Tourism Resilience: Theoretical Foundations, Frameworks and Critical Perspectives

Resilience has become one of the defining organizing concepts in tourism scholarship, propelled by a cascade of shocks culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the concept is theoretically plural and frequently applied loosely. This review synthesizes the principal theories that underpin tourism resilience, tracing its migration from ecological and social-ecological systems (SES) thinking into tourism as a complex adaptive system, and setting out the tourism-specific frameworks that operationalize it from Faulkner’s disaster lifecycle and Ritchie’s strategic crisis management to Calgaro and colleagues’ Destination Sustainability Framework, Lew’s scalar account of community resilience, and Hall, Prayag and Amore’s multi-scalar synthesis. It distinguishes the absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities and the associated ‘bounce-back’ versus ‘bounce-forward’ debate. The review then advances a critical reading: that dominant framings can under-theorize power and agency, risk depoliticizing crises, and rest on a thin empirical base. It is concluded that agenda be acted upon as prioritized set of recommendations with responsible actors, resource requirements, context-specific indicators, implementation barriers and governance arrangements and with testable research questions attentive to African and other Global-South destinations.

tourism resilience; social-ecological systems; adaptive cycle; crisis and disaster management; transformation; destination sustainability; context-specific indicators; governance.

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