Destination Resilience and Sustainable Tourism Development

Abstract

Measuring the resilience of a dynamic system is a difficult undertaking. This article is an effort to present intersecting theories between destination resilience and sustainable tourism. Traditional tourism management relies on a narrow focus based in scientific approaches that are often linear in concept. This type of thinking may lead to some limitations in planning and a full understanding of how the tourism industry operates on various scales. Resilience describes the capacity of a system to absorb change and continue to persist. Sustainability is the intersection of social, economic, institutional, and ecological variables. In this article, a heuristic model is presented that combines and adapts Butler's Tourism Area Life Cycle and Holling's Adaptive Cycle. This heuristic model is intended to stimulate theories on destination resilience within the context of sustainable tourism.