Anna Pollock argues that global tourism is currently unsustainable and vulnerable. She believes the focus on perpetual growth, volume increases, and business as usual is misguided. Tourism needs to shift to a regenerative model that focuses on maximizing benefits to host communities and the environment, not just economic outputs. Communities need to be empowered to determine their own visions for tourism. The role of tourism organizations should expand beyond marketing to fostering conditions where destinations and their residents can truly flourish.

1. Anna Pollock, Conscious.Travel
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TITLE slide
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. It’s an honour to be contributing to
another workshop organised by the European Travel Commission and sharing
the stagewith so many tourismprofessionals who careabout the future of our
industry.
I’vejust20 minutes to sharewhatI have been spending the past 7 years
thinking about, and as I havebeen tasked with “shaking things up,” I’lldIvein
with a personalconviction:
SLIDE 2
Global tourism, ascurrently practiced, isunderperforming, highly
vulnerable and heading towardsbreakdown. Itsoperating modelis no
longer fit for purpose and needs to be replaced.
Normally I would spend the restof my talk telling you why I have come to this
conclusion BUT there’s nothing moredepressing than listing a pile of reasons
why we’rein trouble withoutthe chance to look at ways out, I’vedecided to
focus on how we might change direction.
Again fulfilling my mandate to provokelet me next say - “sustainability” is not
the answer.
Now by that I don’t wish to undermine the counselof any sustainability
experts here present. On the contrary, I urgeyou to take heed and learn hard
and fast. Sustainablepractices that reduce our material impact, our footprint,
are ESSENTIAL, notoptional, but and it is a big BUT, they are not enough.
Sometimes, they even delude us into thinking that we can continue Business
As Usual (BAU). We cannot.
FLOURISHING BEYOND SUSTAINABILITY
The promise of a Regenerative Tourism
Anna Pollock, Conscious Travel, February 6th, 2019

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Sustainable practices address symptoms and enable us to do less harm. In so
doing they buy us a little time butalso – more dangerously – defer the
moment when we haveto get down to the work of systemic change. The time
for that kind of work is now. Hence this question.
SLIDE 3 – What are we being calledto do differently?
What are “we” being called to do differently and who, in this case, are we?
Whom am I addressing today? As the ETC is a collective of national tourism
organisations in Europe, I’d like to think I am addressing the collective tourism
leadership on this continent. That being the case, the first thing I urge you to
do, is to step up to LEADING and not be content to just manage. I say that in
responseto the title of this event – Managing Sustainable Tourism Growth in
Europe. To me, managing means addressing symptoms and crafting tactics to
fix problems. Itdoesn’tinvolve questioning the status quo or digging into root
causes. That’s whatleaders do and right now everyone of us can step up into
that role.
SLIDE 4 - LEAD
The role of LEADER is to set a vision, name the goal or destination and,
thereby, inspire others to get engaged, wantto contribute and to follow. In the
turbulent times in which we live today, a leader is also required to facilitate
collective reflection as a precursor to tapping into some collective intelligence.
Slide 5 UNWTO
In that context, the second imperative is to dare to question what we mean by
successandencouragequestions andconversations.It’samazingtomejusthow
manyarticles havebeen written on both climate changeand overtourismwhere
volume growth was never mentioned let alone questioned.
The notion of Perpetual Growth is not a sacred truth so it’s not taboo to
question it. We can start by investigating a more honestalternative – growing
the net benefit fromtourismto host communities and visitors.

