledge imparted may not be congruent with the multi-pronged nature of indigenous tourism, for successful tourism development involves much more than the creation of new attractions. Furthermore, the learning habits of local indigenes may differ from those assumed in general education programs. The project team first identified the capacity building programs that were needed through analyzing gaps between the current status of the community and the capacities required for tourism development. It then provided the necessary educational programs and encouraged villagers to attend other enhancement opportunities elsewhere. Program provisions were adjusted to be compatible

236  Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall with work and living schedules, and incorporated a variety of types of learning and teaching styles, such as field trips, exercises, one-on-one consultations, with the awarding of certificates to mark successful learning. The comprehension of concepts requires a very different understanding from most villagers’ previous learning experiences, although abstract concepts are important foundations for local people to debate to determine their visions and principles for indigenous tourism development. Overall, a ‘learning by doing’ approach was adopted. For example, when illegal fishing with poison occurred and villagers were angry about what had happened, they were encouraged to organize a voluntary patrol team to look after their own river. As another example, young primary school pupils worked with elders to organize a ‘root-seeking’ tour to learn about Tsou legends.

Discussion In a summary of many years of research, the Stockholm Resilience Center (2014) suggests seven key principles in building and assessing community resilience to a rapidly changing world. These include: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Maintain diversity and redundancy – to ensure that system stability in case some parts are unexpectedly damaged or lost. Manage connectivity – for relationships both within the system and with outside entities. Manage slow variables and feedback – to ensure core values (slow variables) are maintained and change (feedback) is properly monitored. Foster complex adaptive systems thinking – so the community is aware of how relationships are monitored and maintained. Encourage learning – to foster creative and innovate responses to changing conditions. Broaden participation – to ensure that all segments of the social system are part of the resilience framework. Promote polycentric governance systems – to support flexible and potentially independent responses to meeting community needs as they arise.

Community-based approaches to tourism development will vary with the context. They will need to take into account the attributes and complexity of the community, and the needs and opportunities that exist, ideally as identified by members of the community, albeit with some outside assistance. Nevertheless, some generalizations can be made. Accordingly, five interrelated points are highlighted in the following discussion: 1 2 3 4 5

trust; partnership and collaboration; a long-term commitment; empowerment through capacity building and “learning by doing”; and adoption of a multi-pronged development strategy.

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  237 These five points are primarily associated with the resilience principles of maintaining connectivity and maintaining diversity and redundancy (SRC 2014). From a real world community development perspective, these two principles appear to be the most compelling of those proposed by the Stockholm Resilience Center. Little is likely to be achieved in the absence of trust. This does not mean that everyone will agree all of the time. In fact, this is unlikely. Rather, it means that decisions to move in one direction rather than another should be made following open discussion; reasons favoring one option over another should be explained, and decisions should be documented. Furthermore, first impressions are important. In the case of Dabang, the first author was invited to assist the community. When initiative comes from outside, the community must be entered carefully, often with the assistance of local intermediaries. In either case, it will be necessary to gain the trust of local leaders as well as other community members and this is likely to take time, effort, understanding of local traditions, frequent and regular gatherings, multiple visits, participation in events and ceremonies, the exchange of pleasantries and often the sharing of food and drinks. Inability and refusal to follow interpersonal norms may undermine the development of trust in societies where they underpin the establishment of social relationships. Trust is seldom addressed in resilience thinking. It tends to fall under the category of Maintaining Connectivity, because trust is central to the strength of relationships between people. However, this is an aspect of resilience that could probably be better explored and understood. Real trust is earned and is not the same as respect which may be accorded an outsider initially, partly as a result of perceived status. It is gained through sharing of information and cultivating the ability to listen as well as to talk. One usually learns more when one is listening rather than talking! The asking of questions (and careful listening to responses) is more important than having “all the answers at one’s fingertips.” In fact, the latter may give the impression that one lacks empathy and is not prepared to listen and learn. Through the establishment of personal relationships, information and ideas can be exchanged and partnerships and collaboration (connectivity) can occur. Progress can only be made through working with others so the creation of networks of local participants in project activities is vital. Thus, the establishment of partnerships and collaboration is fundamental to the successful undertaking of community development initiatives. All of the above takes time. It may also require accessing external resources, both personnel and financial, and this requires a long-term commitment, another aspect of managing resilience connectivity. While, ideally, early successes are desirable to maintain initial enthusiasm through the provision of positive feedback, real change will not be instantaneous but is likely to occur over years and even decades. Many projects fail because external support is withdrawn before local capacities have been enhanced sufficiently to enable local people to continue with and build upon the initiatives that have been taken through partnerships and collaboration with outsiders. Local capacity building is usually essential to the successful taking of community development initiatives.

238  Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall Empowerment and capacity building occur in a variety of ways, among which “learning by doing” is the most important. Empowerment falls under the resilience idea of broadening participation, while capacity building is encouraging resilience learning. Training programs, instructional workshops, demonstration activities, and the like can be valuable inputs, but working together to make the changes that are needed is the most important aspect of action research. Such activities provide practical experiences and increase the confidence of local participants in their own abilities. Thus, when external support is eventually withdrawn, they have the knowledge and wherewithal not only to continue with existing activities but also to address the changing circumstances that will inevitably have to be faced. The inputs that are required for the successful development of tourism are varied. They include environmental and visitor management, product development, marketing and monitoring, financial analysis and so on. At the same time, the interests and abilities of members of a community may be diverse. Successful development, therefore, requires moving ahead with a variety of interrelated initiatives in what may be called a multi-pronged strategy, different initiatives providing opportunities for the involvement of people with different interests and skills. This correlates directly with the resilience principle of maintaining diversity and redundancy. In this way, development initiatives can involve more people (broadening participation), penetrate further into the community, and are less likely to rely on the success or failure of a single initiative. How does one measure the success of a community-based tourism development initiative and when should such evaluations occur? There is a substantial literature on project and program evaluation (Rossi, Lipsey, & Freeman, 2003; Wholey, Hatry, & Newcomer, 2010). However, in answer to this question, it is suggested that evaluation should be an ongoing process with participants continually reviewing what is or is not working. Indicators of success are the ongoing involvement and enthusiasm of local people, and the establishment and survival of tourism businesses in the community. A further indicator of success is the replication of some of Dabang’s initiatives in other communities in Taiwan.

Conclusions The purpose of this chapter has been to share experiences gained from working on a tourism development strategy with an indigenous community in central Taiwan. The aim has not been to document every initiative in detail. Rather, the intention was to distil from the seven years of (four years plus initial project establishment and subsequent relationships) experience in Dabang, as well as from similar experiences elsewhere, a number of principles that may apply to many rural and small town communities elsewhere, whether indigenous or not, that are seeking to increase their sustainability and resilience through the establishment of tourism development initiatives. From the perspective of the adaptive cycle model in resilience theory, the Dabang experience shows how a community is able to self-organize and build its adaptive capacity by creating new linkages and learning institutions. It also shows

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  239 the close relationship between reorganization, learning, and capacity building. The reorganization stage of the adaptive cycle is considered to have the highest potential for resilience, because the system is most open to innovation. What Dabang shows is that this phase can last a long time (several years) and that an attitude of “life-long learning” and “community confidence” can even become a core community value that is also a powerful indicator of community resilience. From a sustainability perspective, the Dabang experience shows how community buy-in can be increased by moving from broad concepts, such as sustainable development, to more specific conceptualizations that placed the community at the core in terms of conservation and satisfaction. Through discussions in the community, seven areas of concern requiring attention were identified (Figure 13.3). It was expected that these could be addressed by undertaking the following tasks: development of (eco)tourism plans, establishment of mechanisms for implementation of the plans, inventory of resources and creation of a resource database, monitoring of resource quality and investigation of the perceptions of impacts, development of rules for local businesses, residents, and visitors, development and testing of eco-tour programs, and development of business and marketing plans. Three sets of action plans were created as key elements in the development of a form of community-based indigenous tourism which could contribute to the long-term wellbeing of the community. These addressed aspects of environmental stewardship, economic development, and community capacity building. Then, a set of six issues were presented, along with examples of responses to these issues that occurred in the study area. As described in Table 13.1, these issues were (1) environmental concerns, (2) resource assessment, and monitoring, (3) economic issues, (4) the supply system, (5) the broader community and (6) capacity building and empowerment. Each is shown to have direct correlates with core concepts in sustainable development and resilience. Finally, drawing together a number of themes that cut across the topics, issues and initiatives addressed in this example of action research, five subjects are highlighted that we suggest underpin successful community-based tourism development, thereby enhancing community resilience, that is supported by outside assistance (as almost all such initiatives are). They are the establishment of trust, partnerships and collaboration, a long-term commitment, empowerment and capacity building, and the adoption of a multi-pronged development strategy. As discussed above, these elements broadly encompass all of the domains of sustainability and resilience thinking. Resilience thinking and sustainable development are not new approaches to community development. They both provide frameworks for understanding what is important, what might work, what might not work, or what might be missing in a particular development project. Being informed of the ideas, approaches, and models of sustainability and resilience helps us to better address the community development needs in a world that can seem to be changing faster than we might prefer.

Table 13.1  Community-based ecotourism actions and resilience principles Critical actions

Sustainability concepts

Resilience concepts

(1) Environmental concerns and actions should involve local people and incorporate their traditional knowledge.

• Environment and resource issues (environmental quality)

• Encouraging complex adaptive thinking (through scientific knowledge and cultural knowledge) • Managing slow variables (the core supporting variables of the system)

(2) Resource assessment and monitoring can be accomplished through involving external experts, but protocols require modification in recognition of local conditions and abilities.

• Environment and resource issues (environmental quality) • Socio-cultural issues (amiable community)

• Managing connectivity (best utilization of external resources) • Managing feedbacks (sensitivity to how the system responds to different indicators)

(3) Economic issues, including job quality, the retention and distribution of economic gains, and local meanings, should receive serious consideration during the process of tourism product development.

• Economic development issues (satisfied people)

• Managing slow variables • Managing feedbacks (to ensure maximum benefits while maintaining core system values)

(4) The supply system with a fixed communitycentered platform to facilitate communication and cooperation among small operators and other individuals and to assure service quality and stability.

• Economic development issues (satisfied people)

• Promoting polycentric governance system • Broadening participation (to ensure that services are readily available to everyone who needs them within the community)

(5) Broader community needs and long-term well-being should be central to tourism development, facilitated by a network of external aids to augment local capabilities.

• Socio-cultural issues (amiable community)

• Broadening participation (to all elements of the community) • Managing connectivity (to meet needs beyond the community’s capabilities) • Maintaining diversity and redundancy (with tourism as one among other economic activities)

(6) Capacity building and empowerment programs should be congruent with a multi-pronged development agenda and local learning systems and habits.

• Socio-cultural issues (amiable community)

• Encouraging learning • Broadening participation • Managing slow variables (to bring positive transformations to the entire community system) • Maintaining diversity and redundancy (through a diversity of development options)

Learning from Dabang, Taiwan  241

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the Dabang people for their genuineness and hospitality. The authors are grateful to the constructive comments offered by Professor Alan Lew and Dr. Joseph Cheer, and financial and administrative support from Alishan National Scenic Area, Taiwan.

References Agrawal, A., & Gibson, C. (1999). Enchantment and disenchantment: The role of community in natural resource conservation. World Development, 27(4), 629–649. Blackstock, K. (2005). A critical look at community based tourism. Community Development Journal, 40(1), 39–49. Butler, R. W. (1980). The concept of a tourist area cycle of evolution: Implications for management of resources. Canadian Geographer, 24(1), 5–12. Butler, R., & Hinch, T. (1996). Tourism and indigenous peoples. London: International Thomson Business Press. Farrell, B. H., & Twining-Ward, L. (2004). Reconceptualizing tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 31(2): 274–295. Harrison, D. (2008). Pro-poor tourism: A critique. Third World Quarterly, 29 (5), 851–868. Holling, C. S. (2001). Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems. Ecosystems, 4, 390–405. Holling, C. S. (2004). From complex regions to complex worlds. Ecology and Society, 9(1),11. Retrieved 1 October 2016 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art11. Iorio, M., & Wall, G. (2012). Behind the masks: Tourism and community in Sardinia. Tourism Management, 33(6), 1440–1449. Lew, A. A., Pin, T. N., Ni, C.-C., & Wu, T.-C. (2016). Community sustainability and resilience: Similarities, differences and indicators. Tourism Geographies, 18(1),18–27. Rossi, P. H., Lipsey, M. W., & Freeman, H. E. (2003). Evaluation: A systematic approach. London: Sage Publications. Singh, T. V. (2012). Does tourism reduce poverty. In T. V. Singh (Ed.), Critical debates in tourism (pp. 123–150). Bristol: Channel View Publications. Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) (2014) Applying resilience thinking: Seven principles for building resilience in social-ecological systems. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Tao, T., & Wall, G. (2009a). Tourism as a sustainable livelihood strategy. Tourism Management, 30(1), 90–98. Tao, T., & Wall, G. (2009b) A livelihood approach to sustainability. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 14(2), 137–152. Telfer, D. J., & Sharpley, R. (2002). The evolution of tourism and development theory. In R. Sharpley & D. J. Telfer (Eds.), Tourism and development: Concepts and issues (pp. 35–78). Clevedon: Channel View Press. Thomas, W. H. (2011). The basics of project evaluation and lessons learned. New York: Productivity Press. Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R. and Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 9(2), 5. Retrieved 1 October 2016 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5. Wall, G., & Mathieson, A. (2006). Tourism: Change, impacts and opportunities. Harlow: Pearson. Wang, C. S. (Ed.) (2001). Biography of Alisan Township. Chiayi: Alisan Township Office.

242  Tsung-Chiung (Emily) Wu and Geoffrey Wall Wholey, J. S., Hatry, H. P., & Newcomer, K. E. (2010). Handbook of practical program evaluation. New York: Wiley. Winter, R. (1989). Learning from experience: Principles and practice in action-research. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press. World Commission on Environment and Economy (WCED) (1987). Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zuber-Skerritt, O. (1996). New directions in action research. London: Falmer Press.

14 Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience in the world heritage city of Kandy, Sri Lanka Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy

Introduction Following ongoing debates about resilience thinking, this chapter engages with  the concept of slow change – in this case, social-economic resilience – in relation to Kandy (see Lew 2014; Gaston 2010). In this chapter, Becken’s (2013) resilience assessment framework is used to assess poverty alleviation and community development in the world heritage city of Kandy. Kandy is situated in the mountainous region of central Sri Lanka surrounded by tea plantations and enjoys a benign, temperate climate. In evaluating Kandy, it is important to note from the outset that in Sri Lanka, like so many developing countries in the South Asia region, income distribution and poverty reduction remains an entrenched and largely unresolved problem. Like the rest of the country, this remains the case for Kandy. Accordingly, this chapter is conceived in direct response to the issue of addressing enduring poverty in a host community that is very reliant on cultural tourism. This is where our chapter engages with the overarching themes of this book. In our chapter, we investigate the role that cultural heritage tourism plays in enabling community resilience via cultural tourism activities in host communities in Kandy. Drawing heavily on examples and attitudes gathered during recent field-based research, we argue that it is only through collaborative initiatives and partnerships between government and industry organizations with host communities that long-term cultural tourism policies can be developed to facilitate equitable social outcomes. Outcomes, we contend, are only feasibly realized through slow change interactions of social and ecological factors in Kandy. Consequently, this chapter provides some, but by no means all, suggestions on how to realize sustainable heritage tourism in Kandy consistent with resilience principles following a quarter of a century of Civil War. Our central argument is that for Sri Lanka, the best model for tourism resilience is one that is built through four integrated approaches. These are: social capital, socially inclusive governance models, economic development as well as embracing principles of environmental sustainability. The ways that these four

244  Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy

Figure 14.1  Kandy, world heritage city and premier Sri Lankan cultural heritage tourism attraction Source: Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy.

factors interact underpins resilience in Sri Lankan communities that are reliant on high levels of tourism visitation. We also contend that the recent (post-Civil War) experience in the historic world heritage listed city of Kandy, the most popular visitor destination in Sri Lanka, is an exemplar of how resilience can be achieved within host communities.

Sri Lankan tourism industry Modern tourism to Sri Lanka effectively commenced in 1962 when the country embraced the idea of promoting itself as an international travel destination.1 That year, the Ceylonese government introduced a tourism development initiative that focused on five key areas of the country. Four of these were beach resorts and the promotional focus emphasized rich natural values and picturesque coastal beauty. These four were Galle, Colombo, Hikkaduwa, and Bentota. The fifth site, Kandy, an ancient city situated in the highlands of central Sri Lanka is noted for its cultural heritage and rich history as well as royal, spiritual, and religious significance (Guruge 2009). Kandy is also significant for its British colonial history and also its connections to the national myth and legend of Sri Lankan identity and culture. Five years later in 1967, the first ten-year master plan for a national tourism strategy commenced its implementation and continued until 1976. During this period, Sri Lanka experienced a major boom in tourist arrivals from approximately 20,000 visitors in the mid-1960s to 118,000 at the conclusion of the first tourism strategy in the mid-1970s (Sri Lanka Tourism Development

Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience   245 Authority 2015). This was driven by an attractive mix of heritage destinations such as Kandy and scenic beach locales, affordability, and a high-quality product in close proximity to major European, particularly British, tourism markets. In 1977 the Sri Lankan government further liberalized parts of the national economy. This loosening of governmental controls in turn stimulated direct foreign investment and in the process attracted much needed support from the World Tourism Organization (WTO). On the back of this stimulus, Sri Lanka entered another expansionary phase of its tourism boom and rapid growth of the hotel industry was geared towards servicing increased tourist arrivals with an interest in beach holidays and increasingly for some a cultural experience in Kandy (Guruge 2009). As outlined earlier, Kandy is significant as a world heritage city best known for its outstanding universal value as a place of religious devotion. Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1989, it is renowned for its cultural heritage and as a holy city of religion. Also known as the city of Senkadagalapura, Kandy was the ‘last capital of the Sinhala kings whose patronage enabled the Dinahala culture to flourish for more than 2,500 years until the occupation of Sri Lanka by the British in 1815’ (UNESCO). Historical Kandy was a noble city hosting a number of royal dynasties over the centuries. It represents a touchstone of Asian civilization, particularly in terms of its Buddhist and Hindu sites of devotion. While the world heritage significance of Kandy is a source of national civic pride, the city is also regarded in a national context as Sri Lanka’s city of culture (Kolkata occupies a similar place in Indian society) as well as a major tourist attraction, because the ambience of this religious royal city is typified by aesthetically pleasing vernacular Sri Lankan architecture, overlaid with nineteenth-century British colonial buildings. This contextual narrative emphasizing the emergence of the modern Sri Lankan tourism industry (and more specifically Kandy) also needs to be understood in the broader political context of recent history. In 1980, after almost a decade of simmering tensions, ethnic conflict between the Tamil community and the Sri Lankan government – largely dominated by Sinhalese politicians – occurred. This led to the outbreak of the Sri Lankan Civil War that took place between 1982 until the eventual ceasefire in 2009. The Civil War effectively ended the tourism boom discussed above and in the process curtailed tourist arrivals to negligible levels. The economic collateral of this was that many tourism ventures failed as the events of the Civil War overwhelmed policies designed to develop Sri Lankan tourism and the industry was left decimated as the conflict overwhelmed the country’s people. In the Tamil-dominated northern and eastern regions of the country, tourism ceased entirely due to the region being a war zone. During the era of the Civil War (it is worth emphasizing that it did not affect the entire country – most of the conflict was concentrated on the Jaffna Peninsula and the Northern Province), the Sri Lanka government continued to develop tourism policies in southern resorts. In 1992 the Sri Lankan government introduced the second ten-year master plan funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) initiative in conjunction with technical assistance from the WTO (renamed UNWTO in 2005).

