Resilience as the Organising Concept: A Systematic Review of Destination Resilience Scholarship and the Road to the International Year of Sustainable and Resilient Tourism 2027
Keywords:
destination resilience, International Year of Sustainable and Resilient Tourism 2027, adaptive capacity, transformation, path dependency, small island developing states, multi-level governance, resilience captureAbstract
On 26 February 2024 the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution A/RES/78/260, proclaiming 2027 the International Year of Sustainable and Resilient Tourism and inviting the World Tourism Organization to facilitate its implementation. On 2 February 2026 the Committee on Tourism and Sustainability, meeting in Madrid, welcomed the Road Map towards the Year, framed by its authors as the shift from dialogue to delivery. The resolution installs resilience alongside sustainability as an official organising concept for global tourism policy, and it does so at a moment when the scholarly literature has not resolved what the relationship between the two concepts is. This review synthesises thirty-three peer-reviewed studies published between 2024 and 2026 to establish the state of destination resilience scholarship as the International Year approaches. Meta-synthesis and conceptual mapping identify five clusters: the conceptualisation and contestation of destination resilience; resilience measurement and indicators; community resilience and social capital; multi-level governance and policy transmission; and path dependency, lock-in and transformation. The review proposes the Resilience-Sustainability Integration Ladder, which distinguishes four relations between the two concepts, substitution, addition, subordination and integration, and argues that policy discourse has adopted the second while the strongest scholarship supports the fourth. It introduces the construct of resilience capture to describe the process by which a resilience mandate is absorbed into recovery-and-growth machinery, restoring the pre-crisis system rather than transforming it. The review finds that scholarly engagement with the International Year process itself is essentially absent, that measurement work proceeds despite an unresolved conceptual critique of measurement, and that path-dependency research has bypassed the tourism-dependent economies where lock-in is most consequential. Seven propositions are advanced.
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