Intentional Emergence: Moving from experiment to experiment in a Tourism Co-design inquiry about the Sustainable Development Goals

This dissertation brings together two lines of inquiry about ordinary ways of working with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or ‘SDGs’ in the tourism industry and Tourism Co-design as an academic practice that has the potential to transcend academia-industry boundaries. The former focuses on how tourism practitioners relate to the SDGs in their everyday work contexts and navigate the space between the formal, global sustainability strategy and local contexts for action, while the latter deals with how Tourism Co-design might become a practical means for such navigation and how it moves from experiment to experiment in a field of inquiry. As such, this dissertation is concerned with notions of doing what the SDGs propose on an ordinary, everyday basis, doing sustainable tourism development rather than theorizing over it, and doing Tourism Co-design with a view to building desirable futures.

The movements between experiments receive special attention in this dissertation as an aspect of Tourism Co-design that seems to be taken for granted and inevitably occur when engaging others and their various perspectives, deploying design methods, adopting a unique attitude of mind, and leveraging emergent potentials and opportunities. There is an abstract consensus that a Tourism Co-design inquiry hinges on movement, even if there is hitherto little insight into what that means, why it matters, or how it is generated. By utilizing thick description to elaborate how (ordinarily) an inquiry moves from one experiment to the next and what transpires in the process, I reveal instances of generating new understandings and making decisions that cause an inquiry to take turns. This constitutes a new articulation of the many happenings that have otherwise been glossed over as acts of ‘moving from experiment to experiment’. This takes place in an analytical framework based on a distinct research program from Research-through-Design and uses an analytical lens of ‘drifting’, which I deploy to an end of exploring both industry practitioners’ and my own ways of working with sustainability and the SDGs in tourism context.

The reason I am so concerned with the notion of doing in this inquiry is because tourism researchers have long been addressing the widening gap between theoretical advances on sustainability in tourism and the practical application thereof in the tourism industry. Many have launched critiques of the omnipresent use of the term ‘sustainable’ in industry practices and contribute complex, yet abstract academic perspectives on what should be done differently. However, I argue that extant tourism literature exhibits an absence of active attempts of bringing into being the desirable futures that are theorized about and shows a scarcity of accounts on the own practices that researchers bring to the tourism situations they study. This becomes challenging and potentially problematic when suggesting change to tourism situations and tourism practices based on research findings or researcher interventions, as is a common objective in sustainability-related work in the field. Especially when research is considered collaborative or participatory in nature and explicitly aims to involve others in processes of negotiating alternatives, the questions of who is responsible for handling change and who is implicated are not easily answered.

The key contributions in this dissertation are threefold. First, it presents new practice perspectives on what it means to be doing sustainability and Tourism Co-design. My inquiry views the various experiments conducted in the context of this inquiry as generative of new understandings in regard to working with the SDGs in everyday practice in the tourism industry. Moving from experiment to experiment became a means to gain insight into other’s practices, particularly concerning the learnings and decisions made by collaborating practitioners who aim for resonance between their sustainability endeavors and their ordinary environments and established ways of working. This process of inquiry revealed that, at times, they need to surrender values to what is impractical or impossible to pursue, interrupt progress in order to meet others at their levels of capability to contribute to sustainability journeys, and importantly, emancipate sustainability efforts from the SDGs’ confines to make a difference. At the same time, the process of moving from experiment to experiment constituted a gradual development of my own sense of practice, a Tourism Co-design practice, when I was confronted with my own presence and my own agency in the collaborations with industry practitioners. This led me to critically reflect on what it is that we’re doing (and initiating, causing, affecting) when co-designing tourism with others.

Secondly, this dissertation presents a new approach to working with sustainability and the SDGs from a futures perspective, which has implications for both theory and practice. As an act of questioning the underlying temporal logic to sustainability and the overall rational of preserving what is or what once was that is perceived as ‘better’, I introduce a process of remaking the SDGs and imagining what the world might be like had they already been achieved. This is a distinct inversion of the SDGs from a world-without (poverty, hunger, inequality) towards a world-with (abundance, appreciation) approach and a deliberate pluralization of futures that rely on actions and decisions in the present. On a theoretical level, this means linking sustainability research with futures studies and theories, while on a practical level, this means considering actions in the present not based on historic understandings of what we’ve done wrong but from a perspective of arguably more desirable futures and the question how might bring them into existence.

Lastly, this dissertation presents a new theory perspective on what is going on when practically engaging in Tourism Co-design. By focusing on the movements, unfoldings, and turns in my process of inquiry, I expose cycles of hypothesizing, evaluating, and reflecting that take place when advancing from one experiment to another. I argue that experiments don’t come from nowhere, nor start anywhere, and that they grow richer throughout inquiry. These cycles led to distinct moments of expanding, contracting, expediting, and retracting our endeavors in the context of a collaboration with a tourism-related think tank and a distinct serial sequence where one experiment proliferated into a consequential next in the context of a collaboration with a festival organization. In this process of experimenting where the above expressions of movement occurred, I sensed that my practice of initiating and facilitating a joint inquiry involved acts of deliberately creating spaces for collaboration and participation while also demanding a willingness to surrender to what cannot be anticipated. I choose to name this phenomenon ‘intentional emergence’ as a liaison of the intentionality involved in conducting research with the explicit purpose of uncovering new meanings, understandings, relations, and knowledge and the emergent nature of outcomes that are continuously negotiated and never fixed. Intentional emergence creates a constructive field of tension of what currently is and what might become, one that is definitely oriented towards generating change for the sake of better futures, which requires ethical responsibilities towards those we involve.

At its core, this dissertation is a methodological work and contribution that attempts to bring attention to what it means to work with the SDGs in tourism and what it means to study the practices of others while developing an experimental and interventionist practice that itself affords a sense of agency to act. As a result, the thick description of my process of inquiry has a strong autoethnographic element to it that discloses how I experienced Tourism Co-design as an alternative research practice and how I made sense of moving from experiment to experiment in collaboration with others. This dissertation is thick with discoveries, many of them of the small and ordinary kind rather than being grand Eureka!-moments, but it is also thick with doubts, questions, and critiques in relation to how my practice evolved over the last three years and how the field of tourism, and especially sustainable tourism development, has evolved over time. There is an opportunity to reflect on the own practice, the own agency, and the own visions of a better world; not as a matter of self-indulgence but as a realistic place for researchers to get involved with change.