The Paradox of Growth: How Nature-Based Tourism Entrepreneurs Navigate the Tension Between Growth and Sustainability
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2018
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Creative Sustainability
Language
en
Pages
110+2
Series
Abstract
This thesis studies the perceptions and strategies of nature-based tourism entrepreneurs with regard to sustainable tourism development. Specifically, the objective is to understand how they perceive tourism growth and sustainability, how they carry out sustainable tourism principles in practice, and how they view their own roles as stakeholders in sustainable tourism development. The study is connected to bodies of research in tourism, entrepreneurship, and stakeholder theory. The research takes a qualitative approach and is set in the context of Finland, where semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine entrepreneurs operating nature-based tourism microenterprises. The study resulted in the following four findings. First, the entrepreneurs held positive views of the growth in tourism on the condition that growth is controlled sustainably. Awareness of the severity of issues such as climate change was high across the sample. Based on this finding, climate change awareness has increased since prior awareness studies in the first decade of this century. Second, this study found a highly consistent perception of sustainable tourism among the entrepreneurs interviewed. Most of the entrepreneurs highlighted local-level actions regarding sustainable tourism. Third, the sample matches the description of so-called lifestyle entrepreneurs accurately. Rather than making a profit, primary motivations for setting up a business included autonomy, freedom, living true to one’s values, and combining passions and hobbies with work. However, differences in the ways of operating businesses were discovered as well, which suggests that prior research has depicted lifestyle entrepreneurs too simplistically as a homogeneous group. Finally, strategic collaboration with other stakeholders regarding sustainable tourism was very low. Hindrances for collaboration included a suspected lack of interest by other stake-holders, territorial attitudes, and skewed power dynamics. This highlights the need for deeper collabo-ration for advancing sustainable tourism.Description
Thesis advisor
Lankoski, LeenaKeywords
sustainable tourism, entrepreneurship, microenterprise, stakeholder