2. Overview: Resilience and Marine Tourism
2.1. Resilience theory
The resilience concept emerged from the ecological sciences and is a measure of the ability of a system to recover from and adapt to perturbations without fundamentally changing structure and function.
A resilience-based approach is useful in understanding tourism’s response to crises because it considers the ability of a system to maintain and adapt its essential structure, identity, and functioning in the face of often unpredictable change Resilience theory recognises the inherent uncertainty in predicting the complex and dynamic ways in which individuals, organisations, and society may respond to disturbances and change (Gallopin, 2006; Marshall, 2010). Within the resilience literature there is a distinction between ‘specified resilience’ and ‘general resilience’ (Folke et al., 2010). General resilience refers to the resilience of any and all parts of a system to all kinds of disturbances, including novel ones. Specified resilience refers to the resilience of some particular part of a system, related to one or more particular disturbances.