ABSTRACT
The emergence of an ‘evolutionary turn’ within economic geography over the last two decades (Coe, 2010; Grabher, 2009; Pike, MacKinnon, & Cumbers, 2015) has recently resulted in a major step forward in tourism research and regional development studies (see Brouder, Anton Clavé, Gill, & Ioannides, 2017). As a framework, the evolutionary turn enables a deeper understanding of the relationship between the tourism economy and the overall community economic development of places (which are more than just ‘destinations’ and bounded territorial spaces). Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) is proving to be a new path towards understanding the long-term sustainable development of destinations (Brouder, 2017). An important advantage of an evolutionary approach is that it takes tourism out of a tourism-centric focus into broader regional and relational contexts, which are vital for understanding the resilience of places.