246  Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy Between 1992 and 2001, 3412 hotel rooms were established. Allied with this development of high-end tourism was the introduction of training programmes for the hospitality and tourism industry (including industrial and language proficiency to cater for a global visitor market) (Guruge 2009). During this period tourism development extended into rural areas such as Ginthota near Galle. A feature of this phase of development was the increased participation of women in the tourism industry and emphasis on greater gender diversity in the tourist industry workforce. In 2005, a new legislative framework was enacted with the introduction of the Number 38 Tourism Act 2005. A key policy feature of this legislation was that it enabled direct and public investment in tourism development. This Act effectively served to restructure the administrative apparatus of Sri Lanka tourism and led to the establishment of the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority, Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau, Tourism Convention Bureau, and the Sri Lanka Hotel Institute of Management with direct supervision by the Minister of Tourism. The early years of the twenty-first century brought new legislation designed to facilitate tourism development in anticipation of the eventual end of the Civil War. Attention turned towards the best way to facilitate community engaged, long-term sustainable frameworks through tourism development. No longer were projects

Kandy

0

Figure 14.2  Country map of Sri Lanka Source: Authors

5

10

20km

N

Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience   247 such as foreign owned and managed major hotel chains regarded as central to viable long-term tourist offerings as they often led to a repatriation of profits abroad. This was particularly the case for Kandy where there has been longstanding tension between tourism and those who emphasize the history, heritage, cultural identity, and community resilience of the world heritage city.

Unravelling resilience A focus on resilience, including understandings of community and tourism, has become a key analytical tool for development studies over the last four decades (Martin 2012). This has led to new ways of considering the role, effect, and the relative merits of tourism. Many researchers have conceptualized the term resilience (Brand & Jax 2007). Lew, Ng, Ni and Wu (2016) in their analysis of the tourism and resilience literature, map the various ways that resilience relates to other concepts: ‘Instead, it is common to hold that resilience and sustainability are essentially the same’ while for others ‘resilience is a key indicator of sustainability … or that sustainability is the broad social goal and resilience is how it can be implemented’. For example, Walker, Gunderson, Kinzig, Folke, Carpenter and Schultz (2006, p.16) argue ‘resilience is the ability of a system to absorb changes while still being able to function’. Similarly, Chenoweth and Stehlik (2001) note that it is the capacity for regeneration from predicaments in ways that make effective use of resources. In this context, the effective meaning of the term resilience is the capacity of a community to cope. In this respect, resilience refers to the capacity of recovery, to sustain oneself from uncertainties and disturbances. The use of the term ‘sustain oneself’ in a touristic sense is the systemic way that a community can return productively after a crisis. These crises or environmental shocks may be classified as internal or external risks. Internal change occurs within the institution and has an impact on routine activities. External change occurs when macro-level factors such as political, economic, socio-cultural, religious, and technical factors make an impact. Likewise, Lew (2014, pp. 17–18) suggests that based on the speed of change, variables can be divided as being ‘fast change factors’ or ‘slow change factors’. To date, much emphasis has been upon fast change factors and their impact on tourism within the tourism literature rather than slow change factors (Cochrane 2010). Furthermore, considerable focus has also been placed on the importance of resilience systems in tourism (Lew 2014).

Tourism resilience In more recent times, research on tourism resilience has emphasized the impact of meteorological conditions on the tourism sector (Becken 2013; Espiner, & Becken 2014; Strickland-Munro, Allison, & Moore 2010). Further, in the context of Sri Lanka, resilience in tourism has been theoretically discussed by Powell and colleagues (Powell, Cuschnir, & Peiris 2009). However, their research focused on factors for resilience but did not extend to developing a tourism resilience model. Cochrane (2010) for example, proposed a model of tourism resilience through a

248  Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy discussion of experiences gained during the recovery from the devastating effects of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Espiner and Becken (2014) also recommend a systemic approach to understanding resilience and the global tourism industry. For Espiner, this system is composed of a networked series of linkages between human actors in the broader society. Further, recent tourism literature has revealed that in using the complex adaptive theory, most tourism scholars have emphasized resilience from ecological perspectives. Becken (2013) concentrates upon developing a resilience assessment model to social-ecological adversity throughout the application of the ‘the complex adoptive theory’ that simplifies ways of measuring resilience. This model is developed through the application of adaptive complex theory of capacity building for resilience comprising three different integrated aspects: resistance, precariousness, and latitude. For Becken (2013), the term latitude was described as being concerned with human actions (with a particular emphasis on innovation, capacity, and networking). Further, precariousness and resistance have been associated with fast changes factors (predominantly environmental changes factors). In this model emphasis is placed mainly upon socio-ecological changes within tourism operations. In Becken’s view, the social-ecological system is one that extensively engages different social systems as they are determined by the wider ecosystem. This model illustrates the importance of subsystems and the need for them to recover from vulnerable effects and in time return to their core functions. Importantly, resilience planning comprises three key aspects: engineering resilience, ecological resilience, and adaptive resilience. Engineering resilience was first applied in the physical sciences (Martin 2012). It concentrates upon implementation of technical aspects of disaster management and recovery planning (Lew 2014). A feature of ecological resilience is the capacity to absorb effects before damage occurs and also its capacity to reach a ‘new equilibrium or shift to new layout’ (Lew 2014, p.15). Further, most social-ecological resilience approaches aim to resolve disturbances and uncertainty without changing basic configurations. For tourism researchers, focus has tended to concentrate on the adaptive resilience models that conceptually originate from complex adaptive theory (Martin 2012; Becken 2013). A feature of a resilience system approach and its associated sub-system is the capacity to adapt to environmental changes at tourism destinations (Becken 2013). Overall, the effectiveness of the adaptive capacity approach is affected by human social structures and the ecological system. Adaptive capacity can assist in reducing the vulnerability of tourist destinations (Daskon & Binns 2010). Human behavioural and ecological processes are also linked. In this approach, resilience can be interpreted through four combined elements: resistance, recovery, reorientation, and renewal (Martin 2012). Figure 14.3 depicts how these different factors that are associated with resilience approaches interact. Indicators in Table 14.1 illustrate the measurement tools of the combined elements. For example, capacity for resistance can be evaluated by the strength of reaction and the speed of the reaction process.

Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience   249 Table 14.1  Combined elements of resilience Combined elements

Meaning

Indicators

Resistance

Endeavor to prevent something by action

• Strength of reaction • Speed of reaction process

Recovery

Come back to original configuration

• Speed of recovery process • Scale of recovery proces • Strength of integrated approach to manage complications of recovery process

Reorientation

Changing the direction in response to uncertainities

• Capacity of reorientation in response to shock • Effectiveness of orientation in response to shock

Renewal

Action of extending growth • Ability of action towards path of tourism sectors development

Source: Authors

Research methodology In this study, a qualitative approach has been used. This approach works best for understanding social phenomena (Snape & Spencer 2003). The authors realize that the best way to gather industry, practitioner, and local community knowledge, as well as government perspectives was through interviews in Kandy. These were done to generate data in the absence of readily available fine-grained information on cultural heritage tourism in Kandy and its surrounding regions. This is consistent with other including Cochrane (2010), Martin (2012), Strickland-Munro et al. (2010), Becken (2013), and Espiner and Becken (2014) who have also used qualitative methodological approaches for data collection and analysis, particularly in order to gain stakeholder views. During the period July to October 2015, data was collected through fieldbased in-country interviews throughout Sri Lanka and primarily in Kandy. This approach enabled a discourse analysis approach to intereviewees. This meant that respondents were able to discuss their thoughts on the role of tourism in Kandy and also concerning long-term approaches for sustainability. Furthermore in-depth interviews also enabled more extended responses where interviewees discussed their experiences, attitudes, and understandings of cultural heritage tourism in Kandy and more broadly Sri Lankan government tourism strategies. The sample size of interviewees was n=26 and the format was that of semistructured interviews undertaken with key stakehoders. Additional secondary data was gathered from government policy documents. Field-based research revealed that the nature and the capacity of resilience in Sri Lanka is determined by four integrated dimensions. Figure 14.3 below illustrates the four dimensions as well as their indicators comprising economic strength, governance, social capital, and environmental robustness.

250  Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy •Improve partnership and

collaboration •Tourism policy and regulation • Participation management and administration

•Tourist product diversity •Tourism development

fund

•Tourism plans

Economic strength

Social capital

Governance model

Environmental robustness

•Training programme

and workshop for tourism people

•Traditional cultural practices– climate

changes

•Effective health services •Development of traffic

system

•Urban development plans

Figure 14.3  Integrated dimensions of resilience Source: Authors

Understanding tourism resilience in Sri Lanka In Sri Lanka, the tourism sector operates in an inherently complex and competitive environment, mostly underpinned by fragile political conditions that have stubbornly persisted. Following the conclusion of the Civil War in 2009, domestic and international investors became interested in the tourism sector. Incountry interviews with stakeholders confirm that nationally, the tourism sector is characterized by administrative malpractice, a lack of local business capacity, stakeholder fragmentation, an increasingly unpredictable climate, ineffective disaster management processes and many have little, or no, familiarity with sustainable tourism. An integrated systemic overlay is required to further understand and develop tourism resilience frameworks for managing exogenous effects. It is argued that when creating a system for tourism resilience or promoting the empowerment of existing systems, it is essential to recognize sources of vulnerability (Martin 2012; Becken 2013; Espiner & Becken 2014). In Kandy, these often relate to preservation of cultural heritage rather than challenges to the natural environment. Furthermore, ecological diversity and socio-cultural diversity in Kandy is characterized by both slow change factors as well as fast change factors. Using Becken’s tourism resilience model (2013), resilience is characterized by three factors: ‘resistance’, ‘precariousness’, and ‘latitude’. Additionally Powell et al. (2009, p. 636) assert that systematic governance, effective economic management and a healthy environment are integrated factors for resilience in tourism. Further, USAID (2006) proposes

Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience   251 that the following factors should be incorporated in the effective strengthening of the capacity of coastal community resilience underpinned by the collaboration of stakeholders in management and integrated institution functions.

Economic strength Economic strength is a key component for measuring and demonstrating resilience capacity. For Martin, economic strength can help looping back to a previously existing position following a negative effect on a community (Martin 2012). Kandy-based interviews with stakeholders recognized three factors for economic resilience that had tangible benefits for the host community. These were a diversity of tourism product offerings, a dedicated tourism development fund, and a local tourism plan emphasizing cultural heritage tourism that also engages with national tourism strategies. These factors combined lead to increased economic strength in the tourism industry and in turn, enabled the dispersal of material benefits to a greater range of people, and also providing required resources for the preservation of Kandyan cultural heritage. At the outset of promoting Sri Lanka as a global travel destination, Kandy was depicted in promotion campaigns as a cultural heritage destination with a vibrant street culture and an historic, religious, and British colonial era built environment situated in an attractive natural setting. Emphasis was placed on Sri Lankan authentic culture, norms, beliefs, values and the artefacts embodied by Kandyan culture. This led to a boom in product offerings that are vended mainly to tourists. Research with vendors in Kandy confirmed that a multiplicity of tourist experiences are constructed. For example cultural events (including Kandy Perehara, Christmas, and Vesak festivals) and sporting pursuits (particularly cricket, golf, and traditional sports) have expanded tourism offerings in the world heritage city. Other tourism researchers make similar observations including Jolliffe and Aslam (2009), Robinson and Jarvie (2008) who have observed that Kandy and its surrounding areas have deliberately expanded their offerings to ensure year-round market susainability as a response to seasonality effects. Funding for cultural heritage tourism and overall tourism policy development in Kandy comes from a number of sources. The Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority (SLTDA) has a Tourism Consolidated Fund that is administered by the government and obtained from a number of sources. These are the Tourism Development Levy (derived from a 1 per cent levy of total income revenue of registered tourism businesses), an embarkation levy comprising a levy of US$30 (as of 2016) on every outbound passenger from Sri Lanka both by air and sea (including Sri Lankan nationals), and also income from rental properties owned by the SLTDA. The Tourism Consolidated Fund is allocated to the following institutions on a pro rata basis. This is as follows: 70 per cent for the Sri Lanka Tourist Promotion Bureau (SLTPB); 14 per cent for the SLTDA; 4 per cent for the Sri Lanka Convention Bureau (SLCB); and 12 per cent for the Tourism and Hotel Management Institute (THMI) (Samaranayake 2012). In Sri Lanka, tourism was developed based on the nationally directed master plan for many decades. For

252  Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy example according to the first master plan (1967–1976) six tourist destinations were to have been the focus of tourism development. The second master plan (1992–2001) was implemented by the Sri Lankan government in collaboration with the United National Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). Here, the UNDP was the main funding agency and technical contributions were provided by the UNWTO (Guruge 2009). The SLTDA is currently in the implementation stage of a fiveyear tourism development strategy plan (MED 2011).

Environmental sustainability Swarbrooke (1999) argues that the environment is made up of five interconnected elements: the natural, built and farmed environments, natural resources and wildlife. Haulot (1985) has pointed out that tourism stakeholder activities are closely connected with the environment. Many respondents to this study commented that the robustness of Kandy is due in part to its effective health service as well as the development of traffic systems in local transport services and urban development plans. This core infrastructure assists in recovery from change without losing capacity. Importantly the urban development authority (UDA) has implemented its urban development plan with the collaboration of its technical organization the Project Approving Agency (PAA). The PAA comprises members from government agencies including the local municipal council, the environmental authority, and the urban development authority. Before executing any projects, projects should be investigated by the PAA meaning that an all of government approach enables an integrated development of infrastructure provision in Kandy.

Social capital Social capital still plays a vital role in sustainable heritage tourism. This is especially the case for training programmes for tourism stakeholders that examined the impact of climate change on traditional cultural practices as well as disaster recovery assistance. One recent challenge has been the negative effect climate change has had on tourism in Kandy. Generally temperatures in Kandy hover between 12 degrees Celsius in December and 27 degrees Celsius in June with an average annual rainfall between 1100 to 1400 millilitres (Samaranayake 2013, p. 424). Based on recent statistical information provided by the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority the major impact of climate change has been that seasonality has altered and weather patterns are now unpredictable (SLTDA 2015). Historically between July and August there has been very little rainfall (SLTDA 2015). However in 2014 during this period heavy rainfall occurred resulting in extensive damage (Sri Lanka Department of Meteorology 2015). In response to environmental disasters many national and international organizations have conducted workshops and seminars about community resilience and vulnerability. For example, the Department of Culture, Tourism, Trade and Commerce organized a two-day workshop for industry stakeholders in early 2015.

Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience   253

Governance Governance structures are central to increasing capacity for host community resilience. Governance often concerns management frameworks in the tourism industry and is one of the main determinants of resilience (Göymen 2000, p. 1037). For the purposes of this discussion we use Durán’s approach to governance where it is a process of managing tourist destinations through synergistic and coordinated efforts by government that occurs at different levels and different capacities of tourism stakeholders (Durán 2008, p. 10). Fieldwork interviews revealed that collaborative participation between the private and public sectors has a major effect on tourism development. One example of building resilience through partnerships (using Durán’s argument above) is the recent collaboration between Sri Lankan companies with Jet-win and Gibson (Chinese and Indian owned airlines). Many respondents also observed that the introduction of new tourism legislation in 2005 emphasized the importance of private and public participation. Based on the above analysis it is apparent that in regard to Kandy the four dimensions of resilience (social capital, governance, environment robustness and economic strength) need to be integrated in order to form an effective resilience system (see Figure 14.3). This model is consistent with Lew et al. and also Becken’s resilience measuring framework as it is able to absorb shocks and disturbances without altering the system’s structure and its ultimate failure (Lew et al. 2016; Becken 2013).

Tourism livelihoods and poverty As other chapters in this book confirm, during the past quarter of a century emphasis has been placed on the integration of tourism and sustainable livelihoods in regard to developing countries. Measuring and promoting sustainable livelihoods is a way of critical thinking that aims to develop living standards for people with the satisfaction of their basic needs. Sustainable livelihood is a core concept of rural and regional development and is seen as a vehicle for poverty alleviation in developing regions (Mbaiwa 2011, p.1053). Chambers and Conway (1992) observe that: ‘[a] livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural base’. By definition, and in order to be effective, sustainable livelihoods programmes should be people oriented and community focused. Tao and Wall (2009) suggest that there are five types of sustainable livelihood capital comprising: human, natural, financial, social and physical. The also argue that they are interrelated and that all five are required to enable a sustainable living standards. Stakeholders in Kandy stressed that tourism in the world heritage city is the main driver of human development and economic growth. Tourism is also a driver of direct and indirect employment. One respondent commented that ‘tourism definitely

254  Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy creates market opportunities for our heritage product[s]’. However in making this observation they also observed that money earned from Kandyan heritage tourism products did not necessarily provide a livelihood. Instead tourism is regarded as one driver of baseline living standards that only partly resolves poverty alleviation. This is because the tourism revenues from international visitors, while important, only achieve so much baseline change for host communities as they often (due to entrenched caste and class structures) are not distributed in ways that enable poverty alleviation. In fact, the interviewee continues to suggest that this situation ‘is the main reason that our next generation will gradually leave the heritage industry and search for other work’. The challenge of realizing baseline change and resilience mechanisms at a local level is an ongoing one throughout the developing world. As Cheer has previously outlined when writing about outer island tourism in the Pacific and Millennium Development Goals – many of which correlate directly with resilience thinking – sustainable tourism and positive outcomes for island nations are not a given (Cheer 2012, p.24) In Kandy livelihood development is intimately associated with customs, established traditions, and festivals. All these events emphasize tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Daskon et al., confirm that in general, an emphasis on skills and customs are closely linked with sustainable livelihoods of the host community (Daskon & Binns 2009, p. 504). Moreover, host communities tend to be intimately involved with their traditional life and customary practices and often place a strong emphasis on the role and importance of family. In Sri Lanka, family work (for the most part comprising cultural heritage industry related activity) is assigned on the basis of social class. In recent decades younger generations have tended to ignore heavily regimented social classifications. This means that today approximately 20 per cent of Kandyan residents are involved in traditional cultural heritage industry pastimes. These include tea culture, batik printmaking, mask making, Kandyan dance, and other cultural practices (see Figure 14.4 for an indicative example of Kandyan cultural practice). Almost all interview respondents emphasized two key issues. First, tourism in Sri Lanka is considered as a crucial vehicle to revitalize economic activity, promote community harmony, and reinvigorate cultural identity following decades of continuous conflict. A senior Sri Lankan politician confirmed the economic imperatives observing that ‘tourism is essential for Sri Lankan economic development’. Second by generating income and employment, the cultural heritage tourism sector contributes to the reduction of the poverty in surrounding rural, as well as in urban, areas of Kandy. Extensive stakeholder interviews unambiguously support the contention that tourism contributes to poverty reduction although many make this observation with some reservations as they have concerns about the impact of tourism on traditional life and cultural heritage. Tourism development is linked to other sectors of the regional economy. These auxiliary services are provided because of the prominent role that tourism plays in the Kandyan economy. These services include medical facilities, educational institutions, legal and financial sector services (including domestic and international banks), transport, and shipping facilities. This infrastructure

Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience   255

Figure 14.4  Kandyan fire dancers Source: Sivesan Sivandandamoorthy.

underpins tourism development that has in turn led to local investment in Kandy all of which contributes to further enhancing livelihoods at grass roots levels. An official involved with the Department of Culture, Tourism, Trade and Commerce commented that the department is ‘strongly involved in offering basic amenities (sanitation, water supply, electricity, road development) in all tourist destinations and public places’ and further pointed out that the department ‘provides skill development training to tourist guides’ in host communities. This clearly confirms the government’s interest in tourism as well as in host community development as mutually beneficial policy objectives. In Kandy, tourism and the heritage industry provide empowerment opportunities for women. This is because in the heritage industry and its tourism related service organizations over 60 per cent of employees are women. So in this instance tourism can increase the earning capacity (and in turn financial autonomy) of women, which is turn contributes to poverty alleviation. According to the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES), in Kandy, in 2002 a quarter of the community lived below the poverty line (that is those whose real per capita consumption expenditure is under Rs.3624 per month). In succeeding years, poverty continuously declined, and reached 6.2 per cent in 2012/2013 (Department of Census and Statistics 2013 p. 5). By way of comparison in 1991 the unemployment rate was 31.5 per cent

