Transforming the tourism sector in the Dominican Republic: From mass-market to a resilient system
By Maria Eugenia Morales, Socrates Barinas, Sandy Ramirez, and Elia Martinez (UNDP Dominican Republic)
* with thanks to Francesca Nardini and Mariella Atanasova for stewarding the team through the first phase of system transformation work
The pandemic has revealed structural weaknesses in existing systems of governance and value generation. The tourism sector paid a particularly high price especially in those places that heavily depend on a few forms such as mass, sun-sand-and-sea tourism (see the graph below). According to the World Tourism Organization, in 2020 the Caribbean region received about -67% of international tourism arrivals than the previous years. The Dominican Republic (DR), where tourism contributes directly with about 7.4% to GDP and indirectly with 36.9% due to demand from other sectors, has seen a reduction of around 5.8 million visitors. Although this fall has highly impacted country’s economy, it has created an opportunity to shift an entire sector and pivot its trajectory toward greater sustainability.
Our team at the UNDP Dominican Republic Country Office (DRCO) is collaborating with the Strategic Innovation Unit (SIU) and the Chora Foundation to support the country on its path to transform the tourism sector. Recasting this sector implies a pivot from a focus on a single sector to a multidimensional, whole-of-society approach that is more resilient to external shocks and generates wellbeing and sustainability.
The emerging narrative (somewhat inspired by Dan Hill’s Long Papers) puts premium on natural capital as an asset to be stewarded (as opposed to extracted) and on attracting visitors with a stake in the community’s wellbeing (vs. tourists). The ambition is to develop a system that is socially inclusive, environmentally sustainable and systematically resilient, which is able to adapt to unexpected changes. A participatory scheme is fundamental for this purpose, where stakeholders can take decisions to engage visitors with the culture, nature and history of the Dominican Republic, while at the same time this contributes to local wellbeing.
In line with this pivot, we articulated a direction, a strategic intent to enhance capabilities and resources around:
- The generation of knowledge beyond the National level (tapping into grass roots distributed insights of the society);
- Strengthening networks to attract investments, expertise and interest; and
- Positioning the CO as a protector of the Sustainable Development Goals values.
These capabilities will drive and accelerate the transition towards a systematically resilient tourism sector. Through a participatory scheme, we will engage key stakeholders to generate transformative system actions by:
- developing a shared ambition towards building resilient tourism;
- strengthening a responsive government system; and
- diversifying the entrepreneurial ecosystem that is able to respond to the new tourism paradigms.
To understand the dynamics of the tourism sector, the team worked on analyzing how the current model is structured, what are its underlying drivers and dynamics they generate. We abstracted the key elements that structure the relationships and activity within the tourism sector, as a social system as:
- Interventions- focusing on factors, flows and paradigms that underline decision making.
- Human experiences that both are affected by those interventions and that generate dynamics in the system on the account of their individual and collective actions (from visitors and communities to individuals and investors), and
- Resources- from natural capital to infrastructure.
Applying this lens to the tourism sector in DR revealed multiple entry points to engage with in order to shift the system toward a more resilient state. Three particular features emerge that characterize and stagnate the current system stuck in its place:
- it is built around classic tourism (all-inclusive model) resulting on policies that have not been updated to reflect diverse and new markets and client demands,
- the space of governance as a largely centralized system that does not leverage a multitude of resources embedded in the Dominican society, and
- the complex web of information both about and emerging from the sector that if leveraged adequately can build agency for multiple partners to engage and create value.
The interaction between the elements that compose these axes, creates spaces of interest where the CO can work to generate a portfolio towards the strategic intent.
Market Space: It is possible to generate new market possibilities for the tourism sector in DR, which would bring new opportunities for the sector by integrating a new vision. The intent for this space is to attract a diversity of customers by diversifying the offer, which allows to build a strong entrepreneurial cloud of providers, decentralizing the system while environmentally friendly activities can take place. One of the main factors is about taking advantage of the culture, history and gastronomy resources to design balanced services between economy, environment and communities. The positions where the CO can work are related to the activation of the new ecosystem, generation of intelligence, strengthening of manufacturing capabilities and development of the Stewardship of assets Framework.
Governance Space: By integrating new elements, it would be possible to implement measures to strengthen the whole productive chain and improve the policy framework. The proposed move is oriented to generate a participatory scheme, which is able to include all the actors between local, regional and national levels. This new model understands that policy implementation needs stakeholders at different levels to generate an effective mechanism that is able to engage citizens, entrepreneurs and businesses.
Information Space: information available for the tourism sector in the DR is limited, which constrains the ability of the system to make evidence-based decisions, and hamper stakeholders to adapt to changes. A new information space must use data as a mean to make decisions and provide accessible platforms with real time data that can interpret dynamics to improve tourism performance. The CO could assume a position to strengthen an intelligent platform for resilience and sustainability.
On the basis of this system’s view of the tourism sector, we aim to design a portfolio of interventions that on one side builds new engagement models that generate a new vision and progress toward a resilient tourism sector (by integrating a diverse of stakeholders and strengthening a comprehensive governance system that includes of all the actors that generate value) and builds new capabilities that reinforce the entrepreneurial ecosystem and developing a participatory decision-making platform. These breakdown into three areas of interest that our portfolios will explore:
- New asset management models in support of a new sustainable tourism economy. This implies building a governance model for shared stewardship on the basis of new metrics and measures, new language and narratives (with considering a beach as a unit of intervention to test the new asset management models)
- Design and leverage new vehicles (platforms) for sustainability data that serve as a nudge toward new economic models, shift from mass-market tourism toward nurturing home-grown entrepreneurship,
- Grow new policy vehicles that accommodate emerging economic and well-being models, from health and waste management, to social protection and citizen-empowering labor laws
We are excited about this next phase, and we’ll share our learnings as we go along so stay tuned! In the meantime, we are intersted to hear from you if you are interested in partnering or comparing notes.
This work has been made possible with the generous support from Denmark.