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SLIDE 6 MythBusters
Change is in the air thanks in partto a small but growing number of myth
busters – SusanneBecken, Professor from Griffith University in Australia and
closer to home Dr Peeters and team who headed up the TRAN report and
sensibly recommended that the issue of volume growth be debated.
SLIDE 7 hockey stick
In the current model, success is equated with more – more visitors, more
spending, more arrivals, runways, cruisedocks, referrals etc. Virtually every
NTO/DMO states in their strategic plan the objective of attracting more visitors
next year than this year before . They are not held accountable for the net
benefit generated by that activity.
Each year, fairly accurate statistics are produced showing the growth in
numbers, butfew destinations have any real senseof the full nature of the
costs, wherethe income goes, and who ends up paying the direct and indirect
costs associated with servicing the traffic.
The arguments we use to justify our insistence on constantexpansion are that
more visitors and their spending contribute to jobs, taxes and the Gross
Domestic Product. But it is now recognized that GDP simply is a measureof
total economic activity – good and bad – and a very poor indicator of increased
well-being throughouta society.
SLIDE 8 VUCA
This focus on attracting morevisitors (I.e. growing numbers) from whatis now
a global market has had at least 2 unintended consequences.
First, in what’s called a VUCA world of enormous volatility uncertainty,
complexity and ambiguity, it’s not enough to grow bigger. What’s needed
more than income growth is greater productivity; strengthened resilience to
bounce back fromshocks; and far greater adaptability since the futurewon’t
resemble the pastand our practices shouldn’tdo too.

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Second, destination marketers tend to look outward to the markets and to
nurturing relationships with thoseentities that cultivate marketinterest – in
other words, media and their agencies, tour operators, retailers and often
investors –Mostof these are located in the sourcecountries. – not the
destination
In many situations, this has meant that the needs and rights of visitors take
priority over the needs and rights of residents.
Over tourismis partially an expression of this imbalance of power between
guest, host and resident. All too often, being the marketeers we are, we’ve
approached resident engagement as a promotionalchallenge We’ve focused
on telling residents why tourismis good for them but but havem’tspent as
much time listening to their issues, experiences and aspirations nor engaging,
as in involving them in decisions making regarding their future.
The bulk of the work undertaken by a DMO can be described as Marketing &
Sales management. Few are responsiblefor what, in strictly commercial terms,
would be called Asset Management.
SLIDE 9 asset management
This is a textbook definition of AssetManagement
“making bestuse of an organisation’s assets in order to maximize shareholder
value and to providethe best possiblereturns to other stakeholders in the
organisation” is rarely undertaken.
Now imagine this, supposing your destination werea company and you were
its AssetManager – how might you do your job? Take this beautiful city, for
example, with cultural assets dating back thousands of years in an
environment, that dates back 3.8 billion years and acts as a – what would be
an appropriatereturn on that asset? Would it makesense to sell it off at
discountprices year after year? – Becausethat’s exactly what the tourism
industry has been doing. Would it make senseto diminish the capital stock and
defer replenishment?

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SLIDE 10 TITLE ONY -Purpose
Deeper than shifting roles, commercial enterprises, including NTOS, are
increasingly being asked to consider the very purposeof their existence. This
meta shiftis now happening all around us in the business world and is the
most forcefulof all the changes forcing us to re-think the way we do tourism.
SLIDE 10 – ADD FREEMAN
Back In 1968, Milton Friedman one of the economists who lay the groundwork
for neoliberal values of untrammelled growth and the active pursuitof self-
interest that underpinned the economic expansion of the 1980s and 1990s
before it crashed in 2008.
SLIDE 11 – Pollman
Not surprisingly, theGlobal Financial Crisis did more than any other factor to
accelerate the shift in values a decade ago, such that Paul Polman, head of
Unilever can make this comment now
“If you want to be a successfulcompany in the future, you have to go
beyond CSR and make a contribution”
Let’s be clear He’s not saying businesses should notmake profits but that
profits are the outcome of a higher purpose; they are means not ends.
SLIDE 12
So it’s a startof a new year, 2019 – whereis the business world heading? This
graph illustrates the direction of a journey towards a differentfuture that I
believe the tourismcommunity must join in numbers quickly if it is to secure
its social licence to operate.
The bottom axis shows how the purposeof business is being re-defined from a
narrow senseof responsibility for generating returns exclusively to
shareholders (often regardless of cost) to a much broader need to return
benefits to all stakeholders and, as Polman indicated, become “a forcefor
good.”

