Using a Community-Based Stewardship Approach to Create Resilient and Adaptive Tourism Destinations Based on Nordic Tourism Policies

Tourist destinations must demonstrate adaptability and resistance to unpredictable events (such as the Covid-19 pandemic, war conflicts, and economic collapse) or stress factors resulting from predictable changes and evolutions in the social (i.e. demographic changes), economic (i.e. employment and income issues) and environmental areas (i.e. climate change). Cities, communes and other localities must look for new management approaches that allow the tourism sector to quickly and flexibly adapt to these increasingly new challenges. The chapter is founded on the thesis that the community-based stewardship approach can ensure the resilience of tourist destinations to sudden and unpredictable changes in external and internal conditions. Based on the available literature on the subject, a community-based stewardship model was proposed, which shows the local community’s principal elements and activators of self-organization in terms of quick response to suddenly emerging challenges. The proposed model was compared with the main postulates of Nordic tourism policies, which emphasize the elements that activate the self-organization of the local community.