The last two years, the world experienced a major health crisis and a pause in world economic activities, including tourism. In the awake of the pandemic, measures taken to combat its adverse effects should not be at the expense of long-term environmental goals (Hall et al., 2020). Critical voices alarm also on the need to reflect on the sustainability of tourism practice and not least of tourism scholarship towards transformative approaches considering global environmental challenges (Prideaux et al., 2020; Gretzel et al., 2020). Transformative approaches in research underline the importance of reflection and action, and the integration of theory and practice, and of multiple world views.
In this research, we aimed at bringing this experience, embodiment, and new ideas generated during the pandemic into workshops where stakeholders in two destinations in Sweden (Dalarna and Gotland) worked collaboratively to develop a vision and a path to a more sustainable future. We worked with action research and co-design methods to enable a discussion between tourism stakeholders around understandings of tourism development, vulnerability, climate change, and sustainability, and stimulate creativity.
As the analysis of the two workshops has shown, tourism stakeholders, envisioned a sustainable future which would not be based on growth but rather on a better distribution of visitors in time and place. Fossil free destinations, diversification (of the product, of distribution channels) to be resilient was also part of their vision, together with an appreciation of the importance of people; people understood as locals, visitors but also employees. Staycations and workcations were also part of a vision to diversify and attain a more sustainable future. The role of nature as a quality-of-life aspect, which also enables togetherness and proximity in staycations was also discussed. We discuss these findings considering transformative research approaches and we reflect on the research process and the method of the collaborative workshops as a customised method to the wide array of transformative codesign research approaches to explore and reimagine alternative futures (Liburd et al., 2020; Duedhal, 2021).
References
Duedahl, E. (2021) Co-designing emergent opportunities for sustainable development on the verges of inertia, sustaining tourism and re-imagining tourism, Tourism Recreation Research, 46:4, 441-456, DOI: 10.1080/02508281.2020.1814520
Gretzel, U., Fuchs, M., Baggio, R., Hoepken, W., Law, R., Neidhardt, J., & Xiang, Z. (2020). e-Tourism beyond COVID-19: a call for transformative research. Information Technology & Tourism, 22(2), 187-203.
Hall, M., Scott, D. and Gössling, S. (2020) Pandemics, transformations and tourism: be careful what you wish for. Tourism Geographies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1759131
Liburd, J., Duedahl, E. & Heape, C. (2020) Co-designing tourism for sustainable development, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, DOI: 10.1080/09669582.2020.1839473
Prideaux, B., Thompson, M. & Pabel, A. (2020) Lessons from COVID-19 can prepare global tourism for the economic transformation needed to combat climate change, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2020.1762117
2024.
Critical Tourism Studies Asia-Pacific Conference, “Tourism Metamorphosis: Creative Destruction and the Remaking of Tourism Geographies”, Hanoi, Vietnam, 13-17 February, 2024.