Climate change and tourism: scholars’ reflections on transformative research

Farsari, Ioanna; Bakker, Martine; Carvalho, Liliana

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/20254

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Authors

Farsari, Ioanna

Bakker, Martine

Carvalho, Liliana

Abstract(s)

Climate change has become a key topic of attention within the tourism industry and among tourism scholars over the last 20 years however, research has largely focused around the industry’s and entrepreneurs’ perceptions (Tervo-Kankare, 2019); impacts and adaptation measures in destina tions (Becken et al., 2020; Demiroglu et al., 2019; Scott et al., 2019); or tourists’ perceptions and travel behaviour (Becken et al., 2021). Although the need for transformative changes in societies and in the tourism system has drawn research interest (Bellato et al., 2022; Bertella, 2022; Pritchard et al., 2011) there is little discussion around the transformative nature of tourism research regarding climate change. Transformative approaches invite the researcher to reflect and critically examine their role in maintaining unsustainability or bringing change (Mertens, 2021). Epistemologically, they acknowledge the subjective character of research and point to the direction of communication of researcher’s role and values. While transformative approaches acknowledge the importance of reflexivity, researchers’ identities, diverse interests and power, they enable the integration of conventional and disruptive methodologies. Collaborative methods aiming to bridge the theory practice gap, together with reflexivity, have this transformation potential through co-creation and caring (Liburd et al., 2022). With this research note, we want to draw attention to those aspects and invite discussion around climate change and tourism research and reflexivity over our scholarly role. To the knowledge of the authors, there is very little documentation and discussion on how we, tourism scholars, present, discuss and reflect on our research and our role as scholars, and more specifically around transformative climate change research