While there is rich research on tourism destination evolution, the literature on how normative social and environmental goals (as opposed to contingent events or economic imperatives) drive the evolution of tourism towards more sustainable forms remains under-developed. As a result, the overall understanding of how sustainability in tourism is pursued on the ground and what context-specific factors shape these processes is still insufficient. To address this lacuna, the paper draws upon the sustainability transitions (ST) agenda that focuses on the ground level processes of transitions and conceptualises sustainability transitions as multi-actor, multi-dimensional, evolutionary, disruptive and contested processes. As such, the paper offers a constructive response to Niewiadomski and Brouder's (2022) call for bridging the gap between the research on tourism evolution and the sustainability transitions agenda. More specifically, the paper adopts selected concepts of evolutionary economic geography (EEG) (which have long proved helpful in research on both tourism evolution and sustainability transitions) to address how sustainability in tourism is mindfully pursued in the Outer Hebrides (Scotland, UK) and what geographical and historical factors shape this transition. The analysis draws from 17 semi-structured interviews (conducted in 2020-2021 with tourism businesses and various organisations involved in tourism in the Outer Hebrides) and documentary analysis. Two main groups of place- and path-dependent factors that shape the ongoing transition to sustainable tourism in the Outer Hebrides are identified: 1) institutional and social fragmentation, and 2) infrastructural deficiencies and challenges. The paper finds that the transition to sustainability in tourism in the Outer Hebrides is fragmented and intermittent. Although numerous promising changes are taking place, the transition suffers from a lack of systemic and systematic governance.

The Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) framework contributes to the study of tourism destination evolution by focusing on the various circumstances and events through which tourism destinations develop over long periods of time. Our research objective is to investigate how players in tourism destinations shape development pathways when they face stagnant or lock‐in situations. Applying the concepts of path dependence and path creation, we explain how path shaping mechanisms such as bricolage (the process of combining available resources to create innovative outcomes) and breakthrough (a process where actors attempt to generate dramatic outcomes to deviate from existing pathways) occur using two destinations in the two regencies of the Toraja region of Sulawesi, Indonesia, as a case study. Understanding cultural tourism destination pathways requires frameworks capable of interrogating ethno‐political structures and histories and assessing how they influence developmental pathways that generate regional transformations. Our investigation indicates: strong path dependence in tourism, due to cultural, political, and economic conditions, inhibits breakthrough development; that the strength of path dependence at a regional level strongly influences the path shaping processes at the firm level; and that a breakthrough developmental process in tourism does not exclude bricolage.

Until the end of WW2, the Margaret River region (MRR) was a popular domestic destination based on cave explorations. A series of incremental innovations between the 1950s and 1990s reconfigured the destination into a thriving international tourism destination that offers diverse experiences based on wine, surf, and nature. Nonetheless, contemporary external and internal forces are stimulating another shift - one towards sustainability. Apart from the global pro-sustainability agenda, this sustainability transition in tourism is mainly driven by two emerging niches: eco-accreditation and grassroots organisations. This paper adopts the multilevel perspective (MLP) - a commonly adopted framework in the sustainability transitions research field - and combines it with a typology of tourism innovation to examine the evolution of the MRR as a tourist destination. The paper addresses the ongoing sustainability transition in the MRR and discusses both top-down and bottom-up initiatives that stimulate it. In order to provide a holistic view of this transition, the paper also pays attention to the first transition in the destination (i.e. from caves to wine, surf, and nature), and examines its influence on the ongoing sustainability transition. As such, this paper aims to help bridge the gap between tourism geography and the interdisciplinary field of sustainability transitions.

Although sustainable tourism research is a rich and diverse field, it still suffers from a few important shortcomings. Negligible attention has been given to various possible pathways to sustainable tourism (as opposed to sustainable tourism as a 'goalpost') and there is an insufficient understanding of how the interconnections and interdependencies within tourism as a complex system shape the pursuit of sustainability. What is therefore needed is a sharper focus on the actual processes that must unfold for a transition to sustainable tourism to take place, and a better conceptualisation of the tourism industry as a multi-actor and multi-dimensional socio-technical system. We argue here that the sustainability transitions agenda, which has developed over the last two decades at the interface of innovation studies, evolutionary economics, studies of technology and science, and various other fields, offers a promising way forward for the desired pathway towards sustainable tourism to be comprehensively understood and more effectively followed. In order to set the scene for the individual contributions to this collection, we elaborate on this argument by highlighting the key strengths of the sustainability transitions agenda and identifying their potential to help tourism scholars move the work on sustainable tourism in new, unprecedented, and imperative directions. Our overarching aim is to lay the foundations for bridging the gap between (sustainable) tourism research and the sustainability transitions literature to move this combined agenda forward.