256  Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy whereas in 2013 the rate of unemployment decreased to 4.7 per cent (Department of Census and Statistics 2013). These statistics confirm what Jepson has previously argued that as a ‘property of sustainable systems, resilience is an important community development concept’ (Jepson 2016). The strength of Jepson’s assertion, and indeed this book, is that it is obvious that resilient communities are desirable. We contend that this is the case for Kandy as it is for many places. However, as Jepson also infers, the more difficult task of measuring resilience and identifying credible resilience proxies as well as measuring the impacts of tourism is a far greater challenge. Jepson’s resilience measures would include greater empowerment and participation of women in the industry, increased material livelihoods, and quality of life measures for Kandy.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the ways in which cultural tourism, heritage, history, and resilience thinking interact in Kandy. The experience of Kandy provides an invaluable insight into effective ways of developing ethical economic strategies and public policy in accordance with resilience thinking discussed throughout this volume. In turn this analytical study of Kandy contributes to a broader understanding of resilience thinking, as well as the application of resilience concepts. This is particularly the case in the South Asia region. Understandably resilience is a broad and malleable concept. However its application to Kandy was relatively restricted due to a number of issues. Primarily this is due to the poor understanding and application of resilience thinking at a community level. For Kandy Becken’s argument provides a framework for understanding risk and vulnerability and in doing so provides an invaluable conceptual tool for development tourism governance and resilience. We have used Becken, Lew et al., Jepson, Durán, Martin, and Espiner’s arguments to offer an integrated resilience model for Kandy (Becken 2013; Lew et al. 2016; Martin 2012; Espiner, & Becken 2014). More practical obstacles that emerged from this analysis are ongoing issues including a rigid regulatory regime, a labour force that still has a large proportion of people who are under-skilled. In order to identify and overcome these sorts of critical situations in Kandy, we have suggested the adaptation and implementation of an integrated resilience model. This is because its four pillars of environmental sustainability, social capital, governance, and economic strength are central to a sustainable host community in the long run. The benefits of this model are best realized in a practical way, such as cultural renewal, stakeholder empowered economic development, improving the rights and economic wellbeing of women, and monitoring climate impact. All of this occurs during the regeneration phase of the resilience process (Becken 2013, p. 510). Moreover it is only through adopting a resilience framework, as well as resilience measures for benchmarking change, that the three baseline outcomes outlined by Lew et al. of system survivability, security and wellbeing and sense of place and belonging can occur (Lew et al. 2016). For Kandy risk factors according to resilience thinking include climate change, a lack of local business capital, environmental diversity, and ineffective disaster

Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience   257 management associated with tourism development have been identified. All these will, or have had, a negative effect on Kandyan tourism and in turn community resilience. The viewpoints of stakeholders along with the secondary and grey literature confirmed that resilience thinking is a useful conceptual framework for conceptualizing the impacts of tourism on key heritage sites. Recent literature in the field discussed throughout this chapter has also revealed that resilience thinking also lends itself to more innovative approaches for framing community response to structural changes. Finally in the second decade of the twenty-first century the tourism industry in Sri Lanka continues to boom with government and private sector organizations committing to further enhance the situation. This is particularly the case for highprofile destinations such as Kandy. Moreover awareness about resilience thinking needs to be improved throughout the community and particularly amongst key decision-making groups. More precisely, if resilience is not a baseline component of cultural, economic, government, and community thinking, then long-run strengthening of resilience capacity for the Kandyan, indeed Sri Lankan, and cultural heritage tourism sector is not achievable.

Note 1 Although travellers, including Robert Knox of the British East India Company, for the

most part following trade routes of the British Empire, ventured to Ceylon during the British colonial era.

References Becken, S. (2013). Developing a framework for assessing resilience of tourism subsystems to climatic factors. Annals of Tourism Research, 43, 506–528. Brand, F. S., & Jax, K. 2007. Focusing the meaning(s) of resilience: Resilience as a descriptive concept and a boundary object. Ecology and Society, 12(1), 23 (online). Retrieved 7 January 2016 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art23/main. html. Chambers, R., & Conway, G. (1992). Sustainable rural livelihoods: Practical concepts for the 21st century. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Cheer, J. M. (2012). Outer island tourism in the South Pacific and the millennium development goals: Understanding tourism’s impacts. In K. Bricker, R. Black & S. Cotterell (Eds.), Sustainable tourism and the millennium development goals: Effecting positive change (pp. 23–36). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett. Chenoweth, L., & Stehlik, D. (2001). Building resilient communities: Social work practice and rural Queensland. Australian Social Work, 54(2), 47–54. Cochrane, J. (2010). The sphere of tourism resilience. Tourism Recreation Research, 35(2), 173–185. Daskon, C., & Binns, T. (2010). Culture, tradition and sustainable rural livelihoods: Exploring the culture–development interface in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Community Development Journal, 45(4), 494–517. Department of Census and Statistics. (2013). Census of Population and Housing 2012. Colombo: Department of Census and Statistics.

258  Keir Reeves and Sivesan Sivanandamoorthy Durán, C. (2008). Governance for tourism sectors and its measurement. Madrid: UNWTO. Espiner, S., & Becken, S. (2014). Tourist towns on the edge: Conceptualising vulnerability and resilience in a protected area tourism system. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 22(4), 646–665. Gaston, K. J. (2010). Urban ecology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Göymen, K. (2000). Tourism and governance in Turkey. Annals of Tourism Research, 27(4), 1025–1048. Guruge, G. K. (2009). Impact of international tourism on peripheral regions the case of Sri Lanka. Colombo: University of Kelaniya. Haulot, A. (1985). The environment and the social value of tourism. International Journal of Environmental Studies, 25(4), 219–223. Jepson, E. (2016). A new metric for community resilience. Planetizen (January 20). Jolliffe, L., & Aslam, M. S. (2009). Tea heritage tourism: evidence from Sri Lanka. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 4(4), 331–344. Lew, A. A. (2014). Scale, change and resilience in community tourism planning. Tourism Geographies, 16(1), 14–22. Lew, A. A., Ng., P. T., Ni, C.-C., & Wu, T.-C. (2016). Community sustainability and resilience: Similarities, differences and indicators. Tourism Geographies, 18(1), 18– 27. Martin, R. (2012). Regional economic resilience, hysteresis and recessionary shocks. Journal of Economic Geography, 12, 1–32. Mbaiwa, J. E. (2011). Changes on traditional livelihood activities and lifestyles caused by tourism development in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Tourism Management, 32(5), 1050–1060. Ministry of Economic Development (MED). (2011). Tourism Development Strategy 2011–2016. Colombo: Ministry of Economic Development. Powell, R. B., Cuschnir, A., & Peiris, P. (2009). Overcoming governance and institutional barriers to integrated coastal zone, marine protected area, and tourism management in Sri Lanka. Coastal Management, 37(6), 633–655. Robinson, L., & Jarvie, J. K. (2008). Post-disaster community tourism recovery: the tsunami and Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka. Disasters, 32(4), 631–645. Samaranayake, H. M. S. (2012). Lifetime in tourism. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Bookshop. Samaranayake, H., Lantra, N., & Jayawardena, C. (2013). Forty six years of organised tourism in Sri Lanka (1966–2012). Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, 5(5), 423–441. Sri Lanka Department of Meteorology. (2015). Weather forecasts. Retrieved 14 November 2015 from www.meteo.gov.lk. Snape, D., & Spencer, L. (2003). The foundations of qualitative. In J. Chie and, & J. Lewis. (Ed.), Qualitative research perspective (pp. 1–10). London: Sage. Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. (SLTDA). (2015). Annual Statistical Report-2014. Retrieved 8 December 2016 from www.sltda.lk/sites/default/files/ Annual_Statistical_Report-2014.pdf. Strickland-Munro, J. K., Allison, H. E., & Moore, S. A. (2010). Using resilience concepts to investigate the impacts of protected area tourism on communities. Annals of Tourism Research, 37(2), 499–519. Swarbrooke, J. (1999). Sustainable tourism management. Oxford: CABI. Tao, T. C., & Wall, G. (2009). Tourism as a sustainable livelihood strategy. Tourism Management, 30(1), 90–98.

Tourism, history, identity, and community resilience   259 USAID. (2006) Coastal community resilience. International Journal of Consumer Studies (pp. 1–41). Thailand: The United States Agency for International Development. Walker, B., Gunderson, L., Kinzig, A., Folke, C., Carpenter, S., & Schultz, L. (2006). A handful of heuristics and some propositions for understanding resilience in socialecological systems. Ecology and Society, 11(1), 45–52.

15 Backpacker tourism in Fiji as a sustainability intervention Will they sink or swim? Supattra Sroypetch and Rod Caldicott

Introduction Tourism is often considered an economic development strategy for destinations and the wider communities. Locally, tourism has high potential to generate positive economic prospects to host communities through the provision of jobs, income, and tax revenue; these help to improve living standards for local people (Andereck, Valentine, Knopf, & Vogt, 2005; Brida, Osti, & Faccioli, 2011). However, tourism as an economic driving force can seriously impact ecosystem structures and processes and degrade natural resources. Tourists and hosts as custodians are part of an interactive biosphere. How these interacting social-ecological systems are managed in the wake of disruption from tourism is a contemporary and significant challenge for communities. Those not yet applying resilience thinking within their tourism policy arrangements are teetering on a precipice. The interplay among different tourism stakeholders influence destination policy settings (Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004; McMinn, 1998). Planning and policy processes are complex but can be explained in the context of adaptive social-ecological systems. Positive impacts more likely result where strong proactive interactions exist between ecosystems and society (Gunderson & Holling, 2001). Negative impacts are likely when the significance of the interplay is not well understood and society and ecosystems operate independent and not least, in opposition to each other (Gossling, 2003). Commonly, tourism impact studies are based on mono-dimension (social or environmental or economic) questions of how host residents perceive the impacts of tourism on their destinations or communities. The views of tourists regarding tourism impacts are largely overlooked. The contribution of this chapter is that it steps outside of that mono-view stereotype in two ways. First, it sets the impacts of backpacker tourism within the local communities as perceived by both hosts (Fijian) and guests (international backpackers). Second, it focuses these perceptions against the three dimensions of economic, socio-cultural, and environmental impacts (Wall & Mathieson, 2006). In responding to the impacts of backpacker tourism, further actions based around the principles of resilience thinking are proposed for the Fijian communities explicitly and for communities of other less developed countries (LDCs) more implicitly.

Backpacker tourism in Fiji  261 Backpacker tourism generally refers to budget-minded international travellers (mostly aged 18–35 years) who commonly travel with a backpack to multiple destinations, have more flexible itineraries, and take trips of longer duration than conventional tourists. Additionally, they have a preference for using budget accommodation and public transport (Loker-Murphy & Pearce, 1995; Sørensen, 2003). Backpackers receive mixed receptions from various national governments. Some LDCs perceive backpackers as contributing less to gross domestic product (GDP) when compared to conventional and upmarket international tourists (Erawan, 1994; Nuryanti, 2005). On the contrary, Hampton (2010), claims backpacker tourism contributes more to GDP than conventional tourism, particularly at the local level. Hampton attributes the gains to lower economic leakages, higher spending in remote regions, and greater local participation in tourism related enterprises requiring lower capital investments. The national government of Fiji is desirous of backpacker tourism believing backpackers have a stronger aspiration to learn about Fijian culture and are more content with basic facilities than mass conventional tourists: They [backpackers] are the ones in departure lounges without a cheesy lei [a garland of flowers] around their neck, they are not sipping artificial fruit juices and their travel stories are very different to the ones who simply visited an island resort. These travellers are the ones leaving with a real understanding of the Fijian culture. (Bushell & Anderson, 2010, p. 201) Fiji is a popular South Pacific tourist mecca. Its appeal to international travellers lies in the tropical climate, natural setting and indigenous cultures. Tourism is Fiji’s largest industry accounting for 37 per cent GDP in 2014 contributing FJ$2,894.2 million (US$1,366 million) (World Travel & Tourism Council, 2015). Backpackers account for 30 per cent of visitor arrivals to Fiji (Turagaiviu, 2012). Fiji struggles with the inherent effects of conventional tourism through economic leakage, social disharmony, and environmental degradation (PATA: Fiji Taskforce, 2001). The Fiji government, in 1992, adopted a National Environment Strategy to mitigate tourism impacts by supporting development of sustainable product adopting principles of ecotourism (Gibson, 2015; Harrison, 1998). However, a severe disruption in tourism receipts occurred post successive coups of 1987, 2000, and 2006. In response the government instigated a further tourism recovery programme in the form of ‘Brand Fiji’. The resultant 2007–2016 Fiji Tourism Development Plan, heralded backpacker tourism as a mechanism of resilience against the political shock waves and shortcomings of conventional tourism (Department of Tourism, 2007). The intention of the government’s ‘backpacker’ intervention, particularly for development on remote islands such as the Yasawa Group, was to enhance community resilience through external economic inputs. Backpacker tourism became the key economic prospect amongst indigenous islanders (Scheyvens & Russell, 2012). The intervention did generate increased visitor arrivals and a short-

262  Supattra Sroypetch and Rod Caldicott term spike in new backpacker infrastructure on the Yasawa Islands. However, unintended consequences of social-ecological decay are conversely undermining the national intent of enhanced community resilience. The next section examines the host and tourist perceptions towards the slow change that is threatening the social-ecological equilibrium on the Yasawa Islands.

The case study: Nacula communities of the Yasawa group of islands, Fiji The Yasawas is a group of islands lying to the northwest of Viti Levu, the largest island of Fiji (see Figure 15.1). Comprising of five divisions the group includes the islands of Yasawa, Nacula, Naviti, Waya, and Viwa (see Figure 15.2) hosting an estimated population of 5,465 (Kerstetter & Bricker, 2009) across a land area of approximately 135 square kilometres. The Yasawas have a reputation for abundant sunshine, turquoise lagoons, sandy beaches, remarkable reefs, and friendly locals making the islands a key destination for backpackers visiting Fiji (Ministry of Tourism and Environment, 2007). However, economic hardship on the islands is exacerbated through their vulnerability to natural disasters (cyclones) which disrupt the tourist flows. Backpackers to the Yasawas are characterised as young and Caucasian, originating from the United Kingdom (42 per cent), Mainland

Vanua Levu Yasawa Islands

Viti Levu

Suva

© d-maps.com

N

100 km 60 mi

Figure 15.1  Map of Fiji Source: Sroypetch, 2015

Backpacker tourism in Fiji  263

Yasawa Nacula

Viwa

N Naviti

Waya

0

10

20km

Figure 15.2  Map of the Yasawa group of islands, Fiji Source: Sroypetch, 2015

Europe (37 per cent), North America (11 per cent), Australia and New Zealand (5 per cent), and Asia (4.5 per cent), amongst others (Sroypetch, 2015). The island of Nacula hosts the majority of tourism activity of the Yasawa Group. Nacula has six villages and approximately 1,164 resident islanders (District Office Lautoka/Yasawa, 2011). Tourist infrastructure is basic. Most backpacker resorts in the study area are locally owned, small-scale (less than 25 rooms) and provide ‘all-meals inclusive’ accommodation packages. Supplementary activities include diving, snorkelling, fishing, trekking, caving, and local village visits. Development of backpacker tourism has generated solid economic benefit to islanders over the past two decades (Kerstetter & Bricker, 2009). The islanders appreciate these benefits. However, they face challenges of social-ecological change within a planning and policy environment without adequate long-term vision at neither local or national levels.

Research methodology Through a critical review of a trilogy of sustainability indicators (economic, socio-cultural, and environmental) regarding development of backpacker tourism, this chapter draws on data collected through surveys and interviews conducted on Nacula during 2011. From a suite of host and guest stakeholders, the study exposed a mix of perceptions about backpacker tourism impacts to the islands and their communities. Perception impacts were assessed against 38 impact attributes from selected works of Ap and Crompton (1998), Hampton (1998), Scheyvens (2002), and Speed (2008). Five-point Likert scales (from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’) were applied to assess both positive and negative perceptions

264  Supattra Sroypetch and Rod Caldicott of tourism impacts. A total of 206 useable questionnaires were collected from different host groups (indigenous residents, tourism industry employees, tourism business owners, governmental officials, and destination policymakers) and from 390 visiting international backpackers. Post survey, respondents were invited to undertake an audio-recorded interview providing opportunity for deeper fact finding. This approach allowed the interview path to be generally informed by the survey findings. Interviews were conducted with 71 hosts and 30 backpackers. Recordings were not transcribed verbatim, rather through successive listening and without any materially new insights. Key quotes were extracted in support of themes derived from the quantitative data. Using pseudonyms to protect respondent identities, the findings are presented in the next section.

The impacts of backpacker tourism development for the Nacula communities Economic impacts A large percentage of Fijian households have incomes clustered around the poverty line. The Western Division including the Yasawa Islands ranks second poorest in Fiji (ADB, 2012). The economy is largely monetised. Cash income is therefore essential to meet basic needs, even for rural households (ADB, 2012). Owing to their remoteness, Yasawa islanders were already facing economic hardship before the tourism trade began in the area. Subsequently, their economic prosperity has changed positively through tourism: In the past, women had to collect sea-shells, land crabs, and make dried-fish to sell in the mainland and buying sugar and flour to bring back home which took up to 5–6 hours by boat from the Yasawas. But when tourism comes to our place, we are now earning money from tourism through selling our handicrafts and agricultural products to the tourists and the resorts. (Tony, resident, aged 55) With regards to poverty among locals, the national government’s promotion of backpacker tourism as an economic strategy appears merited (Eccles & Costa, 1996; Harrison, 2008). Backpacker tourism, targeting youth markets through budget products, provides opportunities for islanders to engage with the industry and experience better standards of living. Islanders work in the resorts and also supply them with limited agriculture, seafood, and souvenirs. They also receive revenue receipts from leasing land to resort owners as well as from tourists donating at schools and churches (Sroypetch, 2015). Isoa (destination policymaker, aged 62) describes how tourism is changing the lives of locals: The Yasawas’ people who are not employed at the backpacker resorts earn income less than $FJ 1,000 [equal to US$ 487] per person annually. The main source of our income used to be the coconut but now the coconut is not good

Backpacker tourism in Fiji  265 in quality due to too many cyclones and soil erosion. The backbone of our economy today is tourism. A governmental official also added: The Yasawa islands are isolated, so the locals truly face difficulties in terms of finding jobs. But since tourism started here, the locals’ lives have changed a lot. Many of them have got a job especial through working at the backpacker resorts. (Jolame, governmental official, aged 45) In contrast, negative economic impacts from backpacker tourism extend to increased living costs for the locals as their ways of living have changed. Before backpacker tourism, locals harvested food from their own plantations, farming, and fishing practices. Since backpacker tourism, the living pattern of the families involved in tourism has changed. The islanders working at the resorts have less time for farming and fishing. Rather, they rely on the very limited range of processed food (e.g. noodles, dhal, and tinned meat) available from the village store. Consequently, islanders are now heavily reliant on cash to sustain their daily lives (Sroypetch, 2015) supporting findings of Lew, Ng, Ni, and Wu (2016). They noted the importance of strengthening traditional livelihoods, particularly through nature-based resources, as the means to preservation of local culture and traditions. Although village hosts had strong views about backpacker tourism bringing positive economic benefits to their communities, backpacker guests did not register economic benefits as highly. Socio-cultural impacts The increased host-guest encounters and exposure of Western cultures, particularly to younger Fijians who absorb Western ways, is generating tensions within island communities. Findings reveal hosts have stronger perceptions than backpackers towards the socio-cultural impact of backpacker tourism; in both a positive and a negative light. Positively, hosts revealed backpacker tourism aids in the revitalisation of local cultural practices. Mosese (governmental official, aged 40) described, ‘Meke1 has been slowly dying out in Fiji. Fortunately, we now present it to entertain the tourists. This helps in maintaining our traditional culture.’ In addition, Peni (destination policymaker, aged 61) reflected, ‘Backpacker tourism helps in preserving Bure2 [see Figure 15.3] as we are building more Bure in the village to educate tourists’ [there are more modern (concrete) houses built in the village to replace Bure]. Kelera (resident, aged 55) also commented, ‘Tourism helps in preserving local wisdom on how to make Fijian handicrafts such as fans, baskets, and mats.’ Similarly supportive, Julia (Norwegian, aged 29) expressed a backpacker’s view: The locals show their culture every day especially on the Fijian night3 where Fijian songs, dances, food, and Kava ceremony [see Figure 15.4] are presented. I think that is a great way to help preserve their culture.