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On the left axis are organising principles that change as purposechanges.
During mostof the post war economic expansion, business was all about
efficiency and scale – producing more with and for less. As the negative
environmental and socialside effects became impossible to ignore, emphasis
shifted to the notion of effectiveness, minimizing or mitigating damage and
improving social impact by delivering shared valueto a broader rangeof
stakeholders.
But to make this shift, a threshold of understanding has to be crossed.
Academics describe this as “the ontological threshold” which actually means
changing the way we perceive the worldand make sense of it. In other
words, theindividual has to experience a shiftin perception, paradigm and
worldview fromseeing the world as comprising solely dead, inert matter that
can be manipulated as a machine to a living system with consciousness and
intelligence at its core and capable of evolving and self-generating.
At this stage (the yellow wedge) , it becomes naturalto think of a much
broader community of stakeholders and focus on ensuring enterprises deliver
net positive impacts to the places and society in which they operate. The
organising principle shifts to caring.
This afternoon, I wish to draw your attention to the fourth wedge – the
destination of this journey – and to a new word that you will see with
increasing frequency and that is Regeneration – a concept that introduces
infinitely morepotency, meaning, hope than sustainability. Itis far more than
another buzzword or trend.
You cannot understand let alone practice regenerative development unless
you have fundamentally shifted your patterns of thinking, your ways of seeing,
and assumed a deep senseof interdependence with all life on this planet.
Regeneration describes aninter-connectedprocessof becoming that all living
systems participateinwhereby the healthy infolding of every part Is
inextricably connectedwiththe healthy unfolding of the whole.

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SLIDE 13 “ Change the Mindset”
The concept of Regeneration depends on a number of premises of which the
four most important are:
1. That we humans are a part of nature and apart from it. We will thrive
only so long as we supportand servethe thriving of life as a whole and
the ecological systems of which are a part. All regenerative development
starts by asking how are my actions conduciveto life’s flourishing?
To flourish is to be healthy, to express vitality and also to be creative,
adaptable, resilient and capable of self-controland self-mastery. In other
words, weare being asked to think more like gardeners and less like
miners.
Tourismis not one big, complex assembly line of separate parts
connected mechanically and we are neither units of production or
consumption but living, breathing human beings with enormous
potential and driveto become more, to learn and to grow in nature and
quality.
SLIDE 14 – Ego toECO
2. We humans are NOT superior toother life forms nor do wehave a right
or need to exploit, conquer or subduenature but we have, as humans, a
responsibility to work with nature to enable its primary purposeand
function which is sustaining and evolving all life.
SLIDE 15

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3. All life inter-connectedandinter-dependent. Itcomprisesmultiple sets
of nested living systems thatobey nature’s principles. We are NOT
separate individuals only responsiblefor ourselves and having to
struggleand compete in a harsh world of scarcity. Nature offers
abundanceand plenty especially when each part gives before taking.
Each part, eachpersonis unique and has a unique set of gifts toshare
and role to play. Each of us matter and are always making a contribution
to the health of the whole.
SLIDE 16 reframe destination
Regenerative Tourismis based on a fresh understanding that the visitor
economy in general and the destination in particular is not an industrial
production line but a living, networked system embedded in a natural system
called Nature and subjectto Nature’s operating rules and principles. Success of
a living systemis best described by the concept of thriving or flourishing.
SLIDE 17 REGEN INITiatives
For the pastfew years I havebeen studying Regenerative principles and
observing how this relatively young concept is being taken up in such many
and diversefields as agriculture, economics, finance, business, education and
health.
Tourismis ready and ripe for its application – we are a people intensive
phenomenon that cnot only onnects people but , in many cases, seeks to make
them wholeas in healthier. That’s why the root of many words associated with
tourism, such as hospitality and recreation, are actually abouthealing or
making whole what was broken. If doneproperly, tourism can become a vital
regenerative forcein communities enabling all participants (guest, hosts,
employees, business owner-managers,resident) to flourish – not justin a
material, financial sensebut also emotionally, mentally, physically and
spiritually.

