Facilitating participatory approaches to sustainable tourism development

This study addresses the anonymous use of the concept of facilitation in sustainable tourism development literature and provides an understanding of facilitation as an embodied, entangled, and reflexive tourism research practice with others. By looking at reflections on the roles and practices of the facilitator in the field of design, I argue that tourism researchers are inherently connected with the participatory methods they employ and the spaces for participation they create. Following a collaborative tourism design (tourism co-design) methodology and drawing on facilitation experiences and experiments from two tourism co-design contexts, I provide reflexive accounts on building trust, challenging what is taken for granted, and considering intersections with diverse knowledges in participatory approaches to sustainable tourism development. It is the tourism researcher-facilitator’s responsibility to bring these into play in participatory spaces where more sustainable and desirable futures are negotiated, created, and rehearsed in dialogue.