Lunds universitet/Institutionen för service management och tjänstevetenskap
Abstract
Climate change is expected to bring about severe changes to the world’s ecosystems and to challenge mobility patterns on all geographical levels. For tourism these changes have worrying implications. This study deals with the link between tourism and climate change on the municipal level in Sweden. Viewing tourism and climate change as an issue for risk governance, the risk governance practices at three municipal tourist offices are explored. The research develops along the questions how employees at municipal tourist offices construct risks from climate change for their operations, how these risk constructions are translated into practice and how the tourist offices collaborate on climate change with the municipal climate adaptation coordinators (CAC) and the risk and vulnerability coordinators (RVC). The risk governance perspective is chosen to enable a practice-near approach to tourism and climate change. In the data generation semi-structured interviews and participant observations are applied. The main findings of the study are that the respondents from the tourist offices frame risks from climate change on two levels: the interview level and the work-practice level. It is noted that the tourist offices do not explicitly deal with climate change in their operations. Further, the collaboration between the tourist offices and the CACs and RVCs is found to be modest. It is concluded that the municipal tourist offices do not carry out any proactive climate change risk governance as the prevailing practices for acquiring organizational value are not set out for renegotiation in the light of climate change
