Linking resilience thinking and sustainability pillars to ecotourism principles

Abstract

Ecotourism is promoted as a form of tourism that reconciles the conflicting goals of tourism development and the conservation of nature. It is also associated with the concepts of sustainability and, increasingly, resilience. Scholars and development agencies contend that a resilience approach may assist humanity in better managing its responses to changes within socio-ecological systems (SESs) and that it may be effective in correcting the unsustainable trajectory of human societies (see Lebel et al., 2006). The purpose of this chapter is to examine the nexus between the concepts of resilience and sustainability in order to conceptualise how and where the three concepts, sustainability, resilience, and ecotourism, overlap and diverge, and to then present them as a conceptual model of ecotourism resilience and sustainability. This step is important for assisting in the development of practical business models to guide all tourism operations along more sustainable and resilient paths.