Chapter 11 Degrowth, but for Real
Degrowth has entered tourism discourse, but usually as a slogan rather than a program. Academics write about degrowth tourism. Conferences include degrowth panels. The term circulates. But what degrowth actually means for tourism policy, planning, education, and business remains largely unexamined. This chapter moves beyond slogans to sketch what degrowth tourism would require.
Degrowth as a concept emerged from ecological economics in the early 2000s. It argues that economies in wealthy nations have grown beyond sustainable limits and must contract to operate within planetary boundaries. This is not recession (involuntary contraction) but planned, democratic, equitable reduction in material throughput. Degrowth challenges the growth imperative that organizes modern economies and proposes alternative ways of organizing production, consumption, and wellbeing.
Applied to tourism, degrowth means reducing tourism volume: fewer trips, shorter trips, slower trips. It means reducing tourism's material intensity: less flying, less building, less consumption. It means delinking tourism from economic growth: stopping the equation of more tourism with more prosperity. And it means reimagining tourism's purpose: from consumption of experiences to cultivation of relationships.
These are not modest adjustments. They challenge the foundation on which tourism has been built. The industry has been oriented toward growth for so long that growth has become invisible, like water to fish. Suggesting that growth should end provokes disorientation. How would tourism work without growth? What would it even mean?
Begin with volume reduction. Degrowth tourism would aim for fewer tourist trips overall, not just redistribution of existing trips to new destinations. This requires confronting the assumption that everyone should travel and that more travel is better. That assumption is culturally specific and historically recent. For most of human history, most people rarely traveled. They were not thereby impoverished.
Volume reduction does not mean that no one travels. It means that travel becomes rarer, more deliberate, more significant. Instead of multiple short trips, a person might make fewer longer trips. Instead of leisure trips consumed like other commodities, travel would be undertaken for purposes that justify its costs. The reduction is in volume, not in meaning.
Policy mechanisms for volume reduction exist but are underused. Caps limit visitor numbers directly. Venice has experimented with caps on day visitors. Bhutan strictly limits tourist numbers. These examples show that caps are possible, though implementation is challenging. Pricing mechanisms can reduce demand if set high enough. Taxes, fees, and deposits can make travel more expensive and thereby less frequent. The challenge is ensuring that price mechanisms do not simply reserve travel for the wealthy while excluding others.
Rationing offers another possibility. Just as carbon budgets propose allocating emissions rights, tourism budgets might allocate travel rights. Each person could receive a periodic tourism allowance that they could use, save, or trade. This would reduce total tourism while allowing individual choice within limits. The mechanism sounds radical, but wartime rationing shows that societies can implement allocation systems when circumstances require.
Material intensity reduction addresses what kind of tourism occurs, not just how much. Flying is the most carbon-intensive form of travel. Degrowth tourism would shift from flying to slower, lower-impact modes: trains, buses, ships, bicycles, walking. This is already happening at the margins. Flight shame in Sweden has reduced domestic air travel. Night train services are reviving in Europe. But these shifts remain marginal while aviation continues expanding.
Aviation degrowth requires confronting the global character of modern tourism. Much long-haul travel cannot practically be replaced by surface transport. Degrowth tourism would therefore mean less intercontinental travel overall. This has equity implications: people in remote regions might lose opportunities for travel that those in well-connected regions retain. These implications must be addressed through compensatory measures rather than used as reasons to continue aviation expansion.
Accommodation degrowth would shift from resource-intensive hotels to lower-impact alternatives. Building new hotels requires enormous material and energy inputs. Operating them requires continuous flows of resources. The hotel-based model of tourism is materially unsustainable. Alternatives include home-sharing (though this has its own problems), camping, hostels, and other forms of accommodation with smaller footprints.
Delinking tourism from economic growth requires abandoning the development model that treats tourism as an engine of prosperity. This model has been promoted for decades by international organizations, national governments, and the tourism industry itself. Abandoning it means accepting that some places should not develop tourism, that existing tourism destinations might shrink their tourism sectors, and that economic wellbeing does not require tourism growth.
Delinking is difficult because many communities have become tourism-dependent. Their economies are structured around receiving visitors. Their workforce is trained for hospitality. Their infrastructure serves tourists. Reducing tourism in these contexts means economic disruption. Degrowth must therefore be accompanied by transition support: assistance for workers and communities to develop alternative economic bases.
The just transition concept from climate policy applies here. Workers in carbon-intensive industries should not bear the costs of decarbonization alone. Similarly, workers in tourism-intensive economies should not bear the costs of degrowth alone. Public investment in alternative development, retraining programs, social safety nets, and economic diversification should accompany tourism reduction.
Education for degrowth tourism would differ markedly from current tourism education. Instead of training students to maximize arrivals and optimize experiences, education would cultivate critical thinking about tourism's costs, awareness of alternatives, skills for facilitation rather than promotion, and comfort with limits. Students would learn to measure success differently and to question the metrics that currently dominate.
Business models for degrowth tourism exist, though they are currently marginal. Social enterprises that prioritize community benefit over shareholder return, cooperatives owned by workers or communities, and purpose-driven businesses that cap growth voluntarily all offer alternatives to the growth-oriented firms that dominate tourism. These models would need to scale up while conventional businesses scale down.
Degrowth is sometimes dismissed as unrealistic, as requiring changes that people will not accept. But the alternative, continued growth in tourism and everything else, is physically impossible on a finite planet. The question is not whether growth ends but how: through planned, equitable, democratic transition or through crash. Degrowth is the planned option. The crash is already becoming visible in overtouristed destinations, degraded ecosystems, and resistant communities.
The degrowth transition will not be easy. It will require confronting powerful interests, challenging popular expectations, and building institutions that do not yet exist. But it is not impossible. Societies have made comparable transitions before: from agricultural to industrial economies, from wartime to peacetime production, from fossil fuels to renewables (in progress). Tourism degrowth is challenging but achievable.
What is needed is political will, and political will follows from shifted consciousness. The tourism industry has spent billions creating desire for its products. Comparable effort could create desire for alternatives. Not no travel but different travel. Not endless growth but enough. Not consumption of places but relationship with them. These are not deprivations but redirections. Degrowth tourism could be more meaningful than growth tourism ever was.