Figure 15.3  Fijian Bure Source: Authors.

Figure 15.4  Kava ceremony Source: Authors.

Backpacker tourism in Fiji  267 These accounts appear to suggest that the interest of backpackers in the local culture can aid in revitalising cultural practices in the host communities. In contrast, negative socio-cultural impacts of the backpacking industry were expressed by some hosts: According to our custom, all villagers need to help out with communityrelated work. Yet, once tourism started here, working at the resorts is the first priority for the locals and the community obligations come after. This leads to a decrease in the cohesion among us. (Emma, resident, aged 50) Emma’s concern relates to the effects of individualism, a cultural dimension (see Hofstede, 1980) brought in by Western culture at the expense of the collectivist culture of Fiji. Simone (governmental official, aged 40) commented further regarding the breakdown of inter-village relations: In the past, we haven’t needed to use money as we use Fijian canoes for transportation and we do planting and go fishing while at the same time we have a good relationship among the villagers. Whenever we need things that we don’t have we just say ‘kere kere’4 to our neighbours and they always give it to us with a good heart; but now these things have been changed. Concerns that backpacker tourism has led to changes in traditional ways of life is reflected in the stronger view of the majority of hosts compared to their guests. As Vini (resident, aged 52) commented: Our way of dressing has been altered especially amongst the females who work at the resorts. They imitate the tourists in wearing modern dresses. For the females the right dress code to attend the church service is Sulu and Jaba [Figure 15.5] but I see some girls who no longer follow our traditions. Backpackers also expressed observations of socio-cultural changes. For example Ken (British, aged 29) commented: I saw some locals using a mobile phone and wearing brand-named cloths. The more they are attracted by Western culture the more they forget their own culture. In accordance with Wall and Mathieson (2006), these narrations appear to suggest that the development of tourism creates a ‘demonstration effect’ on host communities. Concerns extend to the influence Western culture has on local youth, particularly their growing disrespect toward elders. Several hosts voiced this impact as reflected by Miri (governmental official, aged 42):

268  Supattra Sroypetch and Rod Caldicott

Figure 15.5  Sulu and Jaba – expected church attire for women Source: Authors.

Nowadays, the youth are devaluing their own culture, particularly the way they hold respect to elders. They have picked up the Western way of expression and are showing this to the elders [e.g. talk back to elders]. This aspect of concern accords with Gibson (2015) and the authors’ own observations that youth employed at backpacker resorts and involved in the industry have greater tendency to absorb the tourists’ culture than those not involved. Backpacker tourism on Nacula, and its influences on islanders, was cited by some respondents as leading to lessening of religious values. Backpackers neither agreed nor disagreed about this attribute though hosts expressed strong negative perceptions. Representative of several hosts, Asena (resident, aged 58) said: In Fiji, we work for six days and Sunday is the day for church. But, nowadays many people here don’t practice this custom as they work [at backpacker resorts] almost every day. They go to work instead of going to church.

Backpacker tourism in Fiji  269 Based on researcher observation, (see Sroypetch, 2015) and supportive of Asena’s perspectives above, most parishioners on Nacula were children and elderly people. Moreover, the pastor also expressed concern to the church congregation about Fijian youth nowadays tending to forget their own culture and not attend the church. From a backpacker’s perspective, Nancy (Canadian, aged 40) also responded: There is no regulation on tourists taking photos during the service, especially when the congregation members are emotionally involved in the ceremony. Islanders just want the donations and so they allow us to do anything. Nancy’s views supports the findings of Wall and Mathieson (2006) who imply that host communities become reliant on donations from tourists and adopt their dress sense and that this may lead to further breakdown of the church ceremony’s spiritual authenticity. Environmental impacts Backpackers appeared to be in agreement that they generate actions that degrade the environment, especially those relating to the marine ecosystems. Negative environmental incidents are overlooked by hosts in their pursuit of economic gains. With respect to respondent perceptions that backpacker tourism is increasing damage to coral reefs, each group had opposite views. Backpackers agreed they were responsible but hosts disagreed about the extent of their impact. Like several hosts, Luke (indigenous resort staff, aged 29) reflected, ‘I have been working in diving here in the Yasawas for eight years and I see the coral reefs are still really good. It’s fantastic’. In contrast, several backpackers admitted that their activities cause damage to the coral reefs as Jacob (German, aged 23) responded, ‘Yeah, I agree with this impact because there is too much snorkelling here in the Yasawas’. Further, Lisa (Austrian, aged 20) commented, ‘This effect is caused by tourist activities especially through the boat transports, jet skiing, snorkelling and diving.’ Similarly, Sarah (Norwegian, aged 29) said, ‘This problem is caused by snorkellers, but I believe it is accidental in most cases’. Such slow variables of change commonly occur at destinations providing unregulated coral reef-based snorkelling and scuba services (Hillmer-Pegram, 2014). Of further conjecture among respondents was the perception that backpacker tourism is a catalyst for increased littering. The majority of backpackers weighted this effect highly but the response of hosts was different. Most disagreed with this statement. Several hosts expressed that rather than the tourists, it is the locals themselves who do the littering, as Jo (resident, aged 40) stressed: This effect is not caused by the tourists but the locals as most of us are lowly educated so we don’t know how to protect our environment. Ben (resident, aged 39) furthered this point:

270  Supattra Sroypetch and Rod Caldicott Since we don’t have a proper disposal system a lot of rubbish from households is wiped away to the sea and this pollutes our sea. In contrast backpackers indicated that they were the cause of this littering effect: I have seen a group of backpackers boarding the Yasawas Flyer vessel where they just drink and throw the beer bottles into the sea. (Julia, Canadian, aged 45) Based on both hosts’ and backpackers’ sentiments, the need for environmental education for both tourists and locals is considered crucial to enhancing community resilience (Lew et al., 2016). Any consideration that backpacker tourism contributes to reduced sea water quality was not supported by the majority of host respondents. Conversely, the majority of backpackers agreed they were having an impact on water quality, as Jack (American, aged 28) expressed: The quality of the sea is reducing every day. This is caused by the petrol leaking from jet skiing and the boats transporting the tourists. Such attitudes are consistent with previous research (e.g. Aronson, Thatje, McClintock, & Hughes, 2011) noting that fuel leakage from tourist vessels creates oil contamination in sea water. Some hosts like Otto (governmental official, aged 28) supports this notion though his view was opposed by most of his compatriots: About 90 percent of the backpacker resorts in the Yasawas don’t have a proper treatment plant for their liquid waste but have only the septic system. So, the wastewater without adequate treatment draining from those resorts will negatively affect to the sea and the soil. The findings described above reveal that impacts from backpacker tourism on the communities of the Yasawa Islands cuts across economic, socio-cultural, and environment boundaries and that they are perceived differently between hosts and their visitors. Backpacker tourism development was a consideration of the 1992 National Environmental Strategy and the 2007–16 Fiji Tourism Development Plan, each with intentions of delivering economic sustainability to impoverished villages. The following section draws on concepts of resilience thinking and discusses the intersection between host wellbeing, natural ecology, and socio-cultural structures of Yasawa communities as they strive to adapt to the evolution of backpacker tourism.

Applying resilience principles to the backpacker tourism on the Yasawa Islands Reflecting the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) (1998) thinking around sustainable tourism against the current state of backpacker

Backpacker tourism in Fiji  271 tourism in the Yasawa Islands (see Sroypetch, 2015), it seems clear that ‘It’s not sustainable tourism … just tourism’. The World Tourism Organisation (1998, p. 21) suggests sustainable tourism development: meets the needs of the present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunities for the future. It is envisaged as leading to management of all resources in such a way that economic, social, and aesthetic needs can be fulfilled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecology processes, biological diversity, and life support systems. Some researchers (Lew et al., 2016; Tobin, 1999; Lerch, 2015) note that the ideal contemporary community is one that is both sustainable and resilient. While the goal of sustainability emphasises conservation and change mitigation, resilience aims at adaptation to change in order to be a better community (Lew et al., 2016). The term ‘resilience’ refers to ‘the ability of a system to deal with disruption and change while keeping its basic functions and structure – its “identity”’ (Lerch, 2015, p. 12). Acknowledging the seven approaches to resilience thinking underlined by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (n.d.), the Nacula communities need to adapt to changes that backpacker tourism asserts on their social-ecological system. Through the remainder of this chapter, we propose a prioritising of need that local Yasawa islanders can develop specific to three strands of resilience thinking: encouraging learning; managing slow variables and feedback; and, broaden participation. These approaches exhibited in Figure 15.6 are essential to integrating resilience thinking into all stages of future tourism planning and policy development for Nacula and Yasawa islanders. Encourage learning among different actors within backpacker tourism industry In The Rise of Resilience Planning (Spector, 2016, p. 7), reflecting upon the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, its President Michael Berkowitz suggests communities need to get better at building resilient infrastructure: There’s a difference between resilient infrastructure and infrastructure that builds resilience. Resilient infrastructure is the bridge that doesn’t fall down in the flood. Infrastructure that builds resilience is the piece of infrastructure that promotes transportation or integration that builds the fabric of the city in the strongest possible way. Knowledge, both old and new knowledge plus scientific and local knowledge, shared among the different backpacker tourism industry stakeholders of Nacula is the bridge, the infrastructure that builds resilience, which forms the fabric to foundations of sustainable communities (Lew et al., 2016). Based on learnings from the Nacula case study, the issues that deserve special and immediate attention

Source: Authors.

Figure 15.6  Conceptualising resilience thinking as the planning tool to mitigate non-sustainable development of backpacker tourism in the Nacula communities

Backpacker tourism in Fiji  273 in conjunction with learning opportunities for locals are: the growing monetarised dependence of islanders on resorts and the deterioration of subsistence traditions; environmental conservation practices; and, cultural identity. Such learning can only foster resilient outcomes for communities when there is social and political ‘buy-in’ from all stakeholders (national and local hosts and visitors). This adaptive governance emphasises heightening learning via knowledge sharing across scales in order to bridge different stakeholder perceptions and needs. For the backpacking industry in Fiji, it is important to develop new social norms and cooperation between different layers of planning and policy to ensure resilience thinking is embedded at every stage of the tourism policy cycle (Althaus, Bridgeman, & Davis, 2007; Pforr, 2001). Manage slow variables and feedbacks Backpacker tourism in the Yasawa Islands is at a cross-roads. If the number of visitors continues to increase in line with the 4.2 per cent world predictions for international arrivals (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2016), the experience for the visitor will deteriorate due to the success of its own sector. The pace of change, particularly the clash between the tourism development and the island environment and culture is a concern shared in many places around the world: The Cayman Islands [the Caribbean Islands] Department of Tourism clearly has concerns that too much development and too many visitors could be selfdefeating for the islands and is seeking a way to plan for a sustainable future. (Cayman News, 2016) While other less developed countries continue to embark on tourism projects to bring new investment to enhance their communities (Cohan, 2016; Sustainability Leaders, 2016), the development of backpacker tourism in Fiji is seen to be undermining the social-ecological structure of Nacula’s communities. Though the Fijian government recognises and welcomes the economic benefits the tourism industry brings, Yasawa islanders clearly have concerns about the impacts of tourism on their pristine environments and the associated undermining of their culture. The major slow and emerging variables in Nacula are mostly caused by undesirable tourist behaviour and damaging tourism activities across economic, socio-cultural, and environmental variables (see Figure 15.6). Such challenges need to be addressed through a solid implementation plan that supports community viability and future success (Lew, 2014). Managers and administrators of the Nacula communities must be alert to such external forces and attentive to the processes that are likely to drive the complex tourism system at different stages of development. Therefore, further planning systems are required to continually monitor and manage evolving backpacker interventions. Targeted indicators for slow variables of changes, each with systematic reporting feedback mechanisms are required. Such action aims to detect key variables that may cause the system to access a threshold and reform into a different structure (Stockholm Resilience

274  Supattra Sroypetch and Rod Caldicott Centre, n.d.) Nevertheless, knowledge and monitoring information alone is not sufficient to prevent structural shifts that can harm social-ecological systems linked to communities. Developing governance structures that can responsibly react to monitoring information is also essential (Stockholm Resilience Centre, n.d.). It is the test of relationships between the state, civil society, and the economic interests through which decisions are made that ultimately steer a society (Börzel & Risse, 2005). Broaden stakeholder participations The final strategy to reinforce resilience in Nacula communities is broadening the participation of tourism stakeholders. In the indigenous Fijian village, the chief (the policymaker), as the powerful and sacred leader of the community plays a crucial role in mobilising the whole community toward creating strong community networks with external parties. However, this alone is not sufficient to building the capacity of the islanders to becoming more resilient. To be resilient over the long-term, difficult decisions underlining a more resilient social-ecological context must now be made. If local knowledge and resources are insufficient to support such decision-making, external (foreign) knowledge may provide a useful supplement (Cohan, 2016; Sustainability Leaders, 2016) and can be a positive way to support community development. Through the process of connecting with others across the community, nation, and world, Fiji needs to ensure that all stakeholder skills, talents and views are applied to building resilience, and especially by dealing with power issues (Foucault, 1963; Hall, 2007) and potential conflict of interests (Dredge & Jenkins, 2011; Caldicott, 2017). Importantly, all parties should be involved in the process of planning and policy with implementation fully monitored and evaluated against forecast criteria. While seeking external consultants can help to make strategic links to external resources, the participation of locals fosters ‘public trust’ and are actively engaged as ‘co-producers’ of their future direction (Fledderus, 2015). Fitting the collectivist nature of the indigenous Fijian community which acknowledges the notion ‘we are all related’ reinforces a collective moral responsibility to solving problems. Planning and policy-making can be effectively enhanced through engagement of individuals and institutions both within and outside the community unit (Caldicott, 2017). By integrating the three crucial strategies as identified above to build resilience into the Nacula communities, relevant actors may participate more effectively in the next wave of tourism planning and policy-making for their communities. Through shared learning, their paths will be more focused on resilience, moving beyond the limitations of sustainability. Adopting principles of resilience thinking can assist the Fiji government generally, and the Nacula communities specifically, to be better informed. This enables enabling stronger participation in decisionmaking surrounding the complex dynamics apparent in the clash of socialecological structures.

Backpacker tourism in Fiji  275

Conclusion This chapter provides some thoughts and reflections on the application of resilience assessment as a tool within a Fijian context. It suggests a set of forces and reactions that can assist the Fijian communities because without considered and critical ongoing management of backpacker tourism on Nacula, further erosion of the resilience and sustainability capacities of island communities will continue. The concept of resilience within tourism contexts has largely focused on economic resilience (Lew, 2014). The contribution of this case study is the attempt to critically analyse resident (host) and backpacker (visitor) perceptions pertaining to a trilogy of resilience domains (economic, socio-cultural, and environment). This provides an exploratory baseline for future research and planning, and policy-making in local communities experiencing disruption from tourism development – planned or unplanned. This research illustrates several key factors that communities may engage with to enhance their resilience and by extension the likelihood of sustained tourism development in the face of change. The case study establishes that hosts demonstrate a stronger perception than their guests towards indicators of economic and socio-cultural impacts. By contrast, backpackers believed they contribute to a higher extent negative environmental impact on the destination than those perceived by the hosts. The significance being that perceptions of both hosts and guests are important in planning decisions. Within a resilience context, these findings may be useful to destination practitioners in their planning and implementation of future policies, regulations, and best practice guidelines. The findings can assist communities and governments to more effectively mitigate environmental and socio-cultural costs from the backpackers, while continuing to accrue economic benefits (Diamantopoulou & Voudouris, 2008). For the Nacula communities, we offer three potential options to improve resilience. First, encourage learning programs among different actors within the backpacker sector, particularly on the issues of cultural and environmental sensitivity and conservation. Second, manage slow variables and feedback loops, especially to monitor and manage the incremental changes backpacker tourism forces on the social-ecological system. Third, broaden participation among stakeholders within the Fijian backpacking industry, particularly to make sure that human, social, and financial capitals are each highly valued and utilised wisely to more effectively adapt to changes. Through these actions, empowered community leadership will develop at the local level promoting greater control over natural, cultural, and capital resources. These measures are considered to be a minimum response to ensure the core values of the islanders are not lost, but rather, restored to equilibrium fostering resilient and sustainable livelihoods into the future. Through these actions future planning and policy development for backpacker tourism in Fiji may better consider unintended consequences, especially the loss of local cultural identity, biological diversity, and the naturalness of the Islands. With the 2007–2016 Fiji Tourism Development Plan set to expire, this chapter is timely. The time is right for the people of Fiji to meet the contemporary and significant challenges confronting their communities with renewed vigour.

276  Supattra Sroypetch and Rod Caldicott Balancing the needs of jobs and economic development with preservation of cultures and biodiversity within limited geographic and demographic scope is a daunting and controversial challenge (Cohan, 2016). However, looking forward, the time is right to design a new 2017–20XX National Tourism Management Plan that covers the next phase5 in tourism planning and policy. The government, in partnership with the Yasawa islanders and the backpacker industry operators, can now adjust the policy settings and the pace of change relative to Fijan backpacker tourism in Fiji. In doing so, it is important not to undermine its rich history but to restore the equilibrium; the nexus of its economic importance and the social ecology of its host – a system that is already under enormous pressure.

Notes 1 Fijian form of exhibition dancing usually by men or by women, with movements that act out the formal words of song and chanting (Gatty, 2009). 2 Traditional Fijian house which is constructed of materials from the forests such as bamboo, sugar-cane leaves, coconut and palm leaves and coconut husk fibre (Ravuvu, 1983). 3 Commonly organised by backpacker resorts to present Fijian culture to their guests. 4 Kere kere is the Fijian word for please, a word that introduces a request (Gatty, 2009). 5 The current Fiji Tourism Development Plan is a ten-year plan which covers 2007–2016.

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16 Sustainability or resilience? Poverty-related philanthropic tourism as an agent for deliberate slow change Gary Lacey, Betty Weiler, and Victoria Peel

Introduction While sustainability has become the mainstream approach for tourism studies and planning, achieving sustainability continues to be a major challenge for enterprises and communities. Apart from a lack of consensus over what constitutes sustainability, managing the complex relationships of stakeholders and balancing triple-bottom-line components have proven problematic (Coffman & Umemoto, 2010; Dodds, 2007). In addition, sustainable tourism thinking relies on the arguably static notion of maintaining resources that underpin tourism for future use, a notion that might prove difficult, impossible, or even undesirable in some cases. In response, the more dynamic resilience lens has been applied to tourism in circumstances of inevitable or unsolicited destruction of the resource base, such as occurs in natural disasters and climate change (Lew, 2014). Social disruption and financial disasters, such as the global financial crisis, can also present cases that are perhaps best viewed through the resilience lens. Where sustainability plans for stasis (a continuation of the status quo), resilience embraces change. To date, the literature has concentrated on reactions to unsolicited change. The notion that tourism might be employed as an agent for deliberate change, with the intention of destroying its own product base for the benefit of the community, has not received significant attention in the tourism resilience literature. This radical notion will be explored in relation to philanthropic tourism.

