Speaker
Description
Tourism scholarship has long operated under the normative horizon of sustainability — a framework that, however well-intentioned, encodes a fundamentally defensive logic: reduce harm, minimize footprint, sustain the status quo. This paper argues that such a logic is structurally insufficient. Not because sustainability has failed as a policy aspiration, but because it was never designed to address the deeper question of what tourism could actively restore in ecological and social systems already in deficit.
The regenerative turn, emerging at the intersection of ecological economics, systems thinking, and place-based development theory, reframes the relationship between tourism and its host environments. Where sustainability asks "how little damage can we do?", regeneration asks "what conditions of vitality can tourism help co-create?" The distinction is not merely rhetorical — it implies a fundamentally different ontology of the destination, reconceived not as a resource to be managed but as a living system capable of renewal.
This paper pursues a conceptual-theoretical approach, drawing on paradigm theory (Kuhn) and recent work in regenerative development (Mang & Reed; Wahl) to map the structural contours of this shift within tourism studies. We identify three axes along which the transition from sustainability to regeneration can be theorized: from mitigation to contribution, from carrying capacity to systemic health, and from stakeholder management to community agency. Each axis surfaces a set of unresolved tensions in current tourism governance frameworks.
The paper further examines why regenerative tourism resists straightforward operationalization — partly because regeneration is inherently place-specific and defies universal indicators, partly because it demands a reconfiguration of the value chains that currently structure the industry. These are not obstacles to be overcome by better measurement tools; they point to epistemological commitments that mainstream tourism research has yet to fully confront.
By positioning regenerative tourism as a paradigmatic — rather than merely practical — departure from sustainability discourse, this paper contributes to the growing theoretical literature seeking to articulate what a genuinely post-extractive tourism might look like.
