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The aims of this Editorial are twofold: (i) synthesise emergent themes from the special issue (ii) tender four theoretical frameworks toward examination of crises in tourism.

The thematic analysis of papers highlights a diversity of COVID-19 related crises contexts and research approaches. The need for robust theoretical interventions is highlighted through the four proposed conceptual frameworks.

Crises provides a valuable seam from which to draw new empirical and theoretical insights. Papers in this special issue address the unfolding of crises in tourism and demonstrate how its theorization demands multi and cross-disciplinary entreaties. This special issue is an invitation to examine how global crises in tourism can be more clearly appraised and theorised. The nature of crisis, and the extent to which the global tourism community can continue to adapt remains in question, as dialogues juxtapose the contradictions between tourism growth and tourism sustainability, and between building back better and returning to normal.

The appraisal of four conceptual frameworks, little used in tourism research provides markers of the theoretical rigour and novelty so often sought. Beck’s risk society reconceptualises risk and the extent to which risk is manmade. Biopolitics refers to the power over the production and reproduction of life itself, where the political stake corresponds to power over society. The political ecology of crisis denaturalises “natural” disasters and their subsequent crises. Justice complements an ethic of care and values like conative empathy to advance social justice and well-being.

The purpose of the paper is to explore how climate change and the discourses about adaptation to climate change are altering the spatial development of the tourism industry in coastal destinations. The paper also identifies how tourist development and climate change adaptation can be combined to transform space and place, especially in coastal tourism areas.

Using a theoretical approach based on the concept of production of space, the study focuses on relational space, relationships expressed through representations of space and social practices. A case study method is used to analyze the socio-geographic processes at work in the adaptation to climate change in a coastal tourism community in Quebec, Canada. The analysis of the study utilized Nvivo with thematic textual queries.

The results reveal an adaptation process at work, based on a “hold the line” strategy, where private stakeholders choose to invest in defensive structures to mitigate the impact of rising sea levels and erosion. This strategy reflects coordinated action in the face of the risk and to protect high-value land property.

This research illustrates how tourism and climate change adaptation discourses intersect. It also reveals how tourism development promotes the values and image of coastal space and how this can conflict with an efficient climate change adaptation strategy.

This research provides guidelines for coastal tourism communities, enabling them to design their own climate change adaptation strategy, taking into account how the different social discourses and tourism practices interact with climate change adaptation. It also provides some insights into the criteria that influence an effective climate change adaptation strategy.

This paper aims to explore the role of private stakeholders in the living lab (LL) ecosystem and the relationship of private stakeholders to open innovation (OI) practices. There is extensive literature on private stakeholders and OI, but seldom mention is made on the specific question of how private stakeholders integrate OI in the context of a LL.

The authors will analyze qualitatively how private businesses that have participated in a in situ open innovation evaluate and perceived their open innovation practices. Therefore, how they relate to open innovation. Then, the authors will identify a typology of the businesses in relation to OI.

The research focused on the relationship of private stakeholders to OI in the context of in situ OI activities. The results obtained are consistent with literature on OI (Chesbrough, 2003). However, there are differences: if the elements mentioned by the respondents are described in literature, their representation of OI and its components allows us to affirm that this practice is not generalised and that it is often open to interpretation. That emphasises the importance of the role LLs can play as intermediaries to accompany private stakeholders in the OI process. Private stakeholders look for a guide to develop their OI know-how and find their way in the OI ecosystem.

The value of this paper is to bridge the research on OI done with private organisation and the research on LLs. The research literature did not pay much attention to the representation of the private stakeholders in the OI ecosystem. This paper has provided the start to open up that field.

This chapter aims to analyse how tourism has oscillated from a wicked problem and a geopolitical strategy tool in Brazilian federal tourism public tourism policies (PTP) over the past century (spanning from 1921 to 2022). Recently tourism has garnered significant relevance, emerging as an alternative avenue for development within the constraints and resource limitations faced by the National States. The empirical study collected secondary data from the government official press, encompassing records from the Senate, the House of Representatives, as well as the executive and judiciary branches. Considering this timeframe, a corpus comprising more than 31,000 documents TNAs (‘Tourism Normative Acts’) was meticulously gathered and systematically analysed. Our analytical framework integrates classical geopolitics, with a primary focus on State actors and the nation-building process, and the public policy approach, which is focussed on the degrees of wickedness. Our findings show that (a) the number of international tourists as well as the number of NAT have increased in a considerable way recently, but we cannot directly connect both; (b) three are the periods (1970–1980, 1990–2000, and 2002–2016) in which we can see a tourism geopolitical strategy has been more explicitly and effectively mobilized, and it is not necessarily reflected in the number of NAT, but in the actions generated in each period; and (c) the wicked degree of the tourism policies seem to be reduced according to the more explicit geopolitical strategy is. Despite, the importance tourism has reached, the support system underpinning this endeavour remains deficient, notably in terms of material and financial resources essential for its efficacious execution.

According to Head (2008), wicked problems are not just wicked problems in the sense of complex challenges, but situations that are confusing, unique, diffuse, without clear responsibilities or accountabilities, and difficult to resolve. These problems stand out for their uncertain nature, lack of clear solutions and possible irreversible consequences of attempted interventions. Recognising the pertinence of wicked problems in contemporary public policy discourse, this chapter aims to explore and better understand political decision-makers’ handling of these issues, in a tourism-specific context. The discourse on wicked problems, in accordance with 10 characteristics outlined by Rittel and Webber (1973), remains relevant when examining policy responses to mega trends, such as indigenous disparities, sustainability, digital transformation and demographic change. Against this backdrop and positioned within current academic discourse, this introductory chapter briefly foreshadows the volume’s various contributions by academics from around the world who present a wide range of wicked problems in tourism from their respective perspectives and contexts.