Regenerative Development: Maybe Tourism Has No Role Here

This is the argument in short — for the people who actually have to make it work on a Monday morning.

Let me start with the uncomfortable part.

Tourism does contribute to economic growth. It does not necessarily contribute to development — not if you understand development in the broad sense, as everything that has to be in place for life to improve. Telfer and Sharpley made that distinction years ago, and most of us in this sector have quietly known it was true for longer than that.

We keep waiting for the benefits to reach the people who live in the places we promote. Jonathon Day put it better than I can: he came of age in the eighties and has spent his entire life waiting to see the benefits of trickle-down economics.

Sustainability improved a great deal along the way. Less water. Less waste. Better buildings. But as long as success is still counted in arrivals, overnight stays and spend, every social and environmental outcome remains negotiable — the first thing to be traded away when the numbers dip.

St Godelina's Abbey. Photo Credit: Visit Bruges

Start from the place, not from the demand

Here is the shift, and it is not a marketing shift.

Regenerative development begins with the place and with the people who live in it — not with a target market, not with a gap in the portfolio, not with an investor's business case. Place is what people hold in common, and that commonality is what makes them a community in the first place. It is also the only level at which you can see the real systems working together: climate, culture, economy.

We do the opposite by default. We take a place and reposition it as a "destination", which quietly converts it from somewhere people live into something visitors consume. Attractiveness starts to matter more than uniqueness. And once every place is optimising for attractiveness, they all start to look like each other.

Bill Haggard makes a point that should unsettle every strategy document I have ever seen: economies are rooted in specific places too. You cannot simply grow any kind of economy in any kind of soil.

So the honest first question is not how do we attract more. It is what is genuinely appropriate here — and are there people who would want to experience that?

Sometimes the answer is that tourism has no role in the regeneration of a place at all. That is not a failed process. That is the process working properly.

Your role changes

If tourism does have a role, it is a stewarding one. Stewardship means protecting, restoring and regenerating a place and its community, and it is carried out by people who feel connected to it. Not by people who are paid to sell it.

The useful thing about stewardship is that anyone can hold it: accommodation providers, tour operators, local shops, residents, schools — and guests, too, if we let them.

For tourism boards specifically, the shift is from marketer to convener. You are funded by the local community and local businesses. You hold real power to gather people. Use it to co-develop the potential of the place rather than to package it.

The eight principles

From the literature and from close to a decade of doing this in Flanders, eight principles held up:

Change the mindset. The hardest one, and the slowest. You cannot do differently until you see differently.
Engage the community. Deeply and continuously — including the voices that rarely make it into the room, and those that do not speak at all.
Understand the place. Its history, economy, dynamics, identity and soul. Deep listening, not a standardised checklist. Outsiders help here; locals are often blind to their own strengths.
Regenerate a vision. Weave many small stories into one shared narrative about what this place could become.
Experiment. Many small pilots rather than one masterplan. Let residents run them. Let guests test them.
Mature. Turn what works into something durable: shared governance, distributed ownership, decentralised decisions.
Empower others. A mature organisation exists to help the wider ecosystem flourish, not to defend its own budget line.
Keep learning. Completing a regenerative project is a beginning, not an end. The loop restarts.

In Bruges, we tested all eight of these on a single street — an abbey that had been closed to the public for four hundred years, reopened as a living lab rather than as a product. That case is the spine of the chapter, and I will write about it separately, because the detail is where the learning sits.

St Godelina's Abbey, Bruges. Photo Credit: Visit Flanders

What it will cost you

Time, mostly. Years, not seasons. It will also cost you the comfort of a familiar funding model, and it will run headfirst into procurement rules and shareholder structures that were designed for an entirely different kind of project.

But the direction of travel is not really optional. If protests from residents do not make the point, ecological degradation eventually will.