Shaping sustainable tourism: local insights for Svalbard’s future

Abstract

ABSTRACT While tourism is frequently heralded as a key agent of opportunity and change in the Arctic, transformative change in the polar regions comes with a great deal of uncertainty. The strongly hierarchical Svalbard policy context allows limited action space for expanding tourism or developing new products. Still, Tourism is strictly regulated, and it is debatable whether the local residents have any real say in the shaping of development paths. Nevertheless, understanding local attitudes is always a component in building relationships between public institutions and local stakeholders. Albeit a constraining policy context, knowledge about stakeholder attitudes can provide valuable information about the consequences of alternative policy strategies and interventions that are likely to build or degrade trust in institutions with power. We surveyed the residents of Longyearbyen (N = 238) through an ad-hoc sample to examine attitudes toward effects of tourism, interaction with tourists, and to what extent local attitudes align with or depart from a plausible local interpretation of how key sustainable development goals (SDG) could inform and direct sustainable development of tourism in Svalbard. Current tourism practices face challenges related to several SDGs targeting work conditions, climate change and environmental management.