Towards adaptive tourism areas? A complexity perspective to examine the conditions for adaptive capacity

Abstract

Tourism area development is affected by the competitive global tourism industry and the complex, multilevel dynamics of the contemporary network society. The strategic planning and governance challenge is stimulating tourism areas to become adaptive areas, being capable of responding to changing contexts in order to maintain or improve the performance of these areas as competitive tourism destinations. This article examines conditions for "adaptive tourism areas". It does so on the basis of a complex adaptive system (CAS) perspective on tourism area development. The perspective is used to conceptualise tourism areas as complex and potentially adaptive systems, and to discuss how tourism area development can be understood as a multilevel, co-evolutionary and path dependent process. Furthermore, the CAS perspective is used to draw attention to the importance of a degree of diversity in terms of tourism products, experiences and firms. Encouraging a degree of diversity requires among other things interconnectivity among actors to ease communication and coordination, (policy) experimentation for niche-innovations, learning and reflexivity. The article ends with a discussion on the potential of, and constraints on, pursuing adaptive tourism areas from a strategic planning and governance point of view.

Twenty-five years of sustainable tourism and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism: looking back and moving forward

“…Governance systems and regimes can steer societal relations, including social rules and values, and also socio-technical systems, such as the technologies of tourism provision, which affect the introduction of more sustainable tourism practices. Connections between governance and sustainable tourism are explored in the 2011 Special Issue of this Journal on "Tourism governance: critical perspectives on governance and sustainability", and in a number of recent papers in the Journal (Hartman, 2016;Wray, 2015).…”

Adaptation, interaction and urgency: a complex evolutionary economic geography approach to leisure

“…Whether a development is an emerging, self-organizing process, stems from a bottom-up self-governing process or is top-down initiated by a municipality does not give guarantees for a positive outcome. In the long run, the question is whether development like the cruise port in Harlingen can be made flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances (Hartman, 2015), for instance in changing focus from sea-going cruises to river cruises if this proves more opportune.…”

“…Baggio, 2008;Farsari, Butler, & Szivas, 2011;Hartman, 2015;Ma & Hassink, 2013;McDonald, 2009;Russell & Faulkner, 1999;Zahra & Ryan, 2007). Russell and Faulkner (1999) use a chaos and complexity perspective to analyze the development of Gold Coast in Australia, and show how the actions of just a few individuals, which they refer to as 'movers and shakers', can have large and disproportionate effects on the development of an area.…”

“…We therefore argue that planning for leisure-led regional development is a complex process (Hartman, 2015). By examining the past and current evolution of leisure-led regional development, we ascertain enabling and constraining factors in this process.…”

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