Sustainability and resilience thinking in tourism Sustainability came to prominence in tourism research following the publication of the World Conservation Strategy jointly authored by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the United Nations Environment Education Programme (UNEP) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in 1980. The strategy emphasised the conservation of natural resources, giving rise to substantial literature addressing an environmentally based notion of tourism sustainability that also noted the need to support rural communities and major industries (IUCN, UNEP, & WWF, 1980). This paradigm eventually precipitated a new, triple-bottom-line approach in which firms and industries conceived of

Sustainability or resilience?   281 planning for sustainability in the context of natural, socio-cultural, and economic environments (Krippendorf, 1982; Saarinen, 2006). Following the publication of the Brundtland Commission’s Report (Brundtland et al., 1987), sustainability has largely been viewed through the lens of intergenerational equity with an emphasis on retaining resource or environmental quality for the enjoyment of current generations without compromising the needs of future generations. Sustainability, then, is arguably a static equilibrium approach to development and resource management that aims to retain the status quo within the three aforementioned natural (or physical), economic, and socio-cultural environments (Folke, 2006; Strickland-Munro, Allison, & Moore, 2010). Saarinen (2006) conversely asserts that the activity-based approach to tourism sustainability is a dynamic model in which tourism evolves. The limits to growth are defined by the specific tourism activities and their capacities for resource utilisation. However, this tourism-centred approach has been criticised as doomed to failure (Dodds, 2007). Much of the sustainability discourse has concentrated on the maintenance of the natural environment (see for example Boon, Fluker & Wilson 2008; Mbaiwa & Bernard, 2007) but this approach has not been without its critics. Leakey and Lewin (1995), for example, pointed to the flawed thinking of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) in planning to cull elephants in order to maintain a tourism friendly environment in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park. The destruction of trees by elephants has altered the environment from wooded savannah to desert. Relying on an equilibrium sustainability model, the KWS determined that Tsavo had therefore exceeded its elephant carrying capacity. The solution was to recommend reducing the size of the elephant population to maintain the equilibrium of wooded savannah. Leakey and Lewin (1995) argued that Tsavo was in longterm flux, moving from wooded savannah to desert and back again, in cycles, as elephants migrated across the country. The KWS approach was criticised as a form of mummification, attempting to maintain the environment against natural ‘background’ change for the sake of tourism. Natural disasters beyond the control of ecology or tourism managers present a further issue with the static equilibrium approach (Lew, Ng, Ni, & Wu, 2016). The loss of a tourism attraction, for example a forest or historic buildings through fire, might not be entirely recoverable. Similarly, the melting glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro or the inundation of an island through rising sea levels could rob a destination of its natural tourism resource with little hope of preserving it for future generations. In such cases, the sustainability approach, particularly as defined by Brundtland et al. (1987), might be regarded as inadequate. A similar, static equilibrium approach to the maintenance of cultural environments has been the focus of numerous studies in tourism. As with the natural environment, cultures can be viewed as important tourism resources that should be maintained for the enjoyment not only of the present generation of tourists but also for the pleasure of future generations. Yet, tourism itself can bring about changes to host communities that could result in them becoming less attractive to tourists. Considerable research has addressed the undesirable impacts of the demonstration effect in which supposedly ‘pure’ cultures of the

282  Gary Lacey, Betty Weiler, and Victoria Peel less developed world are exposed to the ‘polluting’ influences of rich, Western tourists (see Intrepid Travel, Victoria University, & AusAid, 2002; Mbaiwa, 2004; Mbaiwa & Darkoh, 2009). In such contexts, tourism has been described as a neo-colonial force that brings about change through the imposition of consumer culture on less developed communities and the inevitable commodification of the host community (HigginsDesboilles, 2004; Shepherd, 2002; Williams, 2008). Such communities, it is said, are disempowered by the touristic exchange, rendering them unsustainable (Pleumarom, 2003). Sustainable tourism thinking endeavours to mitigate the neocolonial, commodifying forces with the aim of maintaining viable communities and cultures. At times, this approach has manifested itself as an attempt to maintain social groups in the kind of ‘primitive’ condition that tourists have enjoyed consuming (Khan, 1997; Mowforth & Munt, 2003; Selzer & Spann, 2007; Williams, 2008). Such cultural mummification draws on a belief that cultures are sacred and must not be changed even through the incidental impact of the demonstration effect. Sustainable tourism has also been criticised as an inexact concept, for which there is no agreed, workable definition (Saarinen, 2006). Even the widely used Brundtland Report definition has come under fire because of difficulties in determining the needs of the present generation and the impossibility of forecasting the needs of future generations (Tyrrell & Johnston, 2008). There are numerous stakeholders in tourism and each is likely to display differing needs (Saarinen 2006). Consequently different approaches to sustainability might advantage one group over another or emphasise one of the triple bottom-line elements above the others. For example, the needs of a local community might fall victim to the sustainability needs of business. While the triple bottom-line implies that each environment is of equal importance, community-based tourism approaches tend to emphasise the social needs of a host population, such as poverty alleviation or empowerment in decision-making (Saarinen, 2006). The issue over definitions extends to defining the host ‘community’ in a tourism context, which as Saarinen (2006) observes refers not only to hosts but to other groups involved in tourism as well. Saarinen also states that despite the community-based sustainability approach, which encompasses pro-poor tourism, host communities do not always achieve real participation or control. Communities consist of an array of social or ethnic sub-groups whose needs and power may be unequal, leading to difficulties in implementing the participatory, community-based approach that sustainable community tourism seeks (see for example Moswete, Thapa, & Lacey, 2009). In response to the limitations identified above, a new tourism paradigm has arisen. The resilience approach began with the work of the ecologist, C. S. Holling (1973), who argued that natural systems do not operate on the basis of a single equilibrium. Ecological systems, he argued, were better served by a complex systems approach in which multiple dynamic attraction basins or stability domains (Munro, 2013) exist and in which there is constant change, including movement of the system from one stability domain to another. Holling (1973) argued that it was the instability, in the sense of large fluctuations, within a system that created

Sustainability or resilience?   283 resilience to the shock events that could lead to extinctions in a managed, stable system. Not surprisingly, when the concept of resilience is applied to other fields such as tourism, there is an emphasis on the ability of the industry, firms, or communities to recover from, or thrive, in the face of shock events such as financial crises, environmental disasters, and health emergencies (Becken, 2013; Biggs, 2011; Lew, 2014; Milman & Short, 2008; Walker et al., 2012). Ecologists speak of different time scales that systems have to contend with. Short-term, shock events are known as fast-change factors. But long-term (or slow-change) factors are also important (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2014). In ecology, these are factors that take many decades or even centuries to manifest themselves (Holling, 1973; Folke, 2006). There is a complex interaction between fast and slow-change factors in complex systems (Becken, 2013). Slow-change factors can, for example, trigger fast-change shocks when a particular, mostly unpredictable, threshold is reached. In addition, fast-change factors need to be considered in relation to longer-term, slow-change elements in an ecosystem (Holling, 1973). Holling (1973) suggests that the assessment of factors, as either slow or fast change, needs to be made on an ecological, rather than a human, time scale. Hence, factors that take several years might still be regarded as fast-change elements. Factors that are both internal and external to the system will display complex interactions. The resilience concept has also been applied to cultural contexts. Adger (2000) speaks of cultural resilience as the capacity of a community to withstand external shocks to its social fabric. Such shocks might include damage to the environment, financial pressure, or socio-political upheaval. Many authors have written about the resilience of socio-ecological systems (Becken, 2013; Folke, 2006; Milman & Short, 2008; Walker et al., 2012). Such studies view communities as part of an ecosystem, interacting with and influencing the survivability of the natural environment and in turn being impacted upon by changes to the environment. Others have studied the resilience of tourism as an industry with a focus not on the natural resource base but on structural changes within the economic system (Bec, McLennan, & Moyle, 2015). While much of the literature has viewed resilience as a method for examining recovery from fast-change, shock events such as fires, tsunamis, weather events and financial disasters, longer-term, slow-change issues such as global warming and tourism life-cycle evolution have also been examined (Bec, McLennan, & Moyle, 2015; Becken, 2013). Despite Holling’s (1973) criticism of the use of human time scales, it can be argued that when applying resilience thinking to purely socio-cultural systems, the human time scale is the most appropriate analytical gauge. Consequently factors that might seem like fast-change events on the ecological scale might reasonably be regarded as slow-change factors in cultural settings. Although resilience thinking is a distinct paradigm from sustainability analysis (Lew et al., 2016) there are some overlaps. Indeed, resilience, sustainability science, vulnerability research, and ecological economics form a spectrum of approaches to sustainable systems and development (Folke, 2006). As with sustainability, there

284  Gary Lacey, Betty Weiler, and Victoria Peel have been problems in settling upon universally agreed definitions of resilience, especially when applied to fields beyond ecology (Folke, 2006; Walker et al., 2012). Both sustainability science and resilience are based on the notion of equilibriums or stability domains. However, where the sustainability approach utilises a single equilibrium, resilience is predicated on the belief that multiple stability domains co-exist. Although sustainability is commonly said to be a static model, it can allow for growth and even a shift away from the equilibrium point, but once a shift has occurred it is regarded as permanent. While a tourism system can progress along a life-cycle curve and either stagnate, decline, or rejuvenate (Butler, 1980), it is unlikely to return to an earlier equilibrium state. The dynamism of resilience thinking conversely posits that systems can shift between multiple stability domains and back again. Resilience also views the stability domain as containing a point around which the system will vary, rather than an equilibrium point upon which it will settle. While change, especially one that threatens or undermines one or more triple-bottom-line indicators, is predominantly seen as a negative in sustainability thinking, it is embraced by resilience theory, which regards it as not only a natural condition but as the driver of incentive and adaptability that leads to the achievement of a more desirable state (Folke, 2006). Most tourism resilience analyses tend to separate tourism from the complex systems within which they operate (Lew, 2014) leading to fuzzy distinctions between resilience and sustainability thinking. Decrying a lack of theoretical development in this field and in an attempt to redress the separation of tourism from its broader environments, Lew (2014) presents a model of tourism resilience consisting of four domains. According to the proposed Scale, Change, and Resilience (SCR) model, tourism takes place in either the entrepreneurial or the community space. Within each space, change can be depicted as either slow or as a rapid shock. Community tourism, for example can be affected by such slow-change factors as climate change and globalization. Resilience is indicated by conservation measures. These slow-change factors are mirrored by shock events like natural disasters and major crises for which resilience is enhanced by characteristics such as social support systems and welfare. Lew (2104) asserts that rates of change can be highly variable in different settings and that different modes of response will be required in different cases. Despite resilience embracing change and recognising humans as agents of change through, among other things, government and NGO policy creation, no studies thus far (the SCR model included) appear to have promoted deliberate change to flip a tourism system or community to a more desirable state. Predominantly, tourism resilience literature views change as an inevitable challenge to be met through innovation and diversity. In other words, changing conditions are endured rather than truly embraced and are never deliberately created. They are unsolicited and generally unwanted (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2014). While it is not necessarily being suggested here that deliberate changes should or could be used in all or most settings, there are forms of tourism in which deliberate slow change that erodes the tourism attraction base can benefit the host community by shifting it to a more acceptable stability domain. A strategy that allows for and even promotes

Sustainability or resilience?   285 decline in particular economic, environmental, or socio-cultural resources would intentionally render the current form of tourism unviable. Poverty-based tourism (in particular, philanthropic tourism) has the potential to evolve in this way. To understand why this might be, it is necessary to explore the nature and purpose of philanthropic and other poverty-related tourism forms.

Philanthropic tourism The small but growing literature on philanthropic tourism lacks a universal definition and different models, ranging from voluntourism, ecotourism, and peace tourism to almost any form of community-based tourism might be advanced (see for example Burns & Barrie, 2005; Coghlan & Filo, 2012; Dekker, 2007; Kelly, 2006; Muganda, Sirium, Moshy, & Mkumbo, 2012; Nuryanti, 2006). An early form that can be described as philanthropic tourism was associated with nineteenth-century European philanthropists who visited one another’s charitable projects or reform institutions in the hope of gaining new knowledge and insights to improve their own charitable endeavours (Dekker, 2007). While some of the nineteenth-century beliefs might seem harsh by today’s standards, there arose a comprehensive network of entrepreneurs, lawyers, and prison inspectors dedicated to addressing poverty and improving the status of children at risk (Dekker, 2007). Such travel was undertaken with the intention of changing the social structure of a community, albeit, directed more at the society from which the traveller originated than at the destination’s community. The marriage of tourism and philanthropy in the contemporary era has perhaps become best known through the Travelers’ Philanthropy project (Selzer & Spann, 2007) that promotes a range of philanthropically related travel experiences including volunteer tourism, gap-year volunteering, research volunteering, and fundraisingincentives travel. In addition, tour companies that donate time, expertise, money, or gifts (time, treasure, and talent) to host communities are understood to be involved in travellers’ philanthropy, as are tourists who do the same (Selzer & Spann, 2007). Such forms of philanthropically related tourism might be regarded as including community minded tour companies and/or tourists involved in philanthropic acts. Unlike the nineteenth-century philanthropic network, it is arguable that tourism is the major focus in such endeavours and that philanthropy is simply a component of the tourism experience, albeit a core component of the movement’s mission (Honey, 2011). The more modern form of philanthropically related tourism also shifts the charitable focus from the source community to the host community. However, the tourist-centred focus of some enterprises can dilute the altruistic intention and might be seen as shallow and self-centred. For example, altruism is not always the primary motivator for tourists or tour companies involved in volunteer tourism (Coghlan, 2007; Ooi & Laing, 2010; Mustonen, 2007; Tomazos & Butler, 2008). In addition to possible altruistic drivers (Wearing, 2003), volunteer tourists are likely to be motivated by a range of factors including socialisation, ego fulfilment, the opportunity to improve their curricula vitarum, and the desire to interact with other cultures, likeminded tourists, or with wildlife (Lacey, Peel, & Weiler, 2012; Mustonen, 2007).

286  Gary Lacey, Betty Weiler, and Victoria Peel In the related form of orphanage tourism (which may or may not involve volunteering activities), the motives of some tourists have recently received popular scrutiny. Cambodia has become a particular focus of concern as orphanage visiting is blamed for a rapid increase in bogus operators motivated solely by financial return (Guiney & Mostafanezhad, 2015). This has manifested as a lack of safeguards for children in their unsupervised interactions with visitors, and of trafficking of children many of whom are not orphaned (Horton, 2011; Murdoch, 2013). There is little incentive for the orphanages that make money out of tourism to reduce the plight and suffering of children whose situation functions as the tourist attraction. NGOs and the United Nations routinely provide warnings that such visits support a multi-million dollar industry exacerbating the poverty it ostensibly aims to reduce (Mostafanezhad, 2016). What might be regarded as a purer form of philanthropic tourism involves philanthropists-as-tourists (as opposed to voluntourism, which typically involves tourists-as-philanthropists). In such travel, existing and sometimes potential supporters visit field projects during their leave or vacation time (see for example Burns & Barrie, 2005; Lacey, Peel, & Weiler, 2012). This type of philanthropic travel more closely approximates the nineteenth-century model with the distinction being a focus on assisting the destination’s community, rather than the traveller’s own community. In this form of tourism, the travellers are existing (or intending) philanthropists with some connection to the field project being visited or to the host community that it serves. Touristic motivations, while sporadically existing, are likely to take a back seat to the desire to assist or to learn about the institution or project (Lacey, Peel, & Weiler, 2012). Apart from one study of visitors to the Africa Foundation’s Luphisi Village project in South Africa (Burns & Barrie, 2005) and a second study of the Waridi School in Kenya (Lacey, Peel, & Weiler, 2012; Lacey, Weiler, & Peel, 2014, 2016), little has been published on this specific form of tourism which shapes the definition of philanthropic tourism in this discussion.

Equilibrium and philanthropic tourism In any form of poverty-dependent tourism, it might be said that the equilibrium point is one in which there are impoverished communities available for visiting. The social features that create or sustain poverty and maintain the equilibrium might include a colonial history, an economic and social system that supports topdown development, a lack of freedom, inadequate political representation, poor health and nutrition, lack of access to new technologies, gender inequality, low levels of education, and an unsustainable environment (Boserup, 1970; Okech & Mwagona, 2007; Schilcher, 2007; Sen, 1999; Silberschmidt, 2004; Smith, 2008; Zhao & Ritchie, 2007). The committed charity incorporating a visitor programme for philanthropic tourists is likely to have a stated mission of poverty alleviation and empowerment, addressing one or more of the above-mentioned social structures (see for example, Imbumba Foundation, 2015; Lacey, Weiler, & Peel, 2016; Unite Africa Foundation, n.d.). Even so, the work of a charitable

Sustainability or resilience?   287 organisation might serve to maintain the status quo, albeit it, unintentionally. In particular, the dependency effect of charitable giving can reduce incentive in a recipient community, leading to a reliance on continuing charity, rather than a change in social structures and the creation of wealth through entrepreneurship. Where a visitor programme is involved, there is the added neo-colonial force of tourism to contend with (Burns & Barrie, 2005). In some non-philanthropic forms of poverty tourism there is a strong incentive for the tourism operator to maintain poverty as a sustainable tourism attraction as illustrated by the city council declaring Rio de Janeiro’s largest slum an official tourist attraction (Menezes, 2011). Redevelopment in the slum has consisted of improving tourist infrastructure but not conditions for the impoverished dwellers (Broudehoux, 2001). There is a conceivable risk that a charity that incorporates philanthropic tourism might also become so dependent on the tourism dollar that it seeks, consciously or sub-consciously, to maintain the conditions that attract the philanthropic tourist in much the same way that a city might seek to maintain the slum attraction. Although a charity might be held to a higher standard than a municipality, philanthropic tourists have a relationship with the specific community they visit (Burns & Barrie, 2005; Lacey, Peel, & Weiler, 2012) and this could result in their withdrawal of support for a charity once its goals have been achieved in that community. It is perhaps more probable that a charity committed to the alleviation of poverty would resist such pecuniary temptations. In pursuing a goal of social reform and poverty alleviation, a charity or development organisation might implement measures that are aimed at deliberately undermining the very product that could serve as a philanthropic tourism attraction (see Frenzel & Blakeman, 2015). Such actions of a committed charity, supported by a philanthropic tourism programme are not readily analysed within the sustainability paradigm. Rather than attempting to maintain the resource (poverty) and the current equilibrium point, the charity is more likely to try to erode the attraction and alter the social structure to shift the community into a new, more desirable stability domain in which there is no substantial poverty and so no attraction for poverty-related tourism. While this might be regarded as a more desirable state, it is possible for the community to return to the original, impoverished equilibrium position should circumstances change. Hence, there are multiple stability domains and the capacity to change back and forth between them, depending on economic and social circumstances. The resilient community will be one in which capacity is created, enabling the desired changes to be effective and to facilitate a shift to a new stability domain. Hence the charity that helps to create the necessary social structures and to destroy those that hold it in the present state is an agent for both change and resiliency. The social changes effected, in part, by the intervention of a charity and an associated visitor programme, if viewed on a human time scale, are slow-change factors that operate through complex interactions between internal and external players and global conditions at a community level. Such changes are likely to take many years, probably decades. Flipping back into poverty (and philanthropy)

288  Gary Lacey, Betty Weiler, and Victoria Peel from the new stability domain might be a more rapid change but it is the deliberate movement away from poverty, and therefore from philanthropic tourism, that is the focus of this discussion. While the argument has been put that the case of deliberate slow-change in philanthropic tourism better fits the resilience model than the sustainability paradigm, to date no resilience model appears to have accounted for such a possibility. Lew’s (2014) SCR model examines only unsolicited changes but it presents a platform that could incorporate this more radical resilience notion. In the case of slow change in a community tourism setting, Lew (2014) suggests cultural conservation as a possible resilience indicator. The changes being deliberately introduced by a charity or development agency and its associated philanthropic tourism program would, however, seem to run counter to the notion of cultural conservation since attributes of the community’s culture are targets of deliberate change. But what role if any would tourism have once poverty has been reduced sufficiently to render philanthropic or other poverty-related tourism unviable? If tourism is to continue then it will have to adapt to the new stability regime, moving away from the poverty base and adopting a new form. One potential new form is tourism derived from a cultural base. A move to cultural tourism would, of course, be facilitated by cultural conservation as suggested by Lew’s (2014) model (see Figure 16.1). There is then a complex interaction of cultural elements with the resilient community shedding those attributes that contribute to poverty while conserving cultural characteristics that might supplant poverty as a tourism attraction. The external players, such as charities and development agencies that might create philanthropic tourism as part of a strategy for combating poverty, might also present a barrier to resilience. By retaining influence and control over community development for too long a period, a charity might create dependency among the impoverished and exacerbate their disempowerment. Handing over control to the community too quickly, however, runs the risk of pulling support before capacity has been built or ethnic tensions have been solved. Timely withdrawal of external players is vital for resilient tourism and community development (Mayaka, 2016; Moswete, Thapa, & Lacey, 2009).

