The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been presenting stakeholders in the visitor economy with an unprecedented level of uncertainty. Sweden’s approach to handling the pandemic, which is viewed as an international exception, and Småland and Öland with its focus on limited-season summer tourism provide an exceptional context to study how key stakeholders deal with relevant challenges from a decision-making perspective, promising insights beyond the immediate study context.
The pandemic has been and still is a chance to (re-)engage with the development trajectories of tourism in this area and what kind of futures various local stakeholders envision for it. To this end, it is valuable to evaluate the impact and response to Covid-19 in relation to developing the local UNESCO World Heritage site and to achieving the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.
The interdisciplinary research project documented in this report sought to study how stakeholders in the visitor economy make sense of the uncertainty induced by the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the short- and long-run through different lenses. To this end, we studied how stakeholders in the visitor economy reflected on their decisions to deal with the immediate implications of pandemic tourism and plan to engage them in a forward-looking process of scenario development and action-learning to open horizons that envision the present crisis as a chance to work towards a more sustainable future.
The project results address aspects of how the visitor economy in Småland can deal both with the present uncertainty and future crises of a similar nature. In the short-run, we identified how stakeholders in the local visitor economy made sense of the uncertainty of visitor business during the pandemic. This provides points of reflection for the stakeholders involved and suggestions for policy considerations to support the visitor economy for the future. For the long-run, we enhanced futures thinking and discussed development perspectives with stakeholders in the local visitor economy. This is a necessary input to inspiring strategies towards sustainable development beyond the immediate necessities of the present.