Part 1: Rethinking tourism in the wake of Covid — Nepal, Maldives, and Thailand

UNDP Strategic Innovation
5 min readJan 4, 2022

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By Khadeeja Hamid and Ahmed Mohamed Shihab (UNDP Maldives), Purnima Bajracharya (UNDP Nepal), Parima Suwannakarn and Tiffany Chen (UNDP Thailand)

Beach tourism in the Maldives

Tourism industries across the world have been decimated by the coronavirus pandemic. In Thailand, for instance, visitor numbers dropped from 40 million in 2019 to an estimated 500,000 in 2021, which is having implications throughout the country’s value chains, local migration and human wellbeing at large. Little wonder, governments of most destination countries have been at pains to articulate responses robust enough to both support wellbeing of people dependent on this sector and help the industry itself navigate this protracted storm. UNDP’s Prateeksha Singh talks more about covid’s impact in Thailand in this blog post.

Inspired by work in the Dominican Republic (read more here and here) focused on recasting the tourism sector to respond not only to the economic recovery imperative, also how this recovery can contribute to the preservation of cultural, natural and historical heritage and community wellbeing, three countries in Asia have embarked on journeys to recast their tourism sectors — Nepal, Maldives, and Thailand. The idea is to gain a better understanding of the nature and dynamics of the countries’ complex tourism sectors and covid’s impact on these, with a view to better support governments and communities in these countries to rethink and revamp tourism in the wake of the pandemic.

This blog is the first in a two-part series. It describes the three country office teams initial dive into tourism in their countries through a so-called contextualization exercise — adopting a more holistic systemic view of the sector overlaid with the tectonic shifts happening in the industry itself. The second blog will describe how the offices are now beginning to strategically articulate and position themselves to engage on this complex challenge.

Contextualizing within a wider set of global trends and systems

The teams did the contextualization exercise as homework before moving into a 3-day workshop. Teams were provided with a global trend report reviewing the dynamics and state of tourism in the context of covid. This report was intended to stretch the teams’ thinking around how we think about tourism in a condensed timeframe.

The report consisted of three parts:

  • Context scan: an automatically (Artificial Intelligence) produced horizon scanning and foresight digest based on 2719 forecasts obtained from scanning and compiling over 80,000 reputable internet and social media sources.
  • Tourism context shapers: a highlight of key trends brought about or exacerbated by covid that have disrupted the (previously dominant) low cost, high volume, extractive model of tourism practiced in many parts of the world.
  • Asymmetry: a paper discussing the implications of the irreconcilable nature of three competing forces at play in the world of tourism today: the idea of tourism as an economic good, an ongoing pandemic, the localized manifestations of the virus itself.

Based on this, the teams prepared a system snapshot — a simple summary overview mapping the pre- and post-covid features of their country’s tourism system. The visual below shows the system snapshot template used by the teams:

How contextualization was useful

The contextualization exercise was intended to help teams widen and rethink tourism in their country, moving beyond narrow sector/issue-specific perspectives towards a more holistic view of tourism as a complex system interlinked to a variety of themes such as economic development, healthcare, community development, cultural values, indigenous knowledge, renewable energy, and the environment. In this sense it was meant to reframe the issue (tourism as an economic vs community wellbeing paradigm) and in that way ‘see’ multiple entry points for recasting the sector and its future shape.

For the three teams, the exercise proved useful in two ways.

First, it helped the teams get into the right mindset before walking into the workshop. A member of the Thailand team said the exercise “helped put us in the right place”. This helped team members tear down mental silos around tourism, to stop seeing it from the perspective of a particular expertise domain, and to consider multiple implications beyond “profit and income”.

Second, the exercise helped teams understand the wider context of tourism (globally, regionally, nationally) and to situate their own country within it. This provided new insights and helped teams begin to make connections between different systems and trends — seeing how various trends and sub-systems are connected. For instance, a member of the Maldives team described how insights about global changes in long-haul flights enabled him to contextualize the role of the Maldives within a much wider and more complex ecosystem — “recognizing that all things are connected.” Similarly, a team member described how information about global changes allowed her to see emerging possibilities and challenges. For instance, a drop in oil prices induces oil rich Middle Eastern countries to diversify their economies into new sectors such as luxury tourism, could create increased future competition for countries such as the Maldives. In Thailand, the new lenses uncover alternative financing models that reinvest tourism income into social capital and enterprises meant to build new resilience in communities. In Nepal, recasting tourism from a purely economic issue to a paradigm of increasing the well-being of a community got the team to consider how renewable energy in rural areas can not only strengthen the resilience of communities in the wake of shocks, but reduce pollution and offset input costs for tourism activities. This bigger picture thinking helped teams move from the idea that there are quick fixes to the current situation, and it contributed to a notion that the pre-covid status quo of the tourism sectors in these countries are not as legitimate or desirable as they might first have appeared.

Based on the contextualization exercise the teams developed quick scans of their tourism sectors using the template above. Armed with these, the teams went into a 3-day workshop to begin to strategically articulate and position UNDP to engage on these complex challenges in Nepal, the Maldives and Thailand. Our next blog will describe this work in detail so stay tuned!

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UNDP Strategic Innovation
UNDP Strategic Innovation

Written by UNDP Strategic Innovation

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