ABSTRACT
Slow change pressures are often persistent in their consistency and mundane in their perceivable immediate impacts. Over time, however, they can have greater impacts than any single natural disaster or social crisis. Social and economic globalization and climate change are examples of slow change phenomena that have come to cause considerable concern across the planet. Despite a long history of alternative tourisms, almost all tourism development contributes to a globalization of the world that is detrimental to natural environmental systems and traditional social systems. How communities adapt to tourism’s impacts, therefore, is a significant indicator of both specific and possibly general resilience. One way to understand slow resilience is to examine the differences between fast and slow drivers of change, and the system variables that are associated with each. Another approach is through the bistability model, which focuses on the more stable and controlling slow changing variables in a system. The adaptive cycle model provides a third approach to understanding slow resilience by equating slow changes with larger systems in a panarchy hierarchy of systems. Alternatively, the Scale, Change, and Resilience model shows how both slow and fast change can exist at multiple system scales. Taking these different approaches into account, along with examples of tourism systems, a slow and fast resilience assessment and planning model is presented, which might be able to structure research and policy in a manner that can tease out the impacts of slow change drivers and determine resilience responses.