Conclusions and implications The case of poverty-related philanthropic tourism presents a dilemma for sustainability thinking. It is not unreasonable to assess sustainable philanthropic tourism as a failure since the maintenance of the stable equilibrium point implies the continuation of poverty. The more dynamic model of resilience presents a more useful theoretical framework for the analysis and, most importantly, the planning of philanthropic tourism. If philanthropic tourism is to be used as an effective tool in providing long-term relief to impoverished communities, it needs to be regarded as a transitional tourism form that will give way either to other types of tourism or to other economic activities that will better suit a community emerging from poverty. In this sense, philanthropic tourism might

Sustainability or resilience?   289 be viewed through a Schumpeterian lens as a disrupted equilibrium with the NGO as the innovative entrepreneur permanently changing the product base (Schumpeter, 1942). The same NGO might be seen as Kirzner’s (1973, cited in Chiles, Bluedorn, and Gupta, 2007) arbitraging entrepreneur, moving the market from Schumpeter’s disequilibrium toward a new equilibrium point, or to use the resilience notion, a new stability domain. This sense of deliberate (creative) destruction of a product is central to the proposition that poverty tourism should plan for change rather than stability. However, it must be noted that Schumpeter’s and Kirzner’s models are rooted in classical economics (Chiles et al., 2007) and once the equilibrium point has been moved through innovation it is unlikely to return. While it is probable that the aim of an NGO would be for a permanent change in the poverty product, it remains entirely possible for the old stability domain of poverty to return, should economic circumstances change. For this reason, the resilience concept, incorporating as it does the potential for movement backward and forward between stability domains, remains separated from pure Schumpeterian and Kirzian analyses. Even so, the idea that charities might act ‘creatively’ and deliberately, to destroy the poverty base that sustains philanthropic tourism can be incorporated into resilience modelling. Lew’s (2014) SCR model could be expanded to include the idea that in certain types of tourism, particularly in poverty alleviating forms such as philanthropic tourism, deliberate slow change that erodes the tourism attraction can provide considerable benefit to a community. By incorporating

Tourism scale

2a. Community tourism Slow change unintended 2b. Community tourism Slow change deliberate

Resilience issues / Indicators

4. Community tourism Rapid shock

3. Entrepreneur tourism Sudden shock

1. Entrepreneur tourism Slow change

Change rate

1. Facilities and service decline / Maintenance programs 2a. Climate change and globalization / Natural and cultural conservation 2b. Philanthropic tourism and poverty alleviation / Create cultural tourism and other industries 3. Major attraction or market loss / Training and diversification 4. Major crises and disasters / Social support systems: welfare and infrastructure

Figure 16.1  SCR in Tourism model (with deliberate slow change) Source: Adapted from Lew (2014).

290  Gary Lacey, Betty Weiler, and Victoria Peel deliberate change as well as unsolicited change, the SCR model might better reflect the reality of philanthropic tourism. This would result in a model with four realms and two sub-realms as depicted in Figure 16.1. In this manifestation of Lew’s model, unintended changes might be seen as largely external to the community. Deliberate changes might be externally created by foreign charities and NGOs but they could also be initiated by an indigenous Community-Based Organisation. Agents of deliberate change would also ideally act as creators of resilience by providing the capacity for change and adaptation to a new stability domain. In further developing the SCR model, consideration needs to be given to whether deliberate (creative) change would be applicable in the rapid shock realm of community-based tourism. Similarly, using the Schumpeterian lens, consideration might also be given to the potential for deliberate change to be incorporated into the entrepreneurial tourism scale and whether it might be more likely to be expressed as a rapid or slow-change resilience issue.

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17 Between resilience and preservation strategies Traditional villages from Maramureş Land, Romania Gabriela Ilies

Introduction The discourse on the endangered status of the traditional Romanian village has emerged parallel with the general interest in the traditional rural world (Ianos, 1996; Benedek & Dezsi 2004). The argument that the traditional Romanian village is endangered by modernization forces and needs to be saved has been routinely employed not only by ethnographers and sociologists, but also by a large number of regional studies, planning projects, and tourism development plans, all employing scientific and practical perspectives (Benedek, 2000; Cianga & Dezsi, 2008; Ancuta et al., 2015). Nevertheless, the life trajectory of a traditional village depends on decisions taken by authorities at local, regional, or national levels and may be subjected to various preservation projects. In Romania, resilience concepts are rarely entertained, and are new for the public discourse (Radu, 2015; Stoican & Grecea, 2015). The objective of this study is to look at the specificity of the traditional village in the Maramureş region, Romania and evaluate those elements that play an important role in community resilience. The focus will be on the local vernacular architecture and its influence on tourism and on the overall identity of the village. The traditional built landscape – comprising listed heritage and functional elements, traditional resource valorization and cultural issues are discussed in order to determine how resilient Romanian rural communities are. One of the key emergent findings from this study is the diffusion of certain features of the local traditional architecture outside conventional boundaries. Critical developments that have shaped the approach to this study from a resilience perspective include: (1) the chaotic evolution of the built environment in the post-communist period due to its high degree of vernacularism; (2) the shift from national to international migration for work and the subsequent acculturation of local émigrés which has visibly impacted the local cultural heritage; (3) the ongoing conflict between the conservation needs and the development needs of the community (the expectation for a dynamic community in a frozen-in-time landscape); (4) the considerable degree of similarity between the present tourism brand and that of the pre-1989 place brand. Consequently, the decision was

296  Gabriela Ilies made to examine vernacular architecture in order to assess community resilience because, in an unintended way, this has become the core feature of the local and regional tourist brand and place brand (Stancioiu et al., 2011; Drule, Chiş, & Dunca, 2013; Ilies & Ilies, 2015). Community resilience building – blocks Community resilience is the conceptual framework (Folke et al., 2011) employed to examine the Romanian traditional village. The basic definitions of the concept use attributes as the capacity to deal with change (SRC, 2014), the ability to adapt to disasters or crises (IRFC, 2014), and acknowledgement of the role of persistence and transformation in the process of development of complex systems such as rural communities. Disturbances occur at different speeds and scales, leaving the community in a constant adaptive state (Lew, Ng, Ni, & Wu, 2016). Worldwide, studies link community resilience to disaster management plans (McSweeney & Coomes 2011; EU resolution, 2013) and rural development – wellbeing, livelihoods, economic diversification (IRFC, 2014; Kotschy et al., 2014).Therefore, building community resilience is a process based on resilience thinking (Folke et al., 2011; Plieninger & Bieling, 2012; SRC, 2014; IRFC, 2014), capacity building through learning, innovation and networking among its members at regional, national, and international levels (IRFC, 2014). Toolkits for community resilience building are developed to substantiate the resilience planning process and tend to be organized around the main concepts, comprising objectives, expected outcomes, and examples. Despite the abundance of toolkits described in detail by resilience practitioners (IRFC, 2014; Lavelle, Ritchie, Kwasinski, & Wolhson, 2015; FAO, 2016), in Romania, government documents refer only to disaster management plans, sustainable development, and social welfare (UNDP/GEF, 2012; EU Parliament, 2013; MADR, 2014). Conversely, resilience capacity indexes formulated as sustainable development indexes (FAO, 2016; Foster, 2007) are more frequent in the strategic documents mentioned above. Resilience building principles are designed to communicate elements of resilience thinking towards local stakeholders aiming to translate them into actions (Biggs, Schluter, & Schoon, 2014). These guidelines offer an insight into the core features of a resilient rural community. Maintaining diversity and redundancy is the first of the seven principles that needs to be addressed (Folke et al., 2011). Preservation strategies applied at local level in Romania, approach the socio-ecological system from two top-down complementary perspectives: cultural heritage preservation and nature protection. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and UNESCO have a comprehensive heritage preservation strategy for cultural properties on the World Heritage List, seven of them are located in Romania, including the wooden churches in Maramureş (http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/2629). Second, Natura 2000, a European network of protected areas, deals with protected species and habitats which have been preserved through sustainable human activities, enabling a certain economic

Between resilience and preservation strategies  297 development (Sundseth, 2008). This network is working also in Maramureş, representing eight sites with over 30 per cent of the region’s surface and set guidelines for local nature reserve management plans (http://natura2000.eea. europa.eu/#). Local and regional authorities acknowledge the relevance of these frameworks and adapt their preservation strategies accordingly. As a consequence, maintaining diversity and redundancy in the traditional built landscape is at least theoretically well substantiated. However, managing connectivity, broadening participation, and promoting polycentric governance systems could be challenging in a traditional rural society (Sandu, 2004). Therefore, the focus of this study is more on the traditional lifestyle which supports resilience thinking, rather than on the resilience index calculus. Although goal setting processes regarding resilient communities involve the understanding of a dynamic and adaptive system (Lew, Ng, Ni, & Wu, 2016), breaking it down into elements of resilience could be useful. The structure outlined by WEF’s Global Report (2013) supports the approach of the traditional village’s resilience according to five components: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, response, and recovery. Traditional lifestyle of the rural community partially concurs with resilience thinking (Sandu, 2004), enabling a robust modularity and decision-making model only in certain types of regions, mostly mountainous (UN Sustainable Mountain Development Report, 2016). Redundancy, on the other hand, is a feature of complex systems which enable core functionality, the variety, balance, and disparity of compensatory response traits following disturbance (Kotschy et al., 2014). Derived from ecology, the concept of functional redundancy refers to the similar roles and functions of different species (Lawton & Brown 1993) facing environmental change. This concept is relevant for the current state of vernacular architecture and its influence on the traits of tourist accommodation facilities and signposting in Romania’s rural tourism destinations. Unexpected economic opportunities and valorization (such as tourism and wood crafting) outline the capacity of self-organization based on longstanding traditional social and professional networks, highlighting another component of resilience: resourcefulness (Stancioiu et al., 2011). Traditional building styles require experience and knowledge, carpenters and cabinet makers ensure the continuity of wood crafting, and facilitate the development of new directions as experiential cultural tourism and inclusive education.

Context The Romanian traditional village In Romania, the concept of the traditional village is not normative; therefore, there are complementary views of it. Based on cultural taxonomies, sociodemographic analysis and economic assessment, sociologists have, in general, defined the traditional village in opposition to the modern village (Sandu, 2004; Voicu & Voicu, 2006). Ethnography and interdisciplinary studies point to the role of identity reservoir, based on a longstanding image of heritage container,

298  Gabriela Ilies rich cultural assets, favourable background for tourist activities (Turnock, 2002; Iorio & Corsale, 2010; Dancus, 2010; Ilies & Ilies, 2015). In general, Romanian rural space is defined by communities living in villages grouped in communes. These communities occupy most of the national territory and account for half of the total population. Most of the villages in Romania are mediumsized, having between 1,000 and 5,000 inhabitants; less than 100 or greater than 10,000 inhabitants are exceptions (up to 3 per cent of the total, INSSE, 2012). Agriculture is the main economic activity traditionally occurring in subsistence farms. Economic diversification is poor. Therefore rural tourism is presented in the public discourse as a development facilitator (Benedek & Dezsi, 2004), stabilizing migration tendencies, improving livelihoods of the families (Iorio & Corsale, 2010; Dezsi et al., 2014). Nevertheless, the Romanian traditional village is demographically challenged, with an ageing population and intense outward migration, and adapting to social and economic changes marked by at least two critical events: the enforcement of the communist regime (1950s) and the postcommunism transition (after 1989). Cultural change occurred while the intense industrialization process was accompanied by abandonment of the rural lifestyle, of core values (Ianos, 1996), and property issues during collectivization and in the post-socialism period (Turnock, 2002; Hann, 2003; Creed, 2011; Kligman & Verdery, 2011). Though unevenly dispersed, there are several regions of Romania that show better preservation and adaptability to cultural change. This is the case of historical regions named locally and in the regional studies literature as ‘Lands’ or ‘Countries’ (Cocean, 1997; ICOMOS, 1999; Dancus, 2010). There are twentyone regions in Romania with land features, usually located in and around the Carpathian lowlands, somehow similar to the French notion of ‘Pays’ described by Paul Claval (1993) as territories where people feel attached to the land, where the sense of belonging is strong, and where regional identity and social capital are obvious. They are not administrative or normative units and traditional villages are more resilient here due to an inherited comprehensive set of knowledge (Dancus, 2010). Maramureş Land aligns with this characterization and is typical of the characteristics alluded to by Claval. Vernacular architecture from Maramureş Maramureş is situated in the northern part of Romania, near the border with Ukraine (Figure 17.1). It stretches for around 3,310km2 and the 225,000 inhabitants are concentrated in 63 villages and five towns, Sighetu Marmatiei being the most important (in 2011, according to National Census Data, INSSE, 2012). Geographically it is located in the Maramureş Lowland and the surrounding mountains, along the Tisza River and its left bank tributaries make up the group of villages in ‘Valleys’. In Maramureş, traditional rural architectural heritage is a cultural marker. Almost every community has at least one wooden church and forty-two of them are listed historical monuments, dating from the seventeenth to the eighteenth

Between resilience and preservation strategies  299

Figure 17.1  The Maramureş region of Romania Source: G. Ilies.

century ad and seven appear on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The uniqueness of their silhouette and the building techniques make the wooden church of Maramureş iconic (Figure 17.2(a)), so much so that Romanian communities across the country and abroad are building wooden churches with these features (Figure 17.2(b)). There are twenty-two (and counting) new wooden churches built on traditional lines in Maramureş (Figure 17.2(c)), fifteen in other regions of Romania, and eight worldwide (Ilies et al., 2016). Besides the wooden churches, the region is characterized by wooden dwellings and their monumental wooden gates. The wooden houses have a very simple plan, with their size adapted to the needs of the family, and with little variations

300  Gabriela Ilies according to social status and history (Dancus, 2010). In contrast, the wooden gates are veritable status symbols – size, decorations, and material demonstrate the affiliation to wealthy noble families. Presently, they are evolving in new artistic ways where old gates mix with newly constructed ones, changing the rural landscape. Monumental wooden gates mark the entrance of all types of households, institutions, and tourism facilities, and they have become an important element in resilience building.

Figure 17.2  Wooden churches from Maramureş Land: aesthetic norms norm and features Source: G. Ilies.

Between resilience and preservation strategies  301 Vernacular architecture is defined as the usual way of building in a place based on climatic constraints and cultural norms (Brunskill, 2000); it is architecture without an architect. The rural landscape in Maramureş Land is vernacular par excellence. It utilizes locally available material – the wood, according to the specific features of the forest (oak in the lowlands and spruce in the higher hills and mountains), but without employing an architect, carpenters build using traditional know-how. Maramureş is also a place where heritage monuments and new, live, functional constructions coexist, maintaining the vernacular features even when using modern materials such as as brick, concrete, and steel, failing to align to the urbanistic standards. The way communities have managed to preserve their architectural style differs across the region, isolation and accessibility being two of the key factors. Additionally, migration for work and growth in the locality are critical facets from a resilience perspective and characteristically, villages that are located near the main road have a smaller number of traditional dwellings, but a higher number of monumental gates. The situation is very similar in other villages across Maramureş and other Romanian regions, such as Oas, Motilor, and Hateg. Budesti – a traditional village in Maramureş Budesti is situated at the southern limit of Maramureş Land (Figure 17.1). At county level, it is a large commune, in terms of both population and area (3,000 inhabitants who live in an area of around 8,451 hectares) (INSSE, 2012). The centre of the village is along the upper Cosau Valley while the lowland houses the majority of the communes in the region. The natural setting of the administrative area is contained in the hills and mountains, from 300 to 1,443 metres in height, enabling a wide range of land uses. The population in the area exemplifies a descending trend (since 1992), slowly ageing and it remains ethnically and religiously homogenous – orthodox Romanians. Overall, the occupational structure shows an agricultural economy with only 20 per cent employed in industry, services, and administration (INSSE, 2016). The data points to two major changes during the last century: the 1950s and the 1990s. First, mining activities in the region were discontinued (metal ore in 1950 and salt in 1959–1976) and the labour force was reoriented towards Baia Mare, the county capital and another major mining area in the county. Second, the transition to the market economy forced the population to focus more on other occupations, such as agriculture, forestry, and tourism. The village is very accessible, compared to other communes in Maramureş. The main road touches the nucleus at the SW edge, leaving a part of the built environment aside. The infrastructure in the area has adapted to the twenty-first century with all utilities including water supply, energy, and telecommunications relatively reliable. This was always a priority for the commune as demonstrated by the fact that it had a hydroelectric plant in the 1920s and electricity supply and post office services since then. Wider public services including school, library, family medical centre, dentist, and pharmacy are available while the nearest hospital is only 20 kilometres away in Sighetu Marmatiei. In Budesti, the number of households total 1,200 with 70 per cent of dwellings made of wood. They

302  Gabriela Ilies

Figure 17.3  Budesti’s vernacular architecture Source: G. Ilies

are structured on streets along the streams and the main road (Figure 17.3), with two nuclei – the lower part called ‘Josani’ and the upper ‘Susani’, each with a wooden church, dating from the eighteenth century. Owing to the fact that the wooden church from Josani is a UNESCO monument on the World Heritage List since 1999 (see also Figure 17.2(b)), the village benefited from the preservation guidelines and managed to outline an efficient strategy regarding the entire traditionally built landscape. The southern part of the village’s administrative area is included into a Natura 2000 site, protecting wildlife species and an interesting geosite – Creasta

Between resilience and preservation strategies  303 Cocosului. Several hiking trails were integrated with cultural trails, linking the neighboring traditional villages (see Figure 17.1). From this perspective, the community initiated a plan for sustainable tourism valorization, by involving its members in participatory activities, encouraging partnerships with academic and professional entities, and building a specialized team within the local council. However, there are several crucial aspects that underline the resilience of the commune: the ability to absorb the effects of economic and political changes, the capacity to maintain the overall functionality of the village despite social disruption and the capacity for self-organization.

