Towards an evolutionary approach to sustainability transitions in tourism

Keywords: COVID-19, evolutionary economic geography, geographical political economy, sustainability, tourism.
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59

Abstract

While COVID-19 brought the travel and tourism industry to a near standstill in 2020, the tourism economy is now well past its 'return from zero' and the future of tourism is now being widely debated as different potential paths emerge post-COVID-19. Recognising how difficult (and contested) the transition to sustainable tourism is likely to prove in the years ahead, we present a conceptual language to more comprehensively address sustainability transitions in tourism and the role of innovations in such transitions. As such, we draw from two well-established theoretical frameworks in geography – evolutionary economic geography (EEG) and geographical political economy (GPE) – to make a case for an evolutionary and spatially-sensitive perspective on sustainability transitions in tourism. In this respect, we aim to bridge the gap between three research agendas to which geographers have significantly contributed – sustainable tourism, tourism evolution and the quickly growing sustainability transitions agenda. We acknowledge that, as much as tourism has the potential to contribute to wider sustainability transitions, the innovations which sustainability transitions rely on can serve as a window on the type of changes which the tourism industry requires to be sustainable in the long term. We argue that, despite the existence of the internationally-endorsed framework in the form of the UN SDGs, sustainability transitions in tourism will always be spatially uneven. While EEG can shed light on how historically-influenced sustainability transitions in tourism are, and what place-specific factors mould them, GPE will help tackle the broader political-economic context in which they unfold.