Tourism’s post-covid-19 reset: Opportunities for sustainability in coastal and marine tourism

Abstract

The forced pause on tourism in New Zealand triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic affected various businesses, livelihoods, and regional communities and froze international tourism. It caused a widespread crisis across the industry. New Zealand's high reliance on the tourism industry, paired with the sector's increased visitor growth and increasingly visible environmental pressures, exposed the need for transformational change as a strategy for recovery. The crisis presented an opportunity to rethink and reset New Zealand tourism. New discourses of sustainability, resilience, and ecotourism have entered the policy lexicon. This research asks how New Zealand's tourism has taken up the opportunity and the extent to which it has embraced these ideas in policy. The thesis focuses on marine and coastal tourism [MCT], as a case study sub-sector. MCT is a significant part of the nation's tourism but is often not recognised as a distinctive sub-sector. The thesis tracks policy documents from extant strategies through immediate pandemic response to recovery and looks for evidence of a great re-set. It examines policy texts from central and regional government authorities, as well as a range of other policy actors – notably tourism industry associations. It uses a thematic and critical analysis of key documents. Much of the responsibility for Covid-19 recovery was transferred to the regional scale and the thesis tracks this shift by examining a set of regional Destination Management Plans, which were to lay out regional futures for tourism regions. It uses two cases Northland and Kaikoura to highlight the place of MCT in imagined regional futures and to ask how much transformational zeal has survived the return of tourist numbers to pre-Covid levels. The thesis argues that other than in particular places, tourism policy is setting tourism on a pathway back to business as usual, albeit with a sustainability twist.