The COVID-19 pandemic has, over the last two years, exacerbated patterns and processes of uneven development globally (Bailey et al., 2020) with many tourism and tourism destinations suffering from the loss of visitors, contraction of the industry and job loss. In the Asia-Pacific, where some of strictest curbs on movement have been imposed, given how reliant many destinations are on international travel, the effects have been profound. In the case of New Zealand, premier international destinations such as the West Coast, Queenstown and Fjordland lost 100% of their international tourists who had generated up to 90% of their revenue. How these places have responded reflects on local levels of resilience, capacity to adapt and potentially also to diversify their income streams. Such responses, at a theoretical level, share much with thinking around ‘lock-in’, regional resilience, adaptation and new path development (Martin, 2020; Martin and Sunley, 2020). Of equal significance, particularly in smaller more vulnerable communities, are the roles played by local social and human capital and collaborative governance in galvanising local response to crises and identifying and developing new economic paths. As evidence discussed in this paper reflects, the ability to fully or partially achieve ‘destination resilience’ (Amore et al., 2018) has been dependent on the existence of high levels of bonding and bridging capital (Murigani et al., 2021) as a facilitator of the immediate responses to the crisis as it evolved in early 2020. Thereafter, this was supplemented with place based leadership, and attempts at adaptation through diversification as places sought to adapt to new-found realities. The paper maps out the process of change in the New Zealand study areas and the impact of overlays of global changes, border closures, local and national governance responses and business and community inputs, identifying emerging processes of bouncing back or transformation.
Keywords: Tourism|Resilience|Social Capital|New Zealand|Adaptation
A103284EN