The Margaret River region (Western Australia) is a popular international tourism destination. Since its emergence in the late 19(th) century, tourism in the Margaret River region (MRR) has interacted with a number of regional industries including timber, dairy, and wine. These interactions have changed from 'supportive' to 'competing' reflecting various changes in the market and the availability of common local assets such as forest, land, and public funding. While timber and dairy had an important influence on the evolution of tourism in the region, it was the emergence of wine that shifted tourism the most.Using selected concepts of evolutionary economic geography (EEG), mainly path-dependence, path-reformation, interpath relations, and triggering events, this paper demonstrates how tourism has interacted with different other industries and how these interactions have shaped the MRR as a wine-tourist destination. The paper shows how two related triggering events contributed to the emergence of wine-tourism as a new path in the region - a process referred to as 'path-blending'. In this respect, the paper provides empirical evidence that triggering events can result in multiple new paths and can also significantly shape the relations between new and existing regional paths. As such, the paper responds to the call for breaking away with the 'single-path view' in research on industrial evolution, and for more attention to the various relations between tourism and other sectors within a tourist destination.

Despite providing important ecosystem services and having a unique ecological value, the fog oases scattered around the City of Lima, face various human-imposed threats, with informal urbanisation and land-trafficking being the main drivers of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. As a response, local communities organise themselves to protect their fog oases by means of promoting ecotourism. The paper adopts an urban political ecology perspective to demonstrate that the different claims on the land which fog oases occupy reflect poor urban planning and the under- developed legal framework and, as such, they are inevitably intertwined with the wider structures of power across the city. Drawing from interviews with key stakeholders and various available documentation, the paper analyses the operations of local tourism organisations in Lima and finds that, although they strengthen local governance and contribute to the conservation of fog oases, they are constantly confronted with various formal and informal hurdles.

Over the last 40-50 years international passenger air transport has been significantly transformed by the neoliberal processes of deregulation and liberalisation. Although deregulation started in the US, initially only with regard to its domestic market, it quickly spread to the international arena when the US started replacing their restrictive bilateral air service agreements (ASAs) with other countries with “open-skies” arrangements based on multiple designation of airlines and no restrictions on routes and capacities (Bowen, 2010; Button, 2009; Debbage, 1994, 2014). Europe followed suit a decade later. In line with the emergence of the Single European Market (SEM), the European Community (which in the meantime became the European Union) implemented three packages of deregulatory reforms – in 1987, 1990 and 1993, with the last one becoming fully effective by 1997 (Bowen, 2010; Debbage, 2014; Duval, 2008; Graham, 1995). Aiming to remove all barriers to intracommunity trade, by 1997 the EU had eliminated most regulatory constraints on routes, fares, capacities, frequencies and market entry (Bowen, 2010; Debbage, 2014), thus becoming the most deregulated air market in the world – the European Common Aviation Area (ECAA) (Bowen, 2010; Debbage, 2014; Duval, 2008). Over time, the ECAA also encompassed some non-EU countries (e.g. Switzerland) and, naturally, all new EU member states.

The processes of globalisation and time-space compression, driven mainly by the neoliberal agenda and the advancement of various space-shrinking technologies, have markedly re-shaped the world over the last 75 years in an almost unchallenged manner. Amongst the most significant outcomes of these processes have been the popularisation of international travel and the accompanying global expansion of the tourism industry. As the first major force ever to effectively stop (or even reverse) globalisation and time-space compression, the COVID-19 outbreak has also put on hold the whole travel and tourism industry. In this respect, the tourism as we knew it just a few months ago has ceased to exist. Although the price the world is paying for this is enormous, the temporary processes of de-globalisation offer the tourism industry an unprecedented opportunity for a re-boot – an unrepeatable chance to re-develop in line with the tenets of sustainability and to do away with various 'dark sides' of tourism's growth such as environmental degradation, economic exploitation or overcrowding. However, the path of re-development and transformation which the global tourism production system will follow once the COVID-19 crisis has been resolved is yet to be determined.

