ABSTRACT
The concept of resilience has been the focus of research within a wide range of different dimensions. Recently resilience has also gained importance within tourism and more specifically within the context of tourism destinations (Cochrane, 2010; Dahles & Susilowati, 2015; Luthe & Wyss, 2014). Tourism destinations – interpreted as complex systems (Baggio, Scott, & Cooper, 2010; Farrell & Twining-Ward, 2004) – are constantly exposed to different types of disturbances. These can include gradually emerging stressors as well as abruptly originating shocks (Lew, 2014; Walker, Carpenter, Rockstrom, Crépin, & Peterson, 2012), which moreover can have different effects within the social, ecological and economic dimensions of the destination. The aim of this article is to introduce the concepts of “Engineering Resilience” (Holling, 1973), “Ecological Resilience” (Holling, 1996) and “Evolutionary Resilience” (Davoudi, 2012) and to understand existing tourism literature on destination resilience according to these different approaches. Moreover, by focusing on the absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities of systems connected to the different connotations of resilience (Béné, Wood, Newsham, & Davies, 2012) the authors endeavor to generate different perspectives on how resilience can be approached and measured at destination level.
