Angela HOF, University of Salzburg, Austria
Martin KNOLL, University of Salzburg, Austria
Austria is among the top tourism destinations in Europe and experiences pressing debates on the social and ecological sustainability of tourism. Based on an interdisciplinary analysis of tourism’s social ecology (Hof and Knoll 2020), we aim to identify viable roads into a sustainable future of tourism. The interdisciplinary research will contribute new evidence by combining approaches routed in (Environmental) History and Geography (Human-Environment Research) with case studies in the Austrian federal state of Salzburg. Four destinations of different type (city tourism, heavily developed ski resort, Alpine Association’s Mountaineering Villages) are investigated for tracing back the place-specific development paths that have shaped the tourism-induced transformation, as well as mapping societal practices, material arrangements and economic strategies of the present day tourism economy. The contribution explores the discussions among tourism planners caught in the loop between pandemic waves, lockdowns and travel restrictions and relaxations to extract their visions for a post-pandemic and post-crisis future. For this, we present results from in-depth semi-structured interviews, which we contextualize in the theoretical approaches to sustainable tourism and tourism transformation (Fletcher et al. 2019). Focusing on the lines of inquiry for a future program of research on the biophysical limits to tourism growth (city and Alpine mass tourism) and commoning tourism and redistributing value (Alpine Association's Mountaineering Villages), we discuss reconsiderations of the political economy of tourism as a whole and visions for degrowth from Austrian perspectives.
Mots clés : Alpine tourist destinations|socio-natural sites|degrowth|post-pandemic regrowth
A102895AH