Relational–regenerative leadership among women entrepreneurs in food tourism

Leadership research in tourism and hospitality has largely privileged autonomous, rational and hierarchical models, marginalising relational, care-based and embodied practices. This study examines how women entrepreneurs in Spanish food tourism perform, negotiate and embody leadership through a poststructuralist feminist and intersectional lens, in dialogue with Feminist Agri-Food Systems Theory. Using grounded theory, the analysis combines in situ observations of five women-led initiatives in Catalonia with 21 semi-structured interviews across Spanish regions. Findings conceptualise leadership as a situated accomplishment, relationally enacted and materially embodied, rather than a neutral managerial role. Two themes emerged: relational and regenerative leadership, encompassing care, collaboration and situated ethics; and embodied resistance and gendered negotiations of authority, including affective agency and legitimacy work. Across both themes, leadership operates through three mechanisms: legibility and legitimacy, accountability displacement, and infrastructures of recognition, such as networks, linguistic belonging, and access to capital. The study advances a relational regenerative leadership framework illuminating small-scale socio-ecological change within food tourism, while exposing how the labour of care and resilience becomes intensified and disproportionately placed on women entrepreneurs. Implications point to the need for destination governance and industry support systems to redistribute recognition, resources and responsibility.