Research on tourism and climate change has emphasised the contribution that the sector should make to the effort to reduce and stabilise greenhouse gas emissions. However the tourism sector response on the supply side has been disappointing and highly variable between and within its sub-sectors. This paper addresses the knowledge gap on the willingness and capacity for tourism businesses to mitigate. Innovation is used as the conceptual framework. At the firm level, mitigation requires innovation yet businesses innovate at different rates and hence their ability to contribute towards emissions reductions varies. A Cluster Analysis is presented of over 400 accommodation providers from Southwest England, a major UK destination region. Three distinctive clusters of SMTEs are identified based on how they innovated to mitigate climate change. The smallest (12%) had introduced a range of process and managerial innovations and was most forward-thinking and active. A second cluster (23%) had introduced several process innovations but its approach to managerial innovations was both partial and confused. The largest cluster (65%) had mainly enacted straightforward process innovations but failed to introduce managerial innovations to measure, monitor and act on their environmental performance. Taken together, these data suggest that the contribution from accommodation providers to emissions reductions targets has been at best modest. Moving forward, greater analytical precision is needed if (this part of) the tourism sector is to be widely mobilised towards tackling climate change. Specifically, policy interventions have to be more effectively targeted at business needs and based on a more differentiated view of planned and enacted behaviour changes. One-size-fits-all prescriptions are inappropriate, arguably even counterproductive for encouraging the greatest level of mitigation activity across the widest range of tourism businesses.
1Climate change mitigation among accommodation providers in the South West of England: comparisons between members and non-members of networks.
ABSTRACTNetworks are a well-established feature in contemporary tourism governance and management. The aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which there are differences among members and non-members of tourism networks in their efforts to introduce measures to mitigate the effects of climate change in their operations. Among accommodation providers in the South West of England, there is no significant difference between members and nonmembers of networks in the modest levels of innovation they have introduced. Possible reasons for the lack of difference are identified including the nature of the networks and the way in which knowledge is exchanged and retained among businesses. The paper argues that, while formal networks still represent an important platform to promote climate change mitigation, their importance may also be in knowledge spillovers and boundary spanning behaviours 'beyond the network'.
Climate change is one of the major challenges of our times and state intervention has been identified as a critical success factor in attempts to tackle it. This paper critically explores the reciprocal relationship between climate change policy and the tourism sector in the United Kingdom. It examines on the extent to which current mitigation activities within accommodation businesses in the South West of England reflect recent UK policy on climate change as well as the prospects of the tourism sector contributing to the delivery of the state's aspirations in this area. Among tourism businesses there has been weak recognition of, and direct response to, recent policy UK initiatives and their associated instruments. An Implementation Gap is identified relating to the top-down nature of climate change policy in the UK. If this gap is to be closed and the tourism sector is to make a greater contribution to abating climate change, policy-making must progress from generic prescriptions towards a more nuanced approach that recognises and addresses the particularities within key economic sectors such as tourism.
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