Collaboration as potential change agent for sustainable tourism development? A case from Greenland

Description

The paper discusses the possibilities of collaboration being a change agent by analyzing narratives of tourism practitioners in Greenland regarding collaborative activities based on material from the project “Tourism Development in Greenland - Identification and Inspiration” (Ren & Chimirri, 2017) and data from my PhD project. The tourism landscape develops through complex practices occurring across different private and public actors with diverse responsibilities, interests, goals and resources. Additionally, these already challenging social relations are entangled with policy-making and infrastructure. That means that the tourism landscape is continuously contested by the existing relationships amongst actors as well as present conditions in relation to the existing policy frame, infrastructure and resources. Collaboration could represent a possible agent in order to tackle this challenging landscape for future tourism development. Based on relevant data from the previous project (Ren & Chimirri, 2017), data from my PhD fieldwork and in line with widely discussed theoretical notions of collaboration as a productive tool for tourism development (Bramwell & Lane, 2000; Gursoy, Saayman, & Sotiriadis, 2015; Morris & Miller-Stevens, 2015), this paper explores how collaboration could de facto act as a potential change agent. Among others, it discusses how the establishment of a fixed frame of collaboration as a productive tool may be in opposition to collaboration as a creative agent, which flexibly responds to an unstable and continuously changing surrounding. How can this contradiction be taken into consideration when looking at how tourism development emerges in practice? How to work with these tensions within and approaches to collaboration? This paper aims to unfold these questions and to open up the debate on the transformation of Arctic tourism with a specific focus on Greenland and its tourism landscape towards a more sustainable tourism development by collectively developing tourism.

Period	22 Jun 2018 → 28 Jun 2018
Event title	6th International Polar Tourism Research Network (IPTRN) Conference and Community Tour
Event type	Conference
Location	Whitehorse & Dawson City, Canada, YukonShow on map