The paper adopts the economic-geographical ideas of strategic coupling, path-dependence and path-creation to analyse the role of local/regional institutions in shaping the impacts of airports on regional development. By means of focusing on the airport industry (i.e. an integral component of the wider air transport system), the paper aims to help bridge the gap between economic geography, where air transport has received little attention, and transport geography, which so far has made little use of the theoretical advancements made in economic geography. The paper discusses the example of Poland where, further to the fall of communism, regional development became a key ambition for local and regional governments and where the importance of passenger aviation is rapidly increasing. Drawing from 16 interviews with airlines, Polish airports and Polish local authorities, and from documentary analysis, the paper explores the ways in which local/regional governments charge their airports with the path-shaping tasks of fostering strategic couplings with airlines and catalysing new forms of growth. This includes financial and political support, joint marketing and imposing challenging targets. The paper also shows that the transformation of Polish airports from passive assets into active agents of regional development (a process that is referred to as the ‘agentisation of airports’) is inherently path-dependent. The peculiar structure of ownership in the Polish airport industry (a partial legacy of the previous system) and the tensions between various actors that it spawns entangle Polish airports in the multi-scalar patterns of politics, which determine the effectiveness of their path-shaping roles.

This paper considers the contribution made to transport geography research at the University of Aberdeen over the last century. In section one, the earliest work in transport geography emphasised the physical connectivity provided by transport through infrastructure networks. Section 2 discusses the contribution made at Aberdeen to debates around accessibility and connectivity. This work had a strong rural dimension and evidenced a growing recognition of the importance of technology in transport. It provided the springboard for research on digital connectivity with important contributions to the wider domain of transport studies in the fields of flexible transport, rural connectivity, transport and energy and social media and big data as reported in Section 3. Section 4 brings the story of transport research at Aberdeen up to the present. It frames research under the banner of intelligent mobility (IM), which links technology and mobility to the wider societal objective of enabling the smarter, greener and more efficient movement of people and goods. Contributions are reported to the fields of shared mobility, smart rural mobility, transport security and privacy and accessibility. Finally, a return to the theme of infrastructure networks and connectivity is highlighted in work on global production networks in aviation.

The necessity to address climate change has resulted in a widespread debate about the need for a transition to a 'greener' economy. How such an economy emerges, by what drivers and at what scale is a significant source of speculation amongst the geographical research community. In the context of longstanding contributions to environmental geography from scholars working at Aberdeen University, this paper outlines a novel research agenda for the Green Economy Research Centre (GERC). The contours of the green economy are examined in the context of economic sectors of food production, tourism, energy and the blue economy. Cross-cutting themes of green transitions, governance, people and place and ecosystem services inform our academic contribution to this evolving and controversial societal issue.

It has undoubtedly taken a lot of time and efforts for geographers interested in tourism to overcome the negative image of tourism as a mere fun activity and establish it as a valid topic of resear...

Although the number of directions which geographical research on transport is taking has recently increased, the extent to which transport geography capitalises on theoretical advancements made in other sub-disciplines of human geography is still fairly limited. This especially pertains to economic geography which, in contrast to the predominantly positivist and quantitative transport geography, has developed over the last few decades a more post-positivist and qualitative profile. By means of focusing on passenger air transport – one of the most neglected industries in economic geography – this paper aims to help bridge this gap. Three under-researched aspects of air transport are identified and a combination of two economic-geographical approaches – global production networks (GPN) and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) – is advocated asa useful conceptual basis for further, more qualitative and more critical research on this dynamic sector. The paper argues that GPN and EEG would help research on air transport to: (1) employ network thinking beyond the infrastructural understanding of networks of air connections and thus better explain the multi-actor nature of the aviation sector, (2) complement the research on supra-national and national regulatory frameworks with more attention to the array of sub-national environments that shape the aviation industry ‘from below’, and (3) explore how the relations between aviation and economic development are moulded by different place-specific institutional factors. To lay foundations under further research the paper conceptualises the aviation industry asa global production network and uses the example of Polish passenger air transport to highlight the paper’s key empirical implications.

This chapter combines the lens of geopolitics with the concepts of strategic coupling and path dependence to explain the inability of regional and local institutions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to facilitate adequately the expansion of international hotel groups into the CEE region in the early 1990s. It is demonstrated that although it was hoped that international hotel investors and operators would bring upgrading to the CEE hotel industry, the various responses to the expansion observed at the sub-national levels initially hampered, not fostered, the whole process.

