Tourism as a catalyst for resilience: Insights from a literature review on crisis adaptation and regional development

Abstract

The work discusses the increasingly popular concept of today, resilience, and examines its tourism aspects, presenting the interdisciplinary nature of the definition and the different meanings. International and Hungarian tourism research still needs to address the issue sufficiently. Tourism, one of the most dynamically developing economic sectors, is mainly responsible for territory creation. At the same time, the presence and expansion of tourism have brought the extent of change in systems to the forefront, thus giving rise to a renewed examination of the issue of resilience. The current research shows further relevance:

- The tourism is an open system, on the one hand it is exposed to many external factors (e.g. natural disasters, economic recession, epidemics, political conflicts, terrorist attacks), and on the other hand it continuously influences its environment (the latter is also referred to when reporting the results).

- Resilience is vital for the sustainability of tourism.

- Due to the acceleration of the flow of information, tourism today reacts much more sensitively to political, economic and health crises observed in the world.

At the same time, the question arises as to how one can include a tourism product in resilience, as well as how to measure whether tourism is the right path to resilience or whether tourism can be the key to resilience in a geographical area or how resilience can be an opportunity, and whether it can mean the same opportunity for everyone, and how can everyone make use of it?

Our research aimed to examine the evolution of tourism and its closely related geographical space’s resilience to crises and identify. We aimed to identify possible paths of adaptation that would allow us to follow the path towards resilience. The tourism research community and regional development practitioners thematically mapped out possible responses to tourism and geographical space crises. Researchers have yet to publish work on this topic, and we consider our work to be missing.

To achieve our aim, namely to examine the diversity of adaptability in this field, we have collected literature. To do this, we used ResearchGate, a global research community connectivity platform. Using the platform's search engine, we reviewed 50 academic articles. We typed "tourism and resilience" into the search engine and took the first 50 works as a sample. We investigated how resilience manifests in the relationship between tourism (tourist destination) and geographical space. It observed resilience in three aspects:

1. When tourism is the cause of resilience.
2. When tourism is in a situation where it has had to recover resiliently.
3. When tourism is a key factor in the resilience of geographical space.

Among our results, the importance and outstanding role of examining resilience can be seen. This is confirmed by the geographical coverage and diversity of the 50 studies, which were carried out in 26 different countries. Statistical analysis provides evidence of the relationship (or lack of it) between developed and developing countries. The schematic diagrams (3 of them), which provide an opportunity to analyze the complex role of tourism in different contexts, are considered to be a truly new and original result of the article. They could provide an excellent basis for future research and policymakers.