Greening tourism in the Giant Mountains: agency in new path development

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to research on sustainability transitions in tourism research by applying recent evolutionary economic geography concepts to understand the role of agency in new path development in tourism regions, focusing on the Eastern part of the Giant Mountains, the oldest National Park in Czechia. Utilising desk research, decade-long participant observation, and twenty-one interviews with key stakeholders, we highlight distinctive leadership and flagship initiatives for sustainability transitions in local tourism. Nevertheless, the tourism industry predominately follows one of less radical pathways - path renewal. Conceptually, first, we documented that the boundary between organizational-level and system-level agency can be blurred and, in some cases, even inseparable. Second, while the literature asserts that the primary obstacle in the operation of the agency-asset nexus is the absence of an interface between organizational-level and system-level agency, we discovered another major hindrance - the weak coordination mechanism between the types of system-level agency exerted by different stakeholders.