Abstract

This book is the first authored overview of resilience in tourism and its relationship to the broader resilience literature. The volume takes a multi-scaled approach to examine resilience at the individual, organisation and destination levels, and with respect to the wider tourism system. It covers the different approaches to understanding resilience (the ecological and engineering approaches) and identifies issues with their understanding and application. The book connects issues of resilience to related key concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation, networks, systems, change and social capital. It is designed to be an upper level undergraduate and postgraduate primer on resilience in a tourism context and will be of interest to tourism researchers in planning, development, geography, impacts, sustainability, disaster management and environmental studies.

Resilience is a concept that has largely been treated as an apolitical metaphor in social science. This book goes a considerable way to moving beyond the metaphor and acknowledging the normative but many-faceted implications of resilience thinking. The in-depth and systematic inquiry offers insights into how resilience can be politically understood and given analytical traction in tourism studies and practice, insisting on the consequences for management and accountability when faced with the immediacy of social, economic and ecological justice in the Anthropocene.

[t]his makes for an exciting awakening of tourism scholars to the conceptual frameworks offered by resilience thinking and resilience theory, it is…cohesive from beginning to end.

This book carries tourism scholarship into a refreshing new future that was long overdue and that will undoubtedly set a new and innovative standard for understanding tourism globally. There is not another industry in the world where the concepts of resilience and social-ecological systems are more relevant and Hall, Prayag and Amore have done a marvellous job drawing together these complex concepts in a digestible and enjoyable text.

C. Michael Hall is Professor in Marketing at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Docent, Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland; and Visiting Professor, School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden. His key research interests include sustainability, tourism planning and policy, and global environmental change.

Girish Prayag is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His research interests include place attachment, organisational resilience, disaster management and tourist emotions.

Alberto Amore is a PhD candidate at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His research interests are destination governance, resilience, tourism and public policy, and crisis and disaster management.