Tourism Resourcification

A conventional claim within tourism research, practice and policy is that tourism is a powerful engine for economic growth across all spatial scales, accounting for slightly more than 10 percent of the global number of jobs and gross domestic product (GDP). What does this tell us? First, that the tourism economy is heavily dependent on mobilising spatial, intangible, material and human resources. Second, that tourism is a crucial resource for economic development. Tourism engages and mobilises resources from every conceivable part of non-human and human environments. Simultaneously, tourism is itself a resource, for example, to support regional recovery from industrial decline, or to open people's eyes for cultural diversity. There is a double resource-dynamic in play, which makes it difficult to separate tourism from other constructions of society-environment interactions. Such links between tourism and other parts of human lives have been deepened by globalisation as well as by digitalisation. In this chapter, we trace and discuss this double resource-dynamics in terms of resourcification: the social processes by which material and immaterial entities become resources. We discuss the contexts, conditions, modes, and temporalities of resourcification. By doing so, we demonstrate how resourcification constitutes the core of tourism development.