Abstract
While there is rich research on tourism destination evolution, the literature on how normative social and environmental goals (as opposed to contingent events or economic imperatives) drive the evolution of tourism towards more sustainable forms remains under-developed. As a result, the overall understanding of how sustainability in tourism is pursued on the ground and what context specific factors shape these processes is still insufficient. To address this lacuna, the paper draws upon the sustainability transitions (ST) agenda that focuses on the ground level processes of transitions and conceptualises sustainability transitions as multi-actor, multi-dimensional, evolutionary, disruptive and contested processes. As such, the paper offers a constructive response to Niewiadomski and Brouder’s (2022) call for bridging the gap between the research on tourism evolution and the sustainability transitions agenda. More specifically, the paper adopts selected concepts of evolutionary economic geography (EEG) (which have long proved helpful in research on both tourism evolution and sustainability transitions) to address how sustainability in tourism is mindfully pursued in the Outer Hebrides (Scotland, UK) and what geographical and historical factors shape this transition. The analysis draws from 17 semi-structured interviews (conducted in 2020-2021 with tourism businesses and various organisations involved in tourism in the Outer Hebrides) and documentary analysis. Two main groups of place- and path-dependent factors that shape the ongoing transition to sustainable tourism in the Outer Hebrides are identified: 1) institutional and social fragmentation, and 2) infrastructural deficiencies and challenges. The paper finds that the transition to sustainability in tourism in the Outer Hebrides is fragmented and intermittent. Although numerous promising changes are taking place, the transition suffers from a lack of systemic and systematic governance.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 214-236 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Tourism Geographies |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 23 Nov 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Open Access via the Taylor and Francis/JISC agreementAcknowledgements
This project was funded by the University of Aberdeen’s Research Enhancement Scheme. The authors are grateful to the funder for supporting their research endeavour. Ethical approval for this research was granted by the University of Aberdeen’s Physical Sciences & Engineering Ethics Review Board and by Sheffield Hallam University Ethics Review process in May 2020.
Keywords
- Outer Hebrides (Western Isles)
- sustainable tourism
- destination evolution
- path dependence
- sustainability transitions
- Scotland
Access to Document
- Niewiadomski_etal_TG_Transitioning_Towards_Sustainable_VoR
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.