Resilience in a traditional rural community Past research projects included Budesti along with nine other traditional Romanian villages in a large study concerning the traditional village with respect to tourism activities (see also Table 17.3); data on resilience issues were considered at the time, but the real output came later, in a study conducted for the Local Action Group Mara – Gutai, a LEADER type private-public intercommunal association which focuses on rural development (findings are detailed in a document available on the LAG’s website and in Zaharie & OAR, 2009; Ilies, Ilies, & Hotea, 2010). Therefore, the case study concentrates specifically on the community resilience in Budesti, although examples from Maramureş are also present. Traditional lifestyle supports resilience thinking The traditional way of life in rural societies is often regarded as a barrier to innovation and intrinsic development, both key elements in resilience thinking given the low robustness of the socio-ecological system (Florida, Cushing, & Gates, 2002). On the other hand, UN documents on sustainable development and on sustainable tourism, acknowledge the importance of traditional know-how perpetuated in mountain communities (UN, 2016; UN &WTO, 2016). Maintaining location and administrative boundaries, fostering a specific spatial structure of land use, linking it to locally available resource valorization and finally complying to natural rhythms, with family and spiritual practices are arguably important for community resilience. The location of villages in Maramureş Land has been documented since the fourteenth century ad and the administrative boundaries of the area have remained largely unchanged (Popa, 1997). This has proved to be important for the community as it demonstrates a strong capacity to maintain stability of land use administration within its limits despite the many political regimes (imperial, communist, or other). Moreover, the region has always been a borderland, even though it has changed affiliation fifteen times throughout its history. Traditional villages in Maramureş Land have a specific spatial structure and specially designated land use areas. For example, several villages have come to specialize in pomiculture or shepherding. The climatic features of the region dictate a delay in crop development, making self-sufficiency an ideal but

304  Gabriela Ilies generally unreachable goal. Livestock breeding depends on pastures, but the low productivity in the region triggers population movements resulting in many residents travelling to other Romanian regions to work on farms and then return home with a percentage of the harvest. This has allowed the development of a network of workers and middlemen and this contributed to team-building and the reinforcement of community identity during the communist period. Forestry is another efficient economic activity, although highly regulated due to the presence of protected sites and other reserves. Maramureş Land is very well forested. Half of its territory is wooded, and 4700 ha are pristine forests. Wood is a local resource for building, energy, art, engineering, and so on. This is why the region is also known as ‘the land of the wooden civilization’. The traditional way of life in the village is regulated by the natural rhythms and the spiritual practices. Older ethnographical studies (Papahagi, 1925; Dancus, 2010) and recent geobranding papers describe the Maramureş people as hard working, strong, dignified, and resourceful (Stancioiu, Pargaru, Teodorescu, Vladoi & Ratiu, 2011). This resourcefulness is derived from livelihood needs on several scales, as resilience thinking usually perceives it with regard to individual, household, community, local government, and national government (IRFC, 2014). Household needs are prioritized above individual needs and according to family and spiritual ethics. For example, domestic roles are well defined in traditional villages: men work outside the house, and women are housekeepers, thus sharing responsibility for livelihoods. Education is considered important by these families and there is a great respect for education and skill acquiring. Holidays and lifelong events are commonly shared as they are perceived as part of the cultural identity. Social capital is most important at local government level because it ensures the success or failure of participatory meetings, and orients the electoral process towards a predictable output given that the innovation capacity is under its influence (Florida, Cushing, & Gates, 2002) and the main stakeholder is the mayor’s office. Field research in 2010 and 2014 revealed a weak understanding of the main features of the traditional lifestyle at higher administrative levels. National strategies tend to be simple strategy statements and without a profound understanding of the key issues at local level, these strategies fail to provide results and enforce the role of the community in its own development. The Romanian national government, through its representatives in the territory, has maintained dual characteristics: on the one hand it exploits the existing place brand for investments and tourism and on the other hand, by neglecting the upkeep of the infrastructure of the region and by concentrating resources in the county capital, Baia Mare (a city situated outside the study region and more developed), it furthers its peripheral status. Fourteen communities in Maramureş along with NGOs and small local enterprises enrolled in the Mara-Gutai Local Action Group (LAG) benefit from the LEADER communities’ experience of bottom-up governance around Europe. LEADER is the acronym in French for ‘Links between actions for the development of the rural economy’, a European Union initiative that supports rural development projects initiated at the local level, working since 1991. In

Between resilience and preservation strategies  305 Romania, their strategic planning is outlined for five year periods: 2007–2013 and 2014–2020, comprising priorities developed through participatory meeting panels and finally refined by a management team (National Rural Development Programme for the 2007–2013 and 2014 – 2020 period, MADR, 2016). Although the term sustainability is used frequently in these meetings, the discussions focus more on issues including economic and demographic recovery, adapting to cultural shock, adaptive response, and learning (Table 17.1). Old and new wooden houses maintain the vernacular aspect of the village Different aspects of vernacular architecture could be translated into the development of a resilience approach; variety, balance, and disparity as described by Kotschy et al. (2014) in relation to redundancy are the main concepts arising from the analysis of traditional wooden dwellings in Maramureş, as part of a resilient system. Traditional wooden houses in Maramureş are built with oak, shingled, high roofed, and have terraces with decorated pillars (Figure 17.3). Old houses are not included on any heritage list as they are considered functional and ordinary in the region. They have low economic value as an individual asset (around US$ 5,000) but have high importance for cultural tourism. The value of old construction wood in reclaimed form increased after 2000 when a group of entrepreneurs entered a Swiss network and started purchasing traditional houses for this purpose. Consequently, a market for the trade in traditional houses emerged with the help of the rural mentality: ‘an old house is associated with poverty and oldness’. Two studies carried out (unintentionally in parallel) in 2009 mention the connection between the poverty status perception of the locals in Budesti and the old house ownership (Zaharia & OAR, 2009; Ilies, Ilies, & Hotea, 2010). In 2006–2007 the political discourse started to focus on the endangered status of the Romanian traditional village and this has been scientifically substantiated in socio-economic studies (Voicu & Voicu, 2006). In Maramureş, the focus of attention was turned towards the problematic status quo of traditional wooden houses especially, their commodified status and the question of market value versus cultural value. In the meantime, international migration for work continually created the impetus for new buildings, especially the construction of private homes. As a consequence, changes in the rural landscape became more evident as acculturation introduced new architectural styles, materials, and functionality. In 2010, the county council, a number of NGOs, and various cultural stakeholders began the implementation of ‘development projects’ designed to preserve the traditional rural landscape (see also Table 17.3). The protection strategies employed were guided by UNESCO documents and in 1999 a group of wooden churches from Maramureş was included on the World Heritage List (UNESCO, 2016). The protection plan was understood as potentially useful for traditional patrimony and heritage listing of other cultural landscape values. In particular, preservation strategies tackled sustainability aspects by implementing green projects closely linked to tourism as demonstrated in virtual reality products and cultural trails associated with ecotourism services.

Authentic folk costumes reinforce the pride of wearing them and relaunch the production.

Renovation of cultural infrastructure

2 Increasing competitiveness and economic viability

Website design and layout with visual elements derived from traditional woodcarving, textiles and painting.

Developing the promotion and communication tools

Diversification of local produce offer

Encouraging local groups to form cooperatives and to concentrate on local produce

Valorization of natural and cultural Support authentic features in heritage the architecture of future tourist infrastructure; Respect the tourist carrying capacity of the protected areas

Authentic cultural products associated to the rural tourism activities in the area

Supporting cultural activities and events

1 Raising the attractiveness of the territory

Discourse

Actions*

Priority*

Table 17.1  Priorities and operational objectives for the local development strategy of LAG Mara-Gutai.

• Provide economic opportunities to people; • Strengthen the connectedness; • Number of cooperative structures

• Manage assets • Number of BB’s with traditional features • Number of ecological management plans adopted

• Provide economic opportunities to people • Number of workshops and retails shops • Number of non-formal learning events

• Strengthen the connectedness; • Manage assets • Number of websites, blogs, pages with traditional cultural assets

• Social cohesion • Number of people involved in cultural community projects

Resilience indicators

Common tourist attractions and infrastructure promotion Good project team

Partnership development

Local management abilities

Support small farms with funding and logistics

Encouraging small farms to enter the produce market

Note: *Raw data from www.gal-maragutai.ro

3 Developing the cooperation and management capacity

Building markets and storages

Enhancing the storage and selling capacity for local produce

• Number of of local project teams

• Strengthen connectedness • Manage assets • Number of of environmentally responsible tourism projects

• Number of of people who have benefitted from vocational and skills training and active in business • Number of new small farms

• Number of markets for local produce

308  Gabriela Ilies Along with cultural heritage protection, natural protected sites and reserves served as models for conservation paths. The latter may be more effective for conservation purposes but is less suited to socio-economic development because it regulates land use and wood harvesting for building purposes and therefore is not supported. In this respect, a coordinated set of actions turned the attention of locals towards the wooden houses. In 2012–2014, the results of a research project were disseminated among the local stakeholders (Studii asupra zonei GAL Mara-Gutai; Ilies, Ilies, & Hotea, 2014). Babes-Bolyai University, the local division of the Romanian Architects Order and WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) presented good-practice examples and young architects showcased their experimental work on the traditional house. The outcomes were visible, first with façade embellishments in wood carvings and later new wood structures adapted to the twenty-first century, maintaining the proportion of the silhouette, the roofing, and the pillar decorations among others. Unexpected economic opportunities: wooden accommodation tourist facilities and system Rural tourism in Maramureş has had a rapid development, both in terms of the number of units and arrivals. The last twenty-five years witnessed the increase of accommodation units from ten in 1994 to 129 in 2014 (INSSE, 2016). The demand for traditional settings and facilities triggered the development of bedand-breakfast units that adhere to architectural features specific to the region such as the use of wood material, rich carvings, old interior design, along with local gastronomy and entertainment. In Maramureş the present number of units featuring a wooden gate is sixty-three – twenty-nine have wooden specific architecture and thirty-five added rustic wooden elements on the façade (according to field work carried out in 2009). In terms of resilience, these wooden buildings tend to compensate for the loss of traditional wooden dwellings along the main communication axes. Tourism certification standards require that regional specificity be met when building an accommodation unit, but the architectural details are neglected, due to insufficient public consultations at that time (2001). Architects and tourism professionals more sensitive to this matter, have formulated several guidelines to be followed by funding bodies for accommodation units under rural development strategies. For example, the EU’s Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development (SAPARD) has been the funding body for rural development projects before 2007 and financed the building of rural tourism units on a more specific requirement list and with the signature of an architect. Although regional specificity features were described in detail, they were hard to meet, due to poor understanding of the benefits of using local materials, underdeveloped technology for affordable finishing, and poor communication of standards. A comparative analysis for the LAG Mara-Gutai, (Ilies, Ilies, & Hotea, 2014) outlined that the main building constraints included general conditions (position

Between resilience and preservation strategies  309 within the plot, volumes, amenities), specific architectural requirements (material, plan, roof, windows, accessories), and interdictions (such as the use of certain visible materials, imported architectural features from other regions). This study argues for the need to correlate these features with the substantiated models, usually found in the ethnographical museum in Sighetu Marmatiei and competent voices in the field including respected architects and portfolio experiments. Building tourism accommodation according to the certification requirements, in Maramureş style, triggered the emergence of new economic opportunities for wood shingle makers, carpenters, weavers and seamstresses. For example, in Budesti village only, there are two shingle workshops with six employees working manually using traditional skills, four gate and other wood structure masters, four traditional hat workshops, and two costume makers among others. In terms of economic diversification as the main community resilience measure, tourism and the wood industry are relevant (Table 17.2). In 2014, the National Tourism Authority designated four villages from the upper valleys of Cosau and Mara including Budesti as the first ecotourism destinations in Romania, based on their natural and heritage assets. The specified goals include preservation matters, improvement of tourism infrastructure, and services through networking, and coherent destination management. The main tourism activities in the area are cycling, adventure, hiking, gastronomy, and sightseeing in the traditional landscape. Budesti local council is one of the most active in the region. The level of funding for the community presented in the table below concerns only external financing; €280,000 was spent directly by the community. Projects revolve around themes such as: reshaping the out-of-line public buildings in the centre with wooden artwork, restoring an entire street, fences, and private building Table 17.2  Economic diversity measurements. Theme

Indicator

Business diversification

Number of subsistence farms

645

14

21

Percentage retail

36

19

Percentage tourism

7

14

Percentage services

14

21

Percentage wood processing

36

38

7

9

1/1288

3/9140

Number of tourism accommodation units/capacity (bed-place)3 Number of nights spent Gross value (EUR) (nights × average rate)

Investments in tourism

2014

800

Percentage local produce Tourism as export

2007

Number of SME2

1

Percentage local community/tourism SME4

41

311

410

7,750

0/100

25/75

Sources: data retrieved from: 1. www.gal-maragutai.ro; 2. www.listafirme.ro/maramures/budesti/ o1.htm; 3. http://statistici.insse.ro; 4. www.comuna-budesti.ro).

The circuit of the wooden churches from northern Transylvania (20142016)

Accommodation unit (2014)

Protection program for the vernacular architecture

SISAT(2007–2010) Integrated tourism valorization strategy in the Romanian traditional village

Maramures County Council, European Regional Operational Fund (POR)

National Rural Development Program- PNDR 2007–2013

OAR Maramures (National Architects Order)

Babes-Bolyai University, CNMP

Research project Special focus on vernacular architecture as resource

Cultural project (2010) Traditional building style norms

Upgrade

Connecting the wooden churches into a thematic trail Tourist info center building Publications

Tourism assets valorization Thematic trail “Green way”

28.000 (share from)

7.740

149.000

452.000 (share from)

22.000 (share from)

N/A

9.300

7.000

18.000

6.000

Funds (EUR)

Budesti and other seven villages in the country

Community

Private

Budesti and other 16 villages in the county

Budesti, Sarbi, Breb, Hoteni communities

Community

Community

Community

Budesti local council

Budesti local council

Beneficiary

Sources: Raw data from official websites of the funding bodies: www.gal-maragutai.ro; www.maracosau.ro; www.cjmaramures.ro, www.madr.ro; www.oar.squarespace. com; http://sighet.extensii.ubbcluj.ro

Mara – Cosau cultural heritage (2013)

National and european fund POR, FEADR and Maramures County Council

Multipurpose machinery (2014) Support for tourism business, branding, protected sites

Machinery purchase for maintenance works in public domain

Cultural home upgrade (2014)

Conservation fund for Mara-CosauCreasta Cocosului area (2015)

Redecoration with traditional elements Audio technology for events

Village center refurbishment (2014)

WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature)

Facade upgrade with wooden traditional elements for public buildings (local council, cultural home, kindergarten, apartment building,)

Visiting the craftsmen (2014)

LAG Mara – Gutai

Activity Workshop upgrade Tourist signposting

Title (year)

Funding body

Table 17.3  Community development projects linked to the vernacular architecture, 2007–2014

Between resilience and preservation strategies  311 façades, organizing participatory meetings for inclusion projects, encouraging tourism businesses to build in the traditional style using examples from existing architectural portfolios, and implementing specific tourist signposting. Traditional building style requires experience and knowledge Vernacular architecture in Maramureş and regional identity are interconnected due to the specific usage of locally available building material and well-established wood-crafting knowledge (Dancus, 2010). The wooden buildings tell a story about the traditional society and the permanence of a lifestyle. Working with wood requires specific skills and knowledge including preparation of the materials, site planning, measurements, angles and structures. The traditional wooden churches are ‘travelling churches’ and are built on a site near the workshop, and then the parts are coded, disassembled and rebuilt at the destination site. Left to non-skilled workers, such a project could easily end in failure. Articles have been written about the wooden church built in Maramureş style for the Romanian community in Caracas, Venezuela (Revista Lumea Credintei, 2007). When the construction was transferred to a country with a different climate (hotter and dryer), the wood started to contract leaving gaps between the beams. The lateral beams threatened to escape from the joint and only the skills of the builders present saved the situation. Communities consider the church as pole, the centre of the village, despite the fact that some have two or three. Wooden churches from Maramureş Land generally date back to the period between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Many were destroyed during the great Tatar invasion of 1717 and were subsequently rebuilt on the same plan. The oldest surviving wooden church, also known as ‘The Church on the Hill’ due to being built on top of a hill overlooking the village of Ieud, dates back to ad 1364 (see also Figure 17.2(b)). Visibility issues in a strict and symbolic sense motivated the communities to build new wooden churches respecting the traditional style and also adding height supported by modern building techniques. The resulting new churches have a striking resemblance to the old ones, except they are taller and larger in size (Barsana 67m, Sapanta 75m). Studies on the traditional norms for a wooden church (Figure 17.2(a)) correlated with the aesthetic norm (Sofonea, 2002; Porumb, 1982) have formed a new image which can be used in tourism branding design. Houses are built on site, usually at the back of the plot leaving the annexes closer to the street for functionality. Around 40 per cent of the households have an old and a new house on the same plot, very close to each other in the hope that the older one will be demolished at some point (INSSE, 2012). The oldest house dates back to 1692 and the best preserved ones are from the eighteenth century (Biltiu, 2010). The wood as building material was used in a restricted legal environment and access was regulated by several decrees. Therefore, the ephemeral status of this material triggered identity strengthening instead of downfall by decay. Moreover, knowledge of the masters ensured their continuous construction. There are two types of masters: ‘self-made’, learning to manage wood structures on their own,

312  Gabriela Ilies and ‘renowned masters’, getting specific education from another master, mostly in their family. Besides them, ordinary people build their own house and gate. Lastly, community resilience in this respect is linked to the learning and experimentation process. In Budesti village the small and medium-sized enterprises operating in the field of wooden construction have between two and nine employees, mostly family members. In general, community meetings have stressed the need for a comprehensive education programme, workshop apprentice/shadowing hours, but only at an informal level and summer schools and crafting events are emerging in the region (Ilies, Ilies & Hotea, 2014).

Conclusion This case study offers several insights about possible strategies based on resilience thinking as applied to the Romanian traditional village. The mix of cultural tourism and ecotourism in rural tourism communities benefited from the preservation strategies conceived for protected areas and heritage sites. However, building community resilience is in its first stage of development, despite the fact that there is an ongoing goal setting process and discourse on local development shifting from top-down to bottom-up. Further questions arise around the specifics of traditional practices in rural mountain communities that are appropriate for planning for community resilience and there is an obvious interest for knowledge improvement through sharing best-practice examples. Moreover, new experimental architecture projects are subjected to public comment (for example the new tourism information centres of Vadu Izei and Ocna Sugatag sparked a lot of debate), but sites of spiritual importance are always expected to be built in the traditional style. The obvious loss in variety and number of wooden dwellings has triggered a planning process in order to achieve resilience or sustainability. Again, best-practices offer a clear route to building the resilience of traditional rural communities, and are instructive to nurturing a healthy relationship with local resources beyond the typical ‘conservation state studies’. Sustainable cultural tourism is a real opportunity which can easily transform into unintended pitfalls from a resilience perspective. Regional identity markers create economic opportunities, by overlapping the tourist brand with the place brand. The accessibility of infrastructure and services is maintained through tourism activity, enhancing the tourist experience, increasing the diversity of local business linked to wood art and other similar artisan activities. Connectedness is reached within the social network formed by community members, including émigrés and other transnational relationships meaning that identity markers such as the wooden church are more easily moved and installed elsewhere. There remain significant opportunities for further research into traditional rural communities involved in tourism and these will have to approach the methodological aspects of discriminating between the effects of and responses to disturbances as articulated in this chapter.

Between resilience and preservation strategies  313

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Part IV

Conclusion

18 Lessons learned Globalization, change, and resilience in tourism communities Alan A. Lew and Joseph M. Cheer

Assessing how human social systems respond to social change is a challenge because, in most instances, the systems that are being examined are implicated as both agents and victims of the change that is taking place. This is especially true of tourism, which, as an economic activity, is an active agent in creating a more globalized and homogenous world, while also being deeply dependent on at least the perception of heterogeneous places and the uniqueness of destinations. The chapters in this book were roughly structured on this awareness, grouped into chapters that discussed how tourism (as a system) responds to broad changes in social, economic, and political conditions, and chapters in which tourism is actively used to bring about changes in those same conditions. Even this division, however, is precarious depending on how a tourism system is defined. At one scale it may be the driver of social change, whereas at another scale it may be the recipient of such changes. Multinational forms of mass tourism are more likely to threaten a local sense of place, for example, than are indigenous and alternative forms of specialty tourism. While one approach may dominate the other, most tourism places are a complex mix of mass and specialty tourisms (glocalization) (Cohen, 2012) which needs to be considered for a comprehensive resilience understanding of the tourism system. The reason this is important for resilience is because it is directly related to the often-raised issue in resilience theory of the need to understand what is being resilient (defining the system) and what is it being resilient to (defining the driver of change) (Carpenter et al., 2001). In tourism studies, there are essentially three broad systems that research can examine from a resilience perspective: 1 2 3

The attraction system – the resources (human or natural) that tourism depends upon in a place. The economic system – the tourism economy or industry in which tourists spend the money. The community system – the community in which tourism activities take place.

