Tourism Sustainability, Resiliency and Dynamics: Towards a More Comprehensive Perspective

Abstract

This paper uses insights from a basic but formal model of tourism dynamics to frame a discussion of sustainability in tourism planning, with a particular focus on the role of dynamic resilience — or the ability of social, economic or ecological systems to recover from tourism-induced stress. The paper presents a theoretical approach to model resiliency in the ecological-environmental quality, economic-fiscal quality and social-cultural quality of tourist destinations. The model also formalises the difference between actual and perceived changes in these vectors. The specific goals of the paper are to characterise a more quantitative approach towards tourism sustainability and resilience, to summarise results in the tourism literature that might contribute to initial empirical implementation of such quantitative models, and to stimulate debate regarding the potential role of such approaches in guiding tourism policy. © 2008, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.