Structured unsustainability: institutional limits and temporal politics in sustainable tourism governance

Abstract

Environmental sustainability has become a widely institutionalised goal across governance levels and policy domains, yet tourism continues to pose challenges for substantive transformation. As a sector characterised by high mobility, carbon intensity, and dispersed responsibility, tourism highlights the limits of sustainability frameworks under conditions of continued growth. This dissertation examines how tourism governance manages tensions between sustainability commitments and tourism development through spatial, institutional, and temporal practices. Its central question asks how tourism governance institutions use legitimacy-seeking strategies to manage contradictions between sustainability commitments and growth imperatives. Three subsidiary questions address how institutional constraints limit substantive environmen- tal outcomes in protected area tourism, how sustainability policies are translated into practices that accommodate growth objectives, and how temporal policy frameworks sustain legitimacy while deferring structural change.

Empirically, the research focuses on Finnish protected area governance and sustainable tourism policymaking, drawing on an analytical framework grounded in New Institutional theory, temporal theory, and in environmental policy. The first two articles analyse how platformisation, corporatisation, and governance re-entrenchment have positioned tourism as an organisational necessity rather than a supplementary activity within protected areas. The third article examines temporal-scalar tensions within protected area governance. The fourth traces sustainability discourse across governance scales, from European Union frameworks through national and regional strategies to desti- nation-level implementation. Taken together, the articles show how institutional and temporal mechanisms work across different governance settings to stabilise growth-ori- ented trajectories while limiting substantive transformation. In Articles III and IV, temporal framings emerge as mechanisms for legitimising sustainability policy: environ- mental solutions are projected into the future while growth-oriented practices persist in the present. The future thus emerges as both an analytical lens and a political resource.

The dissertation aims to make three theoretical contributions to tourism geography. First, it suggests that institutional limits can be understood as structural features of governance architectures that accommodate, rather than resolve, underlying contradic- tions. Second, it develops temporality as a legitimacy-preserving mechanism enabling the ongoing deferral of transformative change. Third, it conceptualises these dynamics as structured unsustainability, a condition in which symbolic compliance, procedural alignment, and temporal displacement sustain institutional continuity beneath the language of transition. In doing so, the study explains why sustainability governance in tourism systematically yields limited transformation through structural design rather than oversight.