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Regenerative tourismis not about stopping marketing or even about de-
growth; it’s simply about agreeing to apply a moremature, robust, creative
understanding of what growth means in nature and that is to “de-velop” as in
“de-veil,” or reveal the potential inherent in every living thing TO allow it to
become more – as in more complex, more beautiful, more adaptable, more
resilient and more capable of living life to the full.
The most exciting aspect of Regeneration is its pursuit of aliveness and
possibility. In commercialterms this will be expressed in a greater engagement
and passion experienced by both guest and host; a commitment to stewarding
the naturalresources on which tourism depends; a closer match between what
the community wants to shareand what the visitor values; and greater
involvement fromacross the community which leads to greater creativity,
collaboration and resilience.
SLIDE - books
If this excites you and I hope it does, here are some books on the subject.
So if that’s the big aspirational picture then the practical steps towards it are as
follows:
SLIDE19
First, we focus our attention on the health of our destination communities as
they are now. Real change will occur at the grassroots, onecommunity at a
time as each community discovers who they are, who they want to become
and how they want to sharetheir identity with their guests. This will require a
level of caring curiosity about what’s really going on in our communities and a
willingness to truly listen, observe, engage and get engaged. That implies far
more than doing occasionalsurveys.
The role of the DMO in the futurewill, in addition to its conventional
marketing function, create the conditions for a destination community to
flourish. No one person or institution can make that happen – we can only
create, contribute and foster the rightconditions for thriving to emerge. That

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will mean building the collective capacity of the community to care about the
place they call home, to shape, enrich and extend the way they attract, receive
and serveguests, because:
If it takes a village to raise a child, thenit takes a destination
community toreceive and serve a visitor well.
Today’s reality is that mostcommunities exist in name only. Destinations are
collections of people, inhabitants, enterprises and agencies located within a
recognised geographical or political area who servetourists relatively
independently of one another. Conscious interaction, collaboration and broad
community engagement are rare. Despite this, each visitor experience is
always an amalgam, a collective total of many smaller experiences delivered by
suppliers often unawareof each other. There is no shared vision coming from
the community for the scope, scale and natureof tourism – in other words
how much, whatkind, when and wherethe community wishes to welcome
visitors and in whatway. In many cases they are not consulted, let alone
involved in any planning, but are told what’s good for them after a decision has
been made,
So the first step is in discovering individually and collectively “who is this place
that has called each individual to be there?” and what does the place mean to
them, what do they dreamit becoming and whatdo they fear happening to it?
This is bestdone through the art of convening and hosting conversations that
matter; supporting a community learn abouttheir options; while developing
the knowledgeand skills needed to co-createa flourishing visitor economy
that works for them. I envisageeach community embarking on a collective,
action-oriented learning Journey of Discovery and this is what we’reabout to
develop and test in Flanders. Our focus rightnow is addressing this question:
SLIDE22
“What knowledge, capacity& skills does a communityneed develop in
order to create and nurture a flourishing destinationthat revitalises
and regenerates the community?

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Itwill inevitably be an intensive, interactive process that once stimulated from
the outsidewill be maintained and shaped from within a community. There are
no quick fixes or wins but, in my opinion this is the only and best way of
avoiding overtourism-related problems in the futurewhile raising the net
positivevalue of the tourismeconomy to unprecedented highs.
That’s why I was so excited to meet Sara last night and learn of her work in
Slow Adventure. Sarah and her colleagues are doing on the ground whatneeds
to happen everywhere,.
My time is up so I’llleave with what I think is THE question of 2019:
How might we build together a Living Tourism fit for a Living Planet?!
Thankyou