Co-designing emergent opportunities for sustainable development on the verges of inertia, sustaining tourism and re-imagining tourism

Abstract

Extant literature point to difficulties related to enabling transitions to sustainable tourism development. Supplementing hereto, this study explored how we may collaboratively design (co-design) opportunities for sustainable tourism futures. Based on fieldwork involving co-designing tourism with a diverse range of practitioners centred on Lake Mjøsa in Norway, it unfolds how an understanding and construction of ‘Our Mjøsa’ surfaced. By analysing the contingent processes and ensuing outcomes, the study introduces a framework for understanding how opportunities may – and may not – emerge and enable sustainable development. The framework comprises four dynamic zones including two of inertia, one of sustaining tourism and one of re-imagining tourism. The study argues that traditional tourism approaches often are located within zones of inertia and sustaining tourism and consequently overlook or fail to engage series of opportunities for sustainability transitions. Within the latter zone of re-imagining tourism, it shows how opportunities can emerge as ‘yours and mine’, together as our sustainable tourism futures. Altogether, the findings suggest that the ongoing tempo-spatial shifts and flows on the verges of inertia, sustaining tourism and re-imagining tourism allow for simultaneously revealing and making more transparent the implicit and explicit assumptions underpinning current tourism practice, while re-imagining our sustainable tourism futures.