Fostering Regenerative Mountain Tourism Practices: A Participatory Action Research With High-Altitude Tourism Workers

Nepal’s Himalayas provide the context for this research examining how frontline tourism workers adopt regenerative practices amid paradigmatic shifts. Despite growing interest in regenerative tourism, little is known about how such shifts occur. This study reveals that sustained adoption emerges from workers’ iterative interplay between professional identity reconstruction and multi-dimensional legitimacy evaluations, analyzed through identity work and legitimization as theoretical tools. Workers whose professional self-concepts shift toward stewardship orientations, through experimentation or elevation pathways, and who assess new practices as instrumentally effective, relationally just and morally aligned demonstrate sustained adoption. Those experiencing institutional distrust and resource constraints exhibit defensive entrenchment, understood as a rational adaptive response to structural betrayal rather than as personal deficiency. Theoretically, the study grounds regenerative tourism in socio-cognitive micro-foundations, extending identity and legitimacy theory to frontline tourism labor contexts. Practically, effective regenerative transitions require genuine agency, economic justice and institutional trust, not merely technical training.