Fragile Sustainability or Sustainable Fragility?

This article explores the materialisations of sustainability in the Logar Valley, an Alpine tourist destination in Slovenia. Drawing on ethnographic research, we examine how sustainability is understood and enacted by local tourism service providers, highlighting four key themes: food practices, the temporalities of tourism, transport, and environmental care. We argue that the local perceptions of sustainability, fragility, and tradition, especially when understood in the context of tourism, function as closely interlinked emic concepts. They serve as a tool or discursive strategy according to which the various actors in Solčavsko position themselves within the multiplicity of social relations between us and them, past and future, nature and culture, tradition and innovation, good and bad. They can thus be understood as socially acceptable tools used by the actors to express their interests in a way that makes these interests appear as “objective”, “rational” or “universally valid” truths.