Each of these will be sensitive to external drivers of change in different ways, and would respond in different ways, resulting in different resilience adaptive cycles (Holling, 2001). Again, scale is important, both spatial scale (what is

320  Alan A. Lew and Joseph M. Cheer included and what is excluded in defining these three systems, or their subsystems), and temporal scale (over what time period is change being perceived or assessed) (Lew, 2014). Different boundaries of space and time can result in very different outcomes. Larger boundaries may conceal important smaller-scale nuances of opinion and action. Smaller-scale boundaries may make these nuances more explicit, but are more difficult to generalize into theory and broader applications. Generalizing tourism resilience to social, economic, and political change, therefore, is problematized when there is a lack of definitional clarity. Is tourism the agent of change, is it the victim of change, or is it both? What is included in the tourism system and what is excluded, and why? Keeping these major issues in mind, the following are some of the lessons learned from the chapters in this book. Continuing conceptual challenges. Despite some two decades of theoretical and empirical work in social-ecological resilience, definitions and conceptual clarity remain challenging. This is especially the case in tourism studies, which have been late to adopt resilience thinking. Most resilience research, both in tourism and beyond, tends to adopt a relatively simplistic engineering resilience perspective, rather than more complex evolutionary approaches that more accurately reflect the nature of change (Hall, Chapter 2; Dahles, Chapter 9). The importance of slow change. Tourism is a major driver of social change in the form of globalization. Globalization is mostly a slow to medium change process that gradually erodes the social uniqueness of places. Resilience theory understands slow change processes by identifying external drivers of change and monitoring internal variable responses, paying special attention to slow changing controlling variables, and modelling the adaptive cycle of large systems that change slowly over time. A continual resilience assessment of key slow change drivers and variables within a specific context can help to develop policies that maintain slow change at socially and politically acceptable levels (Lew, Chapter 3; Ilies, Chapter 17). The self-organizing basis of community resilience. Peripheral regions are particularly vulnerable to external drivers of change, both social and environmental, due to their more limited political and economic resources to influence and manage their situation. Economic globalization has made many traditional rural economies non-competitive and redundant. Tourism has offered an alternative livelihood for some rural communities, although it varies in effectiveness. The resilience of these communities, however, is best measured in terms of sense of place, lifestyles, and cultural landscapes. These are primarily dependent on the social networks they self-organize and maintain to support themselves, with key elements being social capital, local planning and control, and structures that support innovation (Cheer, Chapter 4; Hooli, Chapter 6; Butler, Chapter 7). The key role of innovation. Innovation is a key element in resilience thinking, and it may be the most important element in a successful reorganization following a decline or collapse stage in an adaptive cycle (or in the stagnation stage in the

Lessons learned  321 tourism area life cycle model). Tourism-dependent economies must continually innovate in response to changing visitor preferences to make themselves relevant and competitive. Occasionally this requires a major rebranding, which might be akin to the resilience concept of transformation (Folke, 2016), although usually this is only within the narrow context of the tourism economy. Such a transformation may be toward globalization and internationalization, but it could also be in the reverse direction, toward a return to nature and traditional culture (Fleury & Johnson, Chapter 5; Alebaki & Ioannides, Chapter 8; Wu & Wall, Chapter 13). Tourism can benefit community empowerment and economic resilience. Developing strategies to positively strengthen the resilience capacity of a community has been a challenge, with much of the contemporary focus on engineering approaches to climate change vulnerabilities. However, increasing the resilience capacity specifically for the tourism sector of a community has been shown to be much more straightforward. Two of the key elements in accomplishing this are (1) tourism business education and product skills development, including co-creation, among community members, and (2) tourism-related economic diversification of the community to increase both direct and indirect local employment opportunities in tourism. These processes involve slow, long-term structural reorganization to take advantage of emerging opportunities. To be effective, inclusive planning, open communication, and stakeholder empowerment in governance and educational programs is essential (Bec et al., Chapter 10; Espeso-Molinero, Chapter 11; Wu & Wall, Chapter 13; Reeves & Sivanandamoorthy, Chapter 14). Economic diversification, but not too much. One reason that business resilience may be easier to assess than community resilience is due to the well-defined bottom-line of profit and survivability. Theoretical applications of ecosystems’ resilience to social contexts are prolific, and open to discussion and debate (Brand & Jax, 2007). Examples from business resilience, however, are less common, but suggest that innovating within the range of activities that one knows best (in this case, tourism) is probably a better strategy for long-term success than diversifying into other areas or undergoing a complete transformation when economic times become difficult (Dahles, Chapter 9; Chen & Lew, Chapter 12). Tourism can be adverse for social and cultural resilience. While tourism is demonstrably effective in fostering economic resilience through economic development, it is less effective in managing negative feedback (negative impacts or perceptions of tourism). While the economy may be doing well, the social and environmental sustainability of a destination may be in serious decline, requiring non-economic imperatives to be given greater emphasis. In addition, when the tourism development initiative comes in a mostly top-down manner, internal self-organizing within the community system is likely to be weaker, as is the development of complex adaptive thinking in addressing indigenous issues. Tourism, however, does offer a platform for working toward an effective balance between traditional culture and modern culture (Chen & Lew, Chapter 12; Sroypetch & Caldicott, Chapter 15; Ilies, Chapter 17).

322  Alan A. Lew and Joseph M. Cheer Resilience can be repressive. Resilience characteristics do not necessarily result in quality of life improvements, however those might be defined. This is because resilience theory is more descriptive than prescriptive in its nature (Brand & Jax, 2007) and system interactions may result in larger, controlling systems suppressing the potential of smaller subsystems (known in resilience theory as the ‘remember’ effect) (Holling, 2001). Thus, an oppressive political economy context can result in some systems (social groups) being stuck in a very resilient (unchangeable) state of poverty, while others are ‘stuck’ in a resilient state of wealth and power (Allison & Hobbs, 2004). Poverty is a slow-moving structural system that may need to be addressed through an equally slow change process, of which philanthropic tourism might be able to assist (Hooli, Chapter 6; Lacey & Weiler, Chapter 16). As should be expected, a resilience approach is not always good in a normative or ethical way. This is particularly apparent when the focus is on a single activity or sector, such as the tourism economy. Such a focus highlights the ways that that the activity (tourism) is positive for community resilience, and ways it is less so. It is likely that other economic sectors would have similar, though somewhat nuanced differences, whereas non-economic activities (such as the non-governmental or non-profit sector) would be very different in how they contribute, or not, to the overall general resilience of a place. In the end, however, the planet Earth is a social-ecological system in which everything is connected and everything is constantly changing. This is also true for all of the subsystems that reside below the level of the planet as a whole, which means ‘everything’. From our anthropocentric perspective, we (at least in Western culture) tend to divide the world into nature and human realms, with changes in the natural environment impacting human societies, and human societies driving changes in the natural environment. Most of this happens below the scope of our perceptions and understanding. As humans, however, we also seek stability and consistency. We look for this in our laws, our values, our leadership, our personal relationships, as well as in our natural environments. We are frustrated when these systems that we have conjured change, as they all do. The chapters of this book have attempted to at least partially explain how changes in our social-cultural world emerge, are experienced and perceived, and are responded to, within the special context of tourism. The lessons learned, however, extend beyond just tourism. Change happens, and without it the world would be a much less interesting place.

References Allison, H. E., & Hobbs, R. J. (2004). Resilience, adaptive capacity, and the ‘lock-in trap’ of the Western Australian agricultural region. Ecology and Society, 9(1): 3. Retrieved 6 July 2016 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art3. Brand, F. S., & Jax, K. (2007). Focusing the meaning(s) of resilience: Resilience as a descriptive concept and a boundary object. Ecology and Society, 12(1), 23. Retrieved 10 July 2016 from www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art23.

Lessons learned  323 Carpenter, S., Walker, B., Anderies, J. M., & Abel, N. (2001). From metaphor to measurement: Resilience of what to what? Ecosystems, 4, 765–781. DOI: 10.1007/ s10021-001-0045-9. Cohen, E. (2012). Globalization, global crises and tourism. Tourism Recreation Research, 37(2), 102–111. Folke, C. (2016). Resilience. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (pp. 1–68). New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10. 1093/ acrefore/9780199389414.013.8. Holling, C. S. (2001). Understand the in complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems. Ecosystem, 4, 390–405. Lew, A. A. (2014). Scale, change and resilience in community tourism planning. Tourism Geographies, 16(1), 14–22. DOI:10.1080/14616688.2013.864325.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. adaptive capacity building 188–90 adaptive cycle 8, 41–9, 224–5 adaptive systems thinking, fostering 214–15 Africa: overview 103–5; empirical research 106–9; evolutionary perspective of resilience 105–6; learning processes in Zanzibar 111–13; Maasai as resilient subjects 113; Maasai immigrant workers 109–13; self-organized security guards 110–11 Australia: overview 167; communication improvements 175–7; economic diversification 171–3; employment opportunities 173–5; Great Ocean Road (GOR) 71–81; literature review 168– 70; Mackay and Whitsunday regions 170–9; planning improvements 175–7; research findings and discussion 171–8; research methodology 170–1; social capacity building 177–8; stakeholder cooperation 175 backpacker tourism: overview 260–2; applying resilience principles to the backpacker tourism on the yasawa islands 270–4; case study 262–3; impacts of backpacker tourism development for the Nacula communities 264–70; lessons learned 275–6; research methodology 263–4 Bali 149 Beck, Ulrich, ‘risk society’ concept 3–4 Berkowitz, Michael 271 bistability model 38–41 Budesti 301–3 business resilience 8–9

capacity building: adaptive 188–90; in Lacandon 190–5; need for research and the indigenous tourism 186–8; social 177–8; in Taiwan 235–6 CAS (complex adaptive systems) 9 change management tool, resilience as 168–9 China 202–18; overview 202–3; lessons learned 217–18; literature review 203–5; research methodology 205–6; rural tourism as a catalyst for socialecological resilience 208–17; study context 206–8 collaborative capacity building 190–5 community resilience. see also resilience: building 296–7; defined 9, 13; defining principles 208; vs. individual resilience 188; lessons learned 320; use of term 117 community-based ecotourism 226–7 complex adaptive systems (CAS) 9 conceptual challenges, lessons learned 320 connectivity, restoring and maintaining 210–13 control variables 10 cultural and social conflicts 107, 321 cultural economy 67–71 cultural tourism 90–2 Dabang: overview 222–4; action plans 231; adaptive cycle 224–5; capacity building 235–6; community 234–5; economic impacts 233–4; environmental concerns 232; issues and responses 231–2; lessons learned 236–40; research methodology 227–31; resource assessment and monitoring

Index  325 232–3; supply system 234; sustainable development 225–7 deliberate slow change 280–90 diversification, economic 171–3, 209–10 diversity, maintaining through economic diversification 209–10 ecological resilience 38, 262–23 economic diversification 171–3, 209–10, 321 economic impacts 264–5 economic strength, and the Sri Lankan tourism industry 251–2 ecotourism 226–7 employment opportunities 173–5 engineering resilience 9 enterprise resilience 8–9 environmental impacts 269–70 environmental sustainability 252; and the Sri Lankan tourism industry 252 environmental tourism 92–4 evolutionary perspective of resilience 105–6 evolutionary resilience 9 Fair Isle 116–29 fast change 9–10 fast variables 10 Fiji: overview 260–2; applying resilience principles to the backpacker tourism on the yasawa islands 270–4; case study 262–3; impacts of backpacker tourism development for the Nacula communities 264–70; lessons learned 275–6; research methodology 263–4 globalization, interpretations of 4–5 glocalization 319 governance 253; and the Sri Lankan tourism industry 253 Great Ocean Road (GOR) 71–81 Greece 132–43 Greece’s wine tourism: overview 132; case description 135; discussion 142–3; literature review 133–4; major challenges to the resilience of the sector 137–42; research methodology 135–7 Harvey, David 4 Huangling Village 206–18; overview 202– 3; lessons learned 217–18; literature review 203–5; research methodology 205–6; rural tourism as a catalyst for social-ecological resilience 208–17;

study context 206–8 human social networks, and regional resilience 65–7 indigenous tourism, and the need for capacity building research 186–8 Indigenous tourism product design (ITPD) model 193 individual resilience 188. see also resilience Indonesia: overview 149–50; adaptation to change in 158; Kampong tourism in 153–4; lessons learned 159–61; literature review 150–2; research methodology 152–3; resilience strategies 154–8; Sosrowijayan 158 innovation, lessons learned 320–1 islands: Fair Isle 116–29; fascination with 86; Jersey 87–98; and resilience 127 Jersey: cultural tourism 90–2; economies 88–99; environmental tourism 92–4; history 87–8; sea tourism 94–8 Jiangxi province 206–18; overview 202–3; lessons learned 217–18; literature review 203–5; research methodology 205–6; rural tourism as a catalyst for social-ecological resilience 208–17; study context 206–8 kampong tourism in Yogyakarta 153–4 Kandy 243–57; overview 243–4; economic strength 251–2; environmental sustainability 252; governance 253; lessons learned 256–7; poverty 253–6; research methodology 249–50; resilience in 247; social capital 252; Sri Lankan tourism industry 244–7; tourism livelihoods 253–6; tourism resilience 247–8, 250–1 Lacandon 190–5 learning, encouraging through selforganization 215–16 lessons learned: community resilience 320; conceptual challenges 320; innovation 320–1; resilience 321–2; slow change 320; social change 321 Lew, Alan A., scale, change, and resilience (SCR) model for tourism 12, 47–8, 284, 289–90 literature reviews: Australia 168–70; China 203–5; Greece’s wine tourism 133–4; Huangling Village 203–5;

326 Index Indonesia 150–2; Jiangxi province 203–5; Mackay region 168–70; Mexico 185–90; Queensland, Australia 168–70; resilience 133–4, 150–2, 168–70, 185– 90, 204–5; Whitsunday region 168–70; wine tourism 133–4; Yogyakarta 150–2 long-term structural change 168–79 Maasai 104–14 Maasai immigrant workers: 109–13; in Africa 103–5; empirical research 106–9; evolutionary perspective of resilience 105–6; learning processes in Zanzibar 111–13; Maasai as resilient subjects 113; self-organized security guards 110–11 Mackay region 170–9; overview 167; communication improvements 175–7; economic diversification 171–3; employment opportunities 173–5; literature review 168–70; planning improvements 175–7; research findings and discussion 171–8; research methodology 170–1; social capacity building 177–8; stakeholder cooperation 175 Maramureş Land 295–312; overview 295–6; Budesti 301–3; community resilience building 296–7; concept of the traditional village 297–8; economic opportunities 308–11; lessons learned 312; resilience in 303–5, 303–12; vernacular architecture from 298–301, 305–8, 311–12 Mexico: overview 184–5; adaptive capacity building 188–90; case study 190–5; collaborative research 191–2; indigenous tourism and the need for capacity building research 186–8; Lacandon tourism 190–1; lessons learned 195–6; literature review 185–90; resilience thinking 185–6; tourism collaborative capacity building (TCCB) 195; training skills for tourism product development 192–4 models: bistability model 38–41; Indigenous tourism product design (ITPD) model 193; scale, change, and resilience (SCR) model for tourism 12, 47–8, 284, 289–90; tourism area life cycle model (TALC) 45–6, 224 Nacula communities: overview 260–2; applying resilience principles to

the backpacker tourism on the yasawa islands 270–4; case study 262–3; impacts of backpacker tourism development for the Nacula communities 264–70; lessons learned 275–6; research methodology 263–4 panarchy 42–9 participation, broadening 216 philanthropic tourism 285–90 polycentric governance systems, promoting 216–17 population statistics 3 poverty: and philanthropic tourism 285–90; and the Sri Lankan tourism industry 253–6 product development, training skills for 192–4 Queensland, Australia: overview 167; communication improvements 175–7; economic diversification 171–3; employment opportunities 173–5; literature review 168–70; planning improvements 175–7; research findings and discussion 171–8; research methodology 170–1; social capacity building 177–8; stakeholder cooperation 175 redundancy, maintaining through economic diversification 209–10 regional resilience, and human social networks 65–7 resilience: overview 18–19; approaches to 25–7; assessment 52–4; bibliometric analysis 19–25; business resilience 8–9; as a change management tool 168–9; combined elements 249; community resilience 9, 13, 117, 296–7, 320; defined 116; ecological resilience 9, 38; engineering resilience 9; enterprise resilience 8–9; evolutionary perspective 105–6; evolutionary resilience 9; and human social networks 65–7; individual resilience vs. community resilience 188; integrated dimensions 250; and islands 127; lessons learned 321–2; literature review 133–4, 150–2, 168–70, 185–90, 204–5; policy formulation 52–4; rural resilience 204–5, 295–312; small business resilience 154–61; social resilience 10; social-ecological resilience 11, 208–17;

Index  327 social-economic resilience 253–6; specific resilience 205–6; tourism resilience 247–8, 250–1 resilience thinking, and the traditional way of life in rural societies 303–5 resilient subjects 113 ‘risk society’ concept 3–4 Romania 295–312; overview 295–6; Budesti 301–3; community resilience building 296–7; concept of the traditional village 297–8; economic opportunities 308–11; lessons learned 312; resilience in 303–5, 303–12; vernacular architecture from 298–301, 305–8, 311–12 rural resilience 204–5, 295–312. see also resilience rural tourism, as a catalyst for socialecological resilience 208–17 rural tourism as a catalyst for socialecological resilience 208–17 scale, change, and resilience (SCR) model for tourism 12, 47–8, 284, 289–90 sea tourism 94–8 security guards 110–11 self-organization: encouraging learning through 215–16; lessons learned 320; of security guards 110–11 SES (social-ecological systems) 10, 42 Seven Principles for Building Resilience in Social-ecological Systems (Stockholm Resilience Centre 2015) 10–11 Shetland 116–29 slow change: defined 10; deliberate 280–90; driver variables 34–8; lessons learned 320; philanthropic tourism 285–90; planning for 49–50; socialeconomic resilience 253–6 slow variables 10, 34–8; managing 213 small business resilience, sustainability of 154–61 social and cultural conflicts 107, 321 social capacity building 177–8 social capital 10, 252; and the Sri Lankan tourism industry 252 social change: impacts on tourism 6–7; lessons learned 321; managing 177–8; tourism as a driver of 7–8 social resilience 10 social-ecological resilience. see also resilience: principles for building resilience in 11; rural tourism as a catalyst for 208–17

social-ecological systems (SES) 10, 42 social-economic resilience 253–6. see also resilience socio-cultural impacts 265–9 Sosrowijayan 158 specific resilience 205–6. see also resilience Sri Lanka 244–57 Sri Lankan tourism industry: overview 243–4; economic strength 251–2; environmental sustainability 252; governance 253; lessons learned 256–7; poverty 253–6; research methodology 249–50; resilience in 247; social capital 252; Sri Lankan tourism industry 244–7; tourism livelihoods 253–6; tourism resilience 247–8, 250–1 stakeholder cooperation 175 Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) 10–11, 13, 62 structural change, management strategies for addressing 169–70 sustainability, environmental 252 sustainable development 225–7 sustainable tourism 280–90 system context 50–1 Taiwan 222–40; overview 222–4; action plans 231; adaptive cycle 224–5; capacity building 235–6; community 234–5; economic impacts 233–4; environmental concerns 232; issues and responses 231–2; lessons learned 236–40; research methodology 227–31; resource assessment and monitoring 232–3; supply system 234; sustainable development 225–7 Tanzania 104–14 time-space compression 4 tourism: backpacker tourism 261; as a catalyst for social-ecological resilience 208–17; cultural tourism 90–2; ecotourism 226–7; environmental tourism 92–4; indigenous tourism 186–8; kampong tourism 153–4; philanthropic tourism 285–90; product development 192–4; rural tourism 208–17; sea tourism 94–8; sustainable tourism 280–90; tourism resilience 247–8, 250–1; training skills for product development 192–4 tourism area life cycle model (TALC) 45–6, 224 tourism collaborative capacity building

328 Index (TCCB) 185, 195 tourism livelihoods, and the Sri Lankan tourism industry 253–6 tourism resilience, and the Sri Lankan tourism industry 247–8, 250–1 tourism studies 133–4, 319 traditional communities, resilience in 303–12 traditional villages 295–312 trust 237 UN World Population Prospects 3 undesirable change 34–8 variables: control variables 10; external change driver variables 51–2; fast variables 10; slow and fast external change driver variables 51–2; slow change driver variables 34–8; slow variables 10, 34–8 Victoria, Australia 71–81 villages, traditional 295–312; overview 295–6; Budesti 301–3; community resilience building in 296–7; economic opportunities 308–11; lessons learned 312; maintaining the vernacular aspect of 305–8; resilience in 303–5; Romanian 297–8; vernacular architecture from 298–301, 305–8, 311–12 Whitsunday region 170–9; overview 167; communication improvements 175–7; economic diversification 171–3; employment opportunities 173–5; literature review 168–70;

planning improvements 175–7; research findings and discussion 171–8; research methodology 170–1; social capacity building 177–8; stakeholder cooperation 175 wine tourism: overview 132; case description 135; discussion 142–3; literature review 133–4; major challenges to the resilience of the sector 137–42; research methodology 135–7 World Economic Forum 3–4 World Population Prospects 3 Yasawas 260–76; overview 260–2; applying resilience principles to the backpacker tourism on the yasawa islands 270–4; case study 262–3; impacts of backpacker tourism development for the Nacula communities 264–70; lessons learned 275–6; research methodology 263–4 Yogyakarta 149–61; overview 149–50; adaptation to change in 158; Kampong tourism in 153–4; lessons learned 159–61; literature review 150–2; research methodology 152–3; resilience strategies 154–8 Zanzibar tourism industry 104–14; empirical research 106–9; evolutionary perspective of resilience 105–6; learning processes in Zanzibar 111–13; Maasai as resilient subjects 113; Maasai immigrant workers 109–13; self-organized security guards 110–11