NS34 Session 19

 

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Abstracts

Title: Pedagogical Practices in Tourism Higher Education: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Deisi Maricato, University of Iceland, Jessica Aquino, and Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson

This presentation presents the results of a systematic literature review on teaching practices in higher education in the field of Tourism, with a particular focus on the educational discourses that shape knowledge production. The study aims to answer the following research question: What is the dominant educational discourse that guides knowledge production in tourism teaching practices? To address this question, a systematic review of peer-reviewed academic articles published between 2019 and 2025 and indexed in multiple international academic repositories was conducted, encompassing literature from both the Global North and the Global South.

The review included journal articles published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, based on the author's language proficiency. The analysis was conducted in English and rigorously followed the PRISMA protocol for systematic reviews. The selected studies were examined according to their theoretical and methodological approaches, pedagogical models, and the types of knowledge prioritized in higher education in tourism.

The results reveal recurring patterns and significant gaps in the literature, particularly the dominance of specific epistemological paradigms and the limited integration of diverse perspectives. The discussion highlights the relevance of adopting a decolonizing approach to tourism education, emphasizing the inclusion of multiple epistemologies, situated knowledges, and varied sociocultural contexts. This study contributes to ongoing academic debates, fostering critical reflection on established teaching practices and identifying opportunities for pedagogical innovation that support more inclusive, reflective, and sustainable approaches to tourism education.

 

Title: Community-Led Tourism Governance in Estonian National Parks: Grassroots Innovation in a Centralized System
Authors: Kaisa Linno, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tarmo Pilving, and Monika Suškevičs

Protected areas are increasingly challenged by rising visitor numbers, environmental pressures, and the need to balance conservation objectives with local community well-being. Although collaborative and community-inclusive approaches are widely promoted, national parks typically remain governed through centralized, state-led institutional frameworks. This often limits local participation in tourism development and reduces opportunities for communities to respond to changing socio-economic and environmental conditions.

This paper examines emerging forms of community-led tourism governance within Estonian national parks, which represent some of the oldest protected areas in the post-Soviet region and are among the country’s most significant tourism destinations. Despite a historically centralized management system, local communities have begun to organize into tourism associations that function as grassroots, non-governmental governance actors. These associations bring together local entrepreneurs, residents, and other stakeholders, forming collaborative networks that actively shape tourism development alongside formal park authorities.

Drawing on a qualitative case study approach, the paper explores how these community-led initiatives contribute to co-created tourism practices and institutional innovation within a highly regulated context. The findings suggest that grassroots governance structures can expand local participation, enhance community capacity, and foster more adaptive and place-based tourism development. In doing so, they complement formal management systems and strengthen the resilience of protected areas in times of crisis and ongoing change.

 

Title: Co-Creating Regenerative Tourism Futures: Preliminary Insights from Participatory Action Research in Iceland
Author: Annika Hanau, University of Wuppertal

As tourism destinations navigate intersecting pressures of overtourism, ecological strain, and socio-economic inequality, regenerative tourism has emerged as a framework that moves beyond harm reduction towards actively enhancing community and ecological wellbeing (Bellato & Pollock, 2025; Dredge, 2022). Yet its operationalisation at the destination level remains conceptually under-specified, particularly in Nordic and Arctic contexts where place-based identities, centre-periphery dynamics, and small-scale community structures shape both the opportunities and limits of transformative approaches (Jóhannesson et al., 2025).

This contribution draws on preliminary empirical insights from participatory workshops conducted in Reykjavík and Hvammstangi, Iceland, in September 2025, as part of an ongoing PhD project. Engaging tourism entrepreneurs, municipal actors, and community representatives, the workshops functioned as arenas of dialogical learning and capacity sharing. Findings reveal that while sustainability has become an established baseline, regenerative tourism demands a deeper paradigm shift: reframing tourism as a living system that actively co-evolves with place and generates new potential, rather than merely reducing harm (Reed, 2007).

The comparison between Reykjavík's mature urban context and Hvammstangi's peripheral rural setting illustrates how regenerative capacity is shaped by local agency, governance structures, and community embeddedness in decision-making. Barriers including financial constraints, knowledge gaps, and systemic misalignment point to the need for supportive policy environments and peer learning networks rather than individual operator-level change alone. This contribution argues that participatory workshops are not merely research methods but catalysts for co-creating resilient tourism communities across contrasting destination contexts.

 

Title: 'Infrastructuring' Renewable Energy Transitions: Mobilities, Rural Space and the Visitor Economy
Authors: Solène Prince, Linnaeus University, Marianna Strzelecka, and Scott Cohen

Rural destinations worldwide are being integrated in renewable energy transitions to accommodate the expansion of renewable energy infrastructure. In this presentation, we argue that to be fair processes for rural dwellers, renewable energy transitions must be understood as wider socio-material reconfigurations of rural space mediated through the infrastructures that sustain the mobilities of people, information, and resources. Renewable energy transitions are as much processes of circulation as they are products of technological innovation. While existing research in renewable energy transitions has emphasized the materiality of energy infrastructures and its impact on the energy resilience of communities, limited attention has been given to the way these transitions transform the fabric of rural communities and impact their wider socio-economic resilience.

This presentation examines how the movement of workers involved in the materialization of renewable energy systems (meaning those who design, construct, and maintain them) transforms rural space by giving opportunities for regional development and community resilience. Adopting the conceptual lens of ‘infrastructuring’, we present the infrastructure that enables and accommodates the mobilities of these workers as relational and processual. We approach renewable energy transitions as processes of circulation that reconfigure material and social relations in rural space.

The findings come from interview with accommodation providers in a rural municipality in Sweden where wind parks and other industrial development related to sustainability transitions have been and are being developed. The findings reveal how the infrastructures supporting worker mobility generate ripple effects that intersect with the tourism economy and the intimacy of hospitality, creating new socio-material tensions and socio-economic opportunities for rural communities in renewable energy transitions. By foregrounding the interplay between mobility, infrastructure, and rural life, this presentation raises questions around a more nuanced understanding of how renewable energy transitions intersect with tourism mobilities, contribute to regional development, and reconstitute resilient rural space beyond their immediate material footprint.

 

Title: The Role of Entrepreneurship in Sustaining a Vibrant Archipelago
Authors: Gustaf Onn, Södertörn University, Saeid Abbasian, Maria Thulemark and Christian Widholm

and Anita Radon

The purpose of this project is to increase understanding of entrepreneurship in an archipelago context and how entrepreneurship affects the ability to live and work on Swedish islands. The research questions are

1. What does the geography of entrepreneurship look like in Stockholm Archipelago?
2. How do the archipelago stakeholders view the concept of a living archipelago?
3. What roles do entrepreneurs have in the creation and maintenance of a living archipelago and how does this connect to the place they operate in?

The project has received grants from the Kamprad family foundation and will be carried out 2027-2029.

The focus is on islands lacking a fixed link via tunnel or bridge to the mainland, and they share the rural situation with low levels of services, long transportations, limited public transport, demographic challenges, but also environments with high touristic values.

In human geography, theory delas with the meaning of places, how places construct ideas, attitudes, innovation, creativity etc. and how the places are reformed by people at them, through their thoughts, norms and behaviours.

Archipelago entrepreneurial embeddedness may also create forced place-attachment, where the limited opportunities, lack of resources, influential business connections and networks forces them to rely on the own local context and mobilise available resources to create room for manoeuvre and maintain their place-attachment. We aim to break with the traditional research on embeddedness and catch something more fluent and multilayered, where a process approach considers different degrees of embeddedness.