Social innovations and sustainability of tourism: Insights from public sector in Kemi,Finland

Sustainability of tourism

Tourism is simultaneously impacted by and has various consequences for different environments. Climate change affects especially winter tourism through seasonal changes (Saarinen and Tervo, 2010; Tervo-Kankare, 2011). Tourism’s carbon footprint has increased quickly, especially due to growth-oriented tourism (Lenzen et al., 2018). Tourism may cause overconsumption of nature, losses in biodiversity, and damage to built environments. On the other hand, tourism can encourage destinations to take better care of the environment and support linkages between livelihood improvement and conservation (Leiper, 2004; Nyaupane and Poudel, 2011). Tourism brings financial benefits such as income, work, and leisure facilities (Ladkin, 2011; Leiper, 2004; Nelson and Matthews, 2018) but also risks such as instability in global markets (Smeral, 2010), overdependence on tourism (Diedrich and García-Buades, 2009), or domination by multinational companies (Liu and Wall, 2006). Social impacts linked to employment possibilities and empowerment, for example, may be beneficial but tourism can also dominate and change locals’ lives via rising housing costs, intensified usage of land and public spaces, and tourists’ misbehavior (Ashworth and Page, 2011; Bruttomesso, 2018; Gill, 2004; see Leiper, 2004; Reid et al., 2004). Based on the need to understand and respond to the challenges surrounding tourism, the sustainability approach has evolved. Since the 1990s, it has been the dominant discourse in tourism research and “to an extent, in political circles” (Sharpley, 2009: xiii). Sustainability is often considered to encompass environmental, economic, and social sustainability (e.g. Tuazon et al., 2013; Øian et al., 2018).

In this article, the sustainability approach is addressed through the concept “sustainability of tourism.” This justification is based on the idea that completely sustainable tourism is challenging to objectively achieve and measure and takes into account the criticism toward sustainable tourism development, which can overemphasize the development approach (see e.g. Aall, 2014; Moscardo and Murphy, 2014). Still, sustainability is widely used as a central goal of planning and doing tourism. Following this, the article explores processes enhancing sustainability in a destination through tourism as well as making tourism more sustainable.

Enhancing sustainability requires a horizontal integration of non-tourism sectors in policy and planning (Øian et al., 2018). Furthermore, top-down regulations in sustainability management have been criticized. Moreover, the institutional structures of tourism are usually dominated by private-public-sector actors while input from the general public and locals is typically small. On these grounds, a discussion has emerged on how tourism might be planned in more diverse ways and with more inclusive methods. (Hall, 2007; Hall and Page, 2006; Malek and Costa, 2015.) This paper joins the discussion by bringing out non-traditional public sector perspectives and offering grass-roots initiatives through a social innovation approach to tourism planning.

Social innovations

Social innovations are novel or contextually novel solutions that cross and challenge organizational boundaries, rules, and relationships and emphasize multi-stakeholder perspectives through participation and collaboration (Mosedale and Voll, 2017; Voorberg et al., 2015). Despite their similarities, business-oriented innovations (OECD/Eurostat, 2019) and social innovations have important differences. The latter include the engagement of civil society and can thus complement economic innovations and policy development in pursuing sustainability (Millard, 2018). Social innovations are often motivated by a social need, for instance to create jobs or develop participatory governance, and contribute to value creation for society. Their outcomes can be practical, institutional (by changing decision-making processes), or normative (by transforming norms directing development) (Mosedale and Voll, 2017; Sarkki et al., 2019a). Examples of social innovations include institutionalizing women’s suffrage (Hölsgens, 2016), promoting sharing of public spaces for bicycle use, online education in alternative financial services, and stressing a recovery approach in mental health services (Anheier et al., 2019). Despite that these examples demonstrate a great, contextual variety (Ilie and During, 2012), it is common for all social innovations to be based on social needs, to offer concrete solutions, and, if successful, to provide diverse values for society. Furthermore, social innovations aim at addressing pressing societal challenges. In this article, it is deliberated that social innovations can tackle wide-scale societal needs and emerge from the grass-roots level, and initiatives at any phase in the so called social innovation spiral (Murray et al., 2010) can be considered as social innovations due to their highly innovative ideas, which the initiatives aim to develop and actualize to tackle broad challenges.

Linkages of sustainability of tourism and social innovations

Phi and Dredge call for studying tourism through co-creation, which is an act of exchange and a collaborative process. Co-creation offers a perspective for broadly understanding tourism and its impacts for places, people, and things. It is closely associated with innovations and challenges the idea of who are involved in transformative processes and in which way (Phi and Dredge, 2019). This article contributes to the approach by exploring how social innovations can contribute to co-creation by bringing new actors to discuss and negotiate issues about the sustainability of tourism. Understanding non-traditional perspectives on tourism and going beyond the usual stakeholders to be engaged in tourism activities can help in responding to the wide challenges and impacts of tourism and, hence, enhancing sustainability.

