On Flickering, Tipping Points, Trajectories, Transitions, Transformations, Regime Shifts, and Resiliences in Tourism: Why Resilient Does Not Mean Better and Why Change is Not Always Sustainable

The concepts of transition, transformation, tipping points, and resilience have gained currency in recent years given the impacts of crisis events on tourism. However, while their use has grown in academic and policy circles, their conceptualisation and implications are insufficiently considered. The paper argues that they are essentially contested concepts that are highly normative and political in scope reflecting the values and interests of actors in tourism development. These issues frame the conceptual implications of different destination and tourism development pathways and trajectories. Such pathways are not necessarily transitional (the process of change) or transformative (the shift to a new system state) for different levels of tourism systems and may instead reflect Business as Usual (BAU) or even the intensification of previous trajectories. This reflects the situation that although a pathway and state of a tourism system may be resilient from an engineering resilience perspective, i.e., resistant to change measured by a specific metric like tourist numbers, it may not be sustainable.