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Paper short abstract:

This research explores how the tourism industry governing stakeholders from the public and private sectors in Japan are working together to respond to the challenges for sustainable tourism development during a crisis and increase the industry’s resilience.

Paper long abstract:

This research explores how the tourism industry governing stakeholders from the public and private sectors in Japan are working together to respond to the challenges for sustainable tourism development during a crisis and increase the industry’s resilience. This research utilizes a blended method involving qualitative interviews to investigate experts’ thoughts on sustainable tourism development, challenges to its governance during a crisis, and their insights on changes and transformations towards a more resilient and sustainable tourism industry and the thematic content analysis of national- and prefectural-level tourism development plans.

This research has a goal to investigate sustainable tourism development before, during, and immediately after the COVID-19 crisis, which has been a critical time for the tourism industry in Japan and all over the world. Moreover, this research pursues to uncover the true sustainable nature of tourism, which involves substantial collaboration between multilevel governing public- and private-sector actors as key players and stakeholders in this crucially important sector. The conceptual framework of this research is based on the perspective that through a collaborative approach to tourism governance, the currently predominant reactive nature of sustainable tourism development policies and crisis risk management measures can be shifted to proactiveness in dealing with crises and by that achieving resilience and sustainability of a tourism destination.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is not over yet and is just gradually going to the post-pandemic stage with an increasing number of countries reopening their borders for international tourists, building resilience for the destination and tourism industry is essential for further survival and strengthening in case of a similar crisis. Collaboration and coordination between various institutions such as government (national and local), DMOs, and the private sector in tourism development significantly assist in analyzing the sustainability of the tourism industry and transforming needs into opportunities for further development.