This article emphasizes the idea of social innovations as a way of developing tourism for the needs of local, multi-stakeholder groups rather than involving locals in developing tourism for solely growth-oriented value. This is not to say that social innovations have been absent in tourism; quite the opposite: for example couchsurfing and volunteer tourism can be regarded as social innovations. Rather, the point is to pay special attention to exploring their potential for enhancing sustainability. The linkages are outlined in relation to three themes: (1) needs and challenges, (2) planning processes, and (3) the outcome values that the sustainability of tourism and social innovations can create.

Social innovations and sustainability of tourism are both based on needs and challenges. The sustainability approach was developed in order to address challenges in and caused by tourism. However, in practice, sustainable tourism development is often directed toward the need to develop the industry. According to Moscardo and Murphy (2014: 2546), it rarely gives consideration to how tourism affects other socio-economic development strategies. They state that the aim of tourism development should be to “determine the destination needs rather than tourist attraction potential.” In comparison, social innovations aim to meet social needs and create value for communities. Of course, enhancing well-being via market-based solutions is occasionally a shared goal of both approaches, for example in an employment context. For example, social innovations are often linked with social entrepreneurship (see e.g. Sheldon and Daniele, 2017).

Social innovations and sustainability of tourism are both closely linked with planning, policies, and practices. Utilizing social innovations as a tool in tourism planning can offer new practical insights. Social innovations contribute similar thematics as responsible tourism research, which has been regarded as a practice and action for theoretical and conceptual sustainability (Mihalic, 2016), and through its cooperative nature, contribute to community-based tourism research, which emphasizes the community’s role in constructing sustainability (Richards and Hall, 2000; Saarinen, 2006). Social innovations as reconfigurations of social processes can inform public-private-sector-dominated tourism planning and provide alternatives for transformations toward more inclusive decision-making and grass-roots, community-based, collaborative, and participatory planning (Malek and Costa, 2015; see Sarkki et al., 2019b). On the other hand, market approaches may be integrated into the sustainability processes promoted by social innovations (Alegre and Berbegal-Mirabent, 2016).

The outcomes of sustainability of tourism and social innovations are similar yet different. Neither approach, despite their wide social acceptance, is value neutral. Sustainability is not an objective goal, and similarly social innovations include trade-offs. As Moulaert (2009: 12) states, social innovations involve “the transformation of social relations in space, the reproduction of place-bound and spatially exchanged identities and culture, and the establishment of place-based and scale-related governance structures.” The key difference of realizing social innovations and sustainable development is in the outcomes. Social innovations are social in nature and not (only) market oriented (Ilie and During, 2012; Walker and Chen, 2019) while in practice, sustainable tourism development is often industry oriented.

The two also differ in terms of the different scales on which the outcomes occur. Social innovations are often locally or regionally specific, and are potentially negotiated between agents and institutions with a territorial affiliation (Moulaert, 2009). Local, contextually novel social innovations can try to address systemic problems—the two case studies of this article are examples of this. Sustainability is a broad-scale concept operationalized in several environments. Social innovations can potentially narrow down the broad sustainability goals into smaller-scale approaches and concretize the often abstract aims of sustainability. Finally, sustainability initiatives for tourism and social innovations diverge by that even though tourism is cross-sectoral in nature and has various impacts beyond the tourism industry, it is still often practiced in its own sectoral silo. Social innovations as grass-roots initiatives can be considered to be more cross-sectoral, even holistic, and as initiatives offering practical solutions. Hence, this article discusses how social innovations can inform tourism in a transformation from growth-priorities toward holistically acceptable ideas for addressing social needs in a destination (see Huijbens and Jóhannesson, 2019). Figure 1 presents how social innovations can inform tourism with respect to sustainability.

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Figure 1.

Social innovations informing tourism to enhance sustainability.

Tourism: Needs, planning, and value

The social needs and challenges in and around tourism are manifold. By Finnish standards, the unemployment rate in Kemi is high (Kehittämisosasto, 2019), especially for young people (Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, 2019). Tourism was expected to bring new jobs. However, some experts stated that many young unemployed adults cannot find a job in tourism, while tourism firms cannot always find suitable workers.

In addition, there is a need to enhance environmental sustainability in Kemi. The city council has approved environmentally friendly policies (City Council of Kemi, 2018) and launched a project called Green and Sustainable Kemi. For most interviewed experts, environmental risks were an important consideration, especially because winter tourism is nature dependent and vulnerable to climate change, and because tourists are increasingly aware of sustainability issues. One stated: “If we cannot say from the whole Lapland perspective that our tourism is sustainable, it is very hard to justify why it is worth coming here.” Mass tourism, air travel, snowmobile activities, emissions of the icebreaker Sampo, development on the coastline, and rising consumption were regarded as unsustainable. It was questioned if sustainability can be reached: “But can we ever really state that we have reached a point where our tourism is completely sustainable?”. At the same time, it was noted that the issue of sustainability has already been taken into consideration in many tourism products, actions, and services, although to some extent it was questioned whether Kemi could meaningfully contribute to global sustainability issues or reducing emissions. It was considered problematic to require sustainability of locals if the same was not expected of tourists. There was also a stance that Kemi’s environmental impacts are moderate compared with the rest of Lapland, and that urban tourism growth poses little risk in contrast to development in natural areas. Still, Kemi is actively fostering Lapland’s tourism growth and is not merely passively tapping into already existing tourism flows.

