Tourism Management 44 (2014) 161e163

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Tourism Management
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tourman

Research Note

Assessing and planning resilience in tourism

Tobias Luthe*, Romano Wyss
Institute for Tourism and Leisure, University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur, Comercialstrasse 20, CH-7000 Chur, Switzerland

h i g h l i g h t s

Tourism needs new strategies to cope with complex interrelated change impacts.

Resilience has much explanatory power for tourism coping with change.

There is a lack of resilience assessment and planning in tourism.

Network governance provides a promising angle to tourism resilience.

Resilience research in tourism should combine quantitative and qualitative methods.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This research note reflects the lack of work on tourism governance and resilience with regard to inter-
Received 11 March 2014 related impacts of global environmental change. For tourism management, assessing and planning
Accepted 19 March 2014 resilience is of growing importance since change processes and their interrelations have become more
complex in a globalized, accelerated world, placing tourism under pressure to respond and adapt to
Keywords: various factors. Adaptation and transformation processes to changing environmental, social and eco-
Network governance
nomic conditions require initiatives by various tourism actors with different functions in the tourism
Network metrics
supply chain, and on different scales of governance, to be able to assess, plan and manage resilience over
Quantitative and qualitative data
Literature gap
time. Resilience as a concept has much explanatory power that requires more attention in tourism
Research outlook research, both from a quantitative network governance and a more qualitatively informed research
perspective.
Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. A lack of resilience assessments in the tourism literature
Tourism destinations, regions and actors around the world are
confronted with various connected governance, management and
policy challenges, such as coping with climate change, de-
mographic shifts and economic turmoil. While possible adaptation
pathways to such impacts have been broadly analyzed in the
literature, little research to date has dealt with the complexity of
tourism governance, destination development and management
from a resilience perspective. Resilience of tourism systems as
interrelated social-economic-ecological systems (SEES) describes
the capacity of these systems to deal with stresses by maintaining
the stability of the tourism-related regional economy while
ensuring the flexibility and diversity necessary for innovation and
further development (e.g. Nelson, Adger, & Brown, 2007). Existing
tourism focused studies either conceptualize resilience
theoretically (Strickland-Munro, Allison, & Moore, 2010) or assess
resilience based on qualitative experiences and perceptions of in-
dividual or collective stakeholders (Becken, 2013; Espiner &
Becken, 2013; Ruiz-Ballesteros, 2011). Few studies have adopted a
quantitative network governance perspective and link these to the
interpretation of (network) metrics (Luthe, Wyss, & Schuckert,
2012), and even fewer have integrated quantitative metrics with
qualitative data (Wyss, Abegg, & Luthe, in press). Much qualitative
in-depth knowledge of tourism systems exists, but it has not been
used to a large extent to complement quantitative resilience as-
sessments, neither have qualitative studies made considerable use
of quantitative network approaches.
2. Quantitative network (governance) analysis as a
proposition for well-grounded resilience assessments in
tourism

Resilience of tourism systems as SEES is closely related to the

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ41 77 4689 259. concept of network governance, with regard to different organi-
E-mail addresses: tobias.luthe@htwchur.ch, info@tobiasluthe.de (T. Luthe). zational scales. The tourism literature acknowledges that better

