COVID-19 and Africa's aviation and tourism sectors: A new agenda for the future?

Abstract

Although the impact of COVID-19 is inordinately enormous, there remains a lack of attention to the new governance architecture, the African Union High-Level Task Force (AU-HLTF), in Africa's aviation and tourism sectors in its wake, which this paper primarily examines. We foregrounded governance themes of political economy within the African Union High-Level Task Force (AU-HLTF) through secondary data, observing 90 key industry leaders and 10 purposively sampled semi-structured interviews. We found the insignificant priority in tourism restart via LCCs first, the incongruent holistic relationship between the restart of the aviation and tourism sectors. Secondly, the historical-geographical material relationships within the new governance framework. Thirdly, the AU-HLTF intervention is actor-biased towards the aviation sector and rooted in path dependency. A hierarchical-mixed market governing typology we propose by arguing is a steering mechanism of public sector reform that alternatively reboots a balanced path towards sustainability by prioritizing intra-tourism promoted by low-cost carriers.