Understanding Resilience in a Vulnerable Industry: the Case of Reef Tourism in Australia

By D. Biggs. 2011

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the resilience of vulnerable sectors of social-ecological systems is critical in an era of escalating global change. The coral reef tourism sector is highly vulnerable not only to ecological effects of climate change and other anthropogenic disturbances on reefs, but also to shocks such as economic recession and energy price escalation. Commercial tourism enterprises are key players in reef tourism in Australia and elsewhere. However, the factors that confer resilience to reef-based tourism enterprises, or the reef tourism sector more broadly, in the face of large disturbances have not been investigated to date. This paper empirically examines the perceived resilience of reef tourism enterprises on Australia's Great Barrier Reef to large disturbances or shocks. Binary logistic regression analysis of two measures of enterprise resilience demonstrates the importance of human capital in strengthening enterprise resilience. Lifestyle identity, measured as the extent to which owners and senior managers are active in reef tourism as a lifestyle choice, is positively related to enterprise resilience. Finally, reef tourism enterprises indicate that financial and marketing support are the most important actions that government can take to support enterprises in the face of a large shock.

Subfields: Demography, Ecology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f5307f221e6ce8348db3791f92cf893160e3407

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Citations in the corpus

Resilience and entrepreneurship: a systematic literature review (2017, background): “Most scholars used a very broad definition that included all owner-managers (De Vries and Shields, 2006), new venture founders (Yang and Danes, 2015), SMEs (Biggs, 2011), family firms ( Jaskiewicz et al.”
Psychological resilience, organizational resilience and life satisfaction in tourism firms: insights from the Canterbury earthquakes (2020, background): “This represents an advancement in the study of organizational resilience in tourism (Biggs, 2011; Biggs et al., 2012; Biggs et al., 2015; Dahles & Susilowati, 2015; Xu et al., 2018).”
Conceptualization of SMEs’ business resilience: A systematic literature review (2021, background): “According to Biggs (2011), vulnerability and adaptive concepts are linked and combined into resilience capability at the organization level.”
Community resilience to long-term tourism decline and rejuvenation: a literature review and conceptual model (2016, background): “Besides considering the tourism system’s ability to respond to short-term crises and disasters, the study of resilience within the tourism literature has also considered how the tourism system responds to the long-term impacts of climate change (Biggs, 2011) and how other systems, such as communitie”