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2014.03.011
0261-5177/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
162 T. Luthe, R. Wyss / Tourism Management 44 (2014) 161e163
collaboration and coordination of activities can enhance the per-
formance of both individual actors and of destinations (Pansiri,
2008), while the development of collaborative networks faces
various barriers of resource constraints, common goals, and lack of
trust (Saxena & Ilbery, 2008). The long-term success of individual
business actors, as well as of the whole destination, heavily de-
pends on the collaboration, integration and coordination of each
actor’s individual resources, activities and services (Beritelli, Bieger,
& Laesser, 2007), while understanding tourists as being part of a
joint product development process.
Following the broader SEES-governance literature, a network
governance structure supporting resilience has to meet two
fundamental criteria or governance modes (Folke, Hahn, Olsson, &
Norberg, 2005): (1) Preparing for disturbance by creating and
maintaining diversity for example by enhancing decentralized
processes of social learning, and (2) responding to disturbance by
creating and maintaining flexibility, for example by strengthening
centralized collective action. The literature on network governance
proposes a number of metrics to measure resilience such as size,
density, centrality, efficiency, cohesion and modularity (Baggio,
Scott, & Cooper, 2010; Costa, Rodrigues, Travieso, & Villas Boas,
2007; Scott, Cooper, & Baggio, 2008). These network metrics can
be interpreted with respect to their meaning for resilience in
tourism systems. While providing ample opportunity to under-
stand resilience, the interpretations of metrics are often based on
theoretically derived assumptions, and rarely validated by a deep
understanding of the underlying social perceptions and processes
of the particular case and its specific challenges. In addition, metrics
are based on the structural assessment of networks and rarely take
the functionality of ties within networks sufficiently into account.
3. Qualitative backing of quantitative results in a resilience
context
Assumptions and interpretations of network-based resilience
metrics should be related and validated with qualitative data
regarding social processes and perceptions of stakeholders to bet-
ter understand the system at stake. Part of such integrated analyses
will be to distinguish the quality (functionality) from the quantity
(structure) of ties. Network metrics interpretations are based on the
existence of ties and the structure of networks, but their quality and
functionality may influence the assessment and interpretation of
resilience. On the other hand, qualitative studies should better
integrate the systemic insights provided by quantitative network
analyses to gain a more complete assessment of resilience factors in
tourism.
4. Further research perspective
There is a clear lack of resilience studies within the field of
tourism which complement quantitative network analyses with
qualitative data allowing for a validation of metric interpretations.
Yet this validation is paramount on the (long) path to a more
integrative approach towards the understanding of (complex)
tourism resilience.
A review of the current literature on resilience in tourism re-
veals exemplified conceptual, management and policy oriented
research questions, which are of key interest in the assessment and
planning of resilience in a tourism context:
1. How do assessments based on structural and on functional
tourism networks complement resilience understanding,
including functional positions of stakeholders, different forms of
ties (economic, social, social-ecological), and different scales of
governance?
2. On what scale of governance should processes of planning and
managing resilience take place, and how do such processes
interrelate between different governance scales?
3. How can tourism systems best adapt to both slow change pro-
cesses (such as climate change) as well as prompt change im-
pacts (such as an economic crises) requiring different forms of
innovation, adaptation and structural transformation?
In our view, more case studies should investigate resilience to
specific tourism challenges from a quantitative network gover-
nance angle and then validate the interpreted assumptions with
in-depth understandings of the systems. This will allow for the
evaluation of interpretations of network metrics and for the
further establishment of integrated methods for resilience as-
sessments within the field of tourism. It will ultimately help to
improve the planning for and management of resilience in tourism
dependent regions and areas on different governance and time
scales.
References
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Tobias Luthe is a professor for Sustainability Science and
director of research at the Institute for Tourism and Lei-
sure, University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur,
Switzerland, and visiting professor at the Centre for Key
Qualifications, University of Freiburg, Germany. Tobias
holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences, a M.Sc. in Forest
Sciences and Environmental Economics, and a M.A. in
Communication and Education on Sustainability. His
research interests include the interrelations within socio-
economic-ecological systems, specifically the resilience of
such systems to environmental change and their transi-
tions towards sustainability, focusing on mountain and
Arctic communities and regions, on tourism, and on
renewable energy systems. He is interested in the quanti-
fication and communication of sustainability, and in the
development and integration of transdisciplinary methods
in sustainability science.
 T. Luthe, R. Wyss / Tourism Management 44 (2014) 161e163
Romano Wyss holds a B.Sc. in Geography from the Uni-
versity of Fribourg (Switzerland) and a M.Sc. in Economics
and Geography from Utrecht University (Netherlands). He
is research associate at the University of Applied Sciences
HTW Chur and specializes in the study of humaneenvi-
ronment interactions in resource-dependent communities,
sustainable tourism development and climate change
adaptation in the Alps and the Arctic. He is currently
163
finishing his PhD-studies at the Geography Department
of the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, focusing
on climate change adaptation processes in alpine tourism
systems. He is affiliated member of the Sustainability
Doctoral School at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-
Ingolstadt and member of the Society of Geographers of
Eastern Switzerland.