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Sustainability or Resilience? Preparing the Future of Tour Guiding in Tourism

This workshop explores the concepts of sustainability and resilience in the context of tour guiding, discussing the challenges and opportunities for sustainable tourism. It examines the interplay between sustainability and resilience and the importance of cultural heritage in creating a sustainable and resilient tourism industry.

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Sustainability or Resilience? Preparing the Future of Tour Guiding in Tourism

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  1. Noel B. Salazar, PhD Cultural Mobilities Research soc.kuleuven.be/cumore Sustainability or Resilience?Preparing the Future of Tour Guiding in Tourism Workshop on Tour Guiding and Sustainability 7-8 December 2017 – Uppsala University, Gotland

  2. Concepts matter

  3. Sustainability • Well-known discourse • Sustainability = ongoing process of development that does not jeopardize current and future environmental, economical or social resources • Sustainability’s 9/11 • Our Common Future (1987), UN World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) • Ecological: Environmental degradation • Social: Third World poverty • Focus on environmental quality (vs. human equality) • Sustainable development • Value-laden: Project (linear) vs. Process (cyclical) • Misnomer? Development vs. Sustainability

  4. Sustainability

  5. Sustainable tourism • According to UNWTO • Tourism that meets the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting (~ low impact) and enhancing opportunity (~ income & employment) for the future • Sustainability and heritage • Common theme of ‘inheritance’ of assets • Protection: Conservation vs. Safeguarding • Transport: Sustainable mobility • Environmentally sustainable holiday travel: e.g. voluntary carbon offsetting schemes for aviation • Type of product vs. Ethos? • Alternative forms of tourism vs. Mass tourism

  6. Resilience • Ability to resist & recover from ‘difficulties’ • Adaptation to change by attempting to build capacity to return to a desired state following both anticipated and unanticipated disruptions • May or may not align with sustainability principles • Cultural resilience considers how cultural background (i.e. culture, values, language, customs, and norms) helps people overcome adversity

  7. Resilience

  8. Tour guiding

  9. Official tour guiding Alternative tour guiding Internet-mediated tour guiding Entrepeneurial tour guiding

  10. Interpretation = the art of interpreting (and provoking) by ‘painting’ evocative mental pictures that are at the same time educational and entertaining • Mediates the gap between the tourism imaginaries sold and the reality on the ground • Performance > actual transmitted content • Interactive = always to some extent improvised, creative and spontaneous, defying complete standardization ( external image control) • Selling  Telling  Sharing

  11. Offer

  12. Time’s up!

  13. Points for discussion • Sustainability • Inherited or borrowed conceptions and assumptions • Mass tourism vs. sustainability • Various sustainabilities are difficult to combine and some seem not to be at all compatible • A sustainable society must also be an equitable society • Future challenges of tour guiding, also in the context of crises, will be linked to the dynamic interplay between sustainability and resilience. • Destinations (including their tour guides) may be resilient without being sustainable, but cannot be sustainable if they are not also resilient. • Importance of culture.

  14. Selected References • 2016. Culture broker, tourism. In J. Jafari & H. Xiao (Eds.), Encyclopedia of tourism. Cham: Springer International. • 2014. Tourism imaginaries: Anthropological approaches. Oxford: Berghahn. • 2014. To be or not to be a tourist: The role of concept-metaphors in tourism studies. Tourism Recreation Research, 38. • 2013. Imagineering otherness: Anthropological legacies in contemporary tourism. Anthropological Quarterly, 86(3), 669-696. • 2012. Tourism imaginaries: A conceptual approach. Annals of Tourism Research, 39(2), 863-882. • 2010. Tourism and cosmopolitanism: A view from below. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 1(1), 55-69. • 2010. Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing imaginaries in tourism and beyond. Oxford: Berghahn. More at: http://is.gd/nbsalazar

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