Resilience and Tourism in Islands: Insights from the Caribbean

This chapter makes the case for the competitive advantage of small island economies as tourism destinations. It argues that the social and economic fabric of small island jurisdictions - which includes a canny disposition towards occupational multiplicity by the local labour force - breeds a form of resilience into which the local tourism economy, in both its formal and its informal manifestations, nests comfortably and thus this drives local development sustainably. This argument is made with special reference to Caribbean small island tourism economies, and is based both on a select literature scan as well as semi-structured interviews undertaken in spring 2016.