Rethinking resilient futures for Nordic tourism

Abstract

Amid escalating environmental degradation, geopolitical and geoeconomic instability, and the structural vulnerabilities exposed by COVID-19 pandemic, resilience has become a central concern in tourism scholarship and policymaking. This introduction and the associated special issue examine how resilience is conceptualised and operationalised in Nordic tourism contexts. It demonstrates that resilience is not a neutral or universally shared idea or goal. The contributions in the special issue highlight how resilience emerges through social innovation in second-home destinations, communication strategies of destination management organisations, biodiversity-oriented leadership in national policy frameworks, post-disaster recovery and transformation processes, and the role of change agency under crisis conditions. These studies offer a multi-scalar view of resilience and reveal how institutional constraints, governance dynamics, and power asymmetries between different actors and scales shape what forms of resilience are possible and included or excluded. Based on this, there is a need to challenge often dominant instrumental and recovery-oriented uses of the concept and call for a more inclusive, ecologically grounded, and politically sensitive research agenda. By synthesising these insights and outlining future directions for resilience research in Nordic tourism, we call for moving beyond managerial framings to engage with the socio-ecological, political, and spatial conditions shaping tourism futures.