While research on the globalisation of services in economic geography continues to develop in multiple directions, some service industries are still largely under-researched. The hotel industry is one of the most striking examples. Given that the hotel sector is much more global in terms of number of countries covered by each company than many other service industries, one of the crucial aspects of hotel sector globalisation that requires attention from a geographical perspective is the territorial embeddedness of expanding hotel groups in the variety of institutional, political and economic contexts. Grounded in the global production networks (GPNs) approach, this paper aims to address this lacuna in empirical and theoretical terms. Drawing from extensive research carried out in Poland, Estonia and Bulgaria, the paper examines the impact of post-communist transformations on the expansion of international hotel groups into Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and analyses how different hotel GPNs interact with the various contexts across the region. It is argued that the ways in which post-communist transformations influence the expansion of hotel groups into CEE depend upon the degree of territorial embeddedness of the hotel group, which, in turn, is reflective of the group’s business model and the architecture of its GPN. In theoretical terms, the paper illustrates how, to better account for the particularities of CEE, the GPN approach can incorporate the ‘alternative approach’ – the theory of post-communist transformations that challenges the neoliberal orthodoxy which drove the post-communist restructuring in the 1990s.

Although the concept of sustainability has long permeated the literature on tourism and its development, the research on sustainability in tourism rarely reaches beyond the industry level to examine how tourism contributes to the sustainable development of a given destination in wider terms and how effective such processes can be in different economic, environmental and socio-cultural settings. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this important, yet under-developed, research agenda. The paper focuses on the Isle of Eigg - a remote community-owned Scottish island that has recently committed itself to becoming more sustainable and that seeks to rely on inbound tourism as the most important means to this end. It is demonstrated that tourism plays a key role in enhancing the economic stature of Eigg residents and that, rather than undermining, it strengthens the community cohesion on the island. Despite this, its contribution to the island's environmental sustainability cannot always be taken for granted and some trade-offs between these three kinds of sustainability cannot therefore be avoided. Moreover, economic sustainability on Eigg should not be considered synonymous with economic self-sufficiency.

The influence of expanding hotel companies on economic development in host countries is one of the most under-researched aspects of the globalisation of the hotel industry. Aiming to contribute to this agenda this paper focuses on the expansion of international hotel groups into Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) after 1989 and enquires into their influence on economic upgrading in CEE following the fall of communism. The paper is grounded in the global production network (GPN) perspective and selected assumptions of evolutionary economic geography (EEG), a combination of which is argued here to be an effective theoretical platform from which the targeted set of processes can be addressed. The paper proposes a framework for analysing the influence of the hotel industry on regional development in host economies. Four areas of influence are distinguished: direct investment and infrastructure upgrading; employment creation; knowledge transfer; and forging local linkages. The first three of them are then analysed in more detail on the basis of Poland, Estonia and Bulgaria. It is demonstrated that the influence of hotel groups on regional development hinges upon the business model preferred by the group for a given hotel and, depending on various place-specific factors, it may have different manifestations in different markets. The paper also shows that it is often other actors from hotel groups’ GPNs, rather than hotel groups themselves, that play a key role in creating and enhancing the value which the region captures and in influencing the path of development which the region follows.

In the field of economic geography, the hotel industry is largely under-researched. Meanwhile, its worldwide development has reached the level whereby it can no longer be neglected by economic geographers if the tourism production system and, more generally, the globalisation of services are to be understood. The argument of this paper is twofold. First, it is contended that an economic-geographical approach to the hotel industry can significantly enhance our understanding of this important sub-sector of tourism. Although the paper recognises the useful insights into the internationalisation/globalisation of the hotel industry elaborated within management and business studies, it argues that they fall short of exploring the globalisation of the hotel sector in three important respects: the multi-actor nature of the hotel industry, the territorial embeddedness of hotel groups in host markets and the influence of expanding hotel groups on economic development. Given that these gaps are geographical in nature, the paper argues the case for the global production networks approach as an effective theoretical platform from which they can be addressed. Second, it is argued that the hotel industry can serve as a good sectoral case through which our understanding of the globalisation of services can be advanced. Enhanced attention to business models of hotel groups is argued to be a key to both of these advancements.

This paper contributes to the international research project ‘Capturing the Gains: Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Production Networks and Trade’. Its main aim is to analyse the operations of international airlines in Africa and assess the influence of the international aviation industry on the development of tourism in selected African states. Simultaneously, through an exploration of the different ways in which international airline groups can foster the development of the tourism sector in Africa, the paper informs the general understanding of the influence of tourism on regional development. Although in general terms the paper focuses on the whole of Africa, more detailed issues are analysed on the basis of South Africa, Kenya and Uganda.