(Co)Existence with Tourism: Beyond Sustainability?

Sustainability has shaped tourism scholarship, policy, and destination management for decades. Yet in many destinations, the relationship between tourism, local communities, and environments remains marked by tension rather than resolution. This conference starts from the premise that sustainability should not be taken for granted as a sufficient answer, but critically revisited: tested against outcomes, re-examined in relation to limits and justice, and opened to alternative ways of thinking about tourism’s role in society.

It seeks to explore how far sustainability remains a useful basis for understanding and governing tourism, where its conceptual and practical limits become visible, and whether current challenges call for its rethinking, more effective implementation, or the articulation of broader conceptual and policy pathways.

These questions are embedded in the conference title itself. (Co)Existence foregrounds coexistence as a question rather than an assumption, drawing attention to the challenge of living with tourism under concrete social, economic and ecological conditions and to the uneven terms on which such coexistence is negotiated. Beyond Sustainability? is intended as an invitation to think further, not as a dismissal of work undertaken within the sustainability paradigm. We therefore welcome contributions that critically interrogate sustainability, seek to refine or reconstruct it, or explore broader conceptual and policy pathways, including degrowth, steady-state thinking, justice-based approaches, regenerative perspectives, community-centred governance, and new models of public value.

Set in Zadar, an Adriatic city where many of the tensions shaping contemporary tourism are experienced in concrete ways, the conference offers a fitting context for interdisciplinary exchange on how tourism is understood, measured, governed and redirected under changing social, economic and ecological conditions. It particularly welcomes conceptual, empirical, comparative, methodological and policy-oriented contributions from across the social sciences and allied fields, including environmental studies, planning, geography, economics, sociology, political science, cultural studies and psychology.