The experts were unsure of how Kemi could include everything tourists need. Meeting the expected luxury standards requires land development, services, renovating facilities, and functioning transportation routes in and to Kemi. Tourism was also seen as a relatively unstable industry. It was noted that tourism is sensitive to issues such as security and environmental and financial changes. This was pointed out particularly with respect to the recession a decade ago, when planned investments in tourism did not take place and some entrepreneurs had to shutter their businesses.

The experts expressed that though tourism has widespread support as a livelihood locally, it has a contested history and investing public funds in tourism initiatives has been questioned: “I think the attitudes are more positive than before — (tourism) has faced considerable resistance at some point.” Especially because of this and because growing tourism often alters city atmospheres and recreation possibilities, tourism development is contingent on local support. It was stated that tourism activities are not much a part of locals’ lives but developing tourism without their input is risky: if visits suddenly drop, tourism is dependent on local will to visit the attractions. In addition, the interviewees brought up that a focus on luxury and Lapland tourism was not representative of Kemi. It was stated that tourism needs positive, fresh openings, and personal and unique attractions. Focusing on the Arctic sea, local products, and industrial tourism was repeatedly mentioned as a possible way to make Kemi distinctive.

At the moment, the most visible tourism planning and development are handled by a city-owned tourism company Kemi Tourism Ltd. and, due to tourism’s economic nature, is practiced also by the private sector. For most experts, multi-sectoral cooperation in tourism planning needs to be elaborated for example between the wellbeing, culture, and education services, third sector, and companies. It was stated that the city has a responsibility to holistically govern tourism development, and evaluate it from various perspectives. In general, the decision-making system in Kemi does not represent the actual city population. As a result, tourism planning follows a similarly unrepresentative path. Fostering a more intense involvement of locals was considered a way to create positive outcomes for tourism and city development. One expert explained the need to expand the notion of interested stakeholders by saying, “I do think that every person can have good ideas. The wider we get their visions, ideas, and thoughts, the better.”

All interviewees agreed that tourism brings economic and social value and hope in a challenging economic situation. In the city strategy documents, growing tourism is seen as an opportunity to address demographic changes (City Council of Kemi, 2013). Making travel stays longer and expanding the season could provide employment opportunities and help in dealing with the decreasing population. In addition, the experts noted that tourism makes the city livelier and that tourism attractions can create social value for locals. They also mentioned environmental value as a possible positive outcome of tourism as it encourages Kemi to take better care of the environment and, potentially, educate visitors about sustainability matters.

A social innovation for social inclusion

Kohtaamo (Meeting Space) is one of the national Ohjaamo guidance centers for people aged 18–30. It aims to promote employment and education among young people and prevent marginalisation (Kohtaamo, 2019). In Kemi, Kohtaamo has been established to address several needs, particularly youth unemployment and fragmented employment and social security services. Kohtaamo is a novel solution in Kemi because it challenges and transforms the traditional models for providing services for young unemployed people. The previous system of seeking information and support from several sources has been changed into a one-stop guidance strategy and customers are met as individuals. Kohtaamo is based on cooperation. It brings employers and jobseekers together and is funded by the European Social Fund and “implemented under the guidance of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment and as cooperation between several administrative branches, businesses and the third sector” (Kohtaamo, 2019). In Kemi, Kohtaamo connects organizations such as Kela (The Finnish Social Insurance Institution), TE-palvelut (The National Work and Livelihood Office), municipal employment services, social services, and schools. Additionally, the customers themselves can take part in developing the Kohtaamo services. As Kohtaamo is part of the Ohjaamo network, it has been established through a wider adaption of a national-level social innovation. At the same time, Kohtaamo responds to systemic problems and is a contextually novel innovation on a local level. Kohtaamo creates social and economic value. The staff help customers with practical issues but also aim to create well-being and positive prospects for their future. As one expert stated, “a young person gets better self-esteem through finding a job and getting feedback from their work, understands how to develop themselves, and gets new prospects for what they could be in the future.” Kohtaamo enhances social inclusion, employment, and well-being and creates economic value by supporting regional vitality through employment and by matching employers with jobseekers.

A social innovation for processing waste food

The second example of social innovation, The Social Kitchen, aims at reducing food waste. It is a novel solution for transforming ways of processing waste food and enhancing circular economy in Kemi. Supermarkets’ spare vegetables and fruit not already redistributed by non-governmental organizations are utilized by The Social Kitchen. A professional pre-processes the food and thereafter arranges cooking clubs for groups such as immigrants, people with disabilities, the elderly, or mental health rehabilitees. The needs behind The Social Kitchen are multidimensional. Wasting food is both environmentally and economically unsustainable. The social needs of the groups attending the cooking clubs are linked to needs of belonging and integrating into society, or to learning to process spare food. The Social Kitchen creates environmental value by using spare food, enhances circular economy, and educates people about environmental matters. It creates social value by encouraging people to eat and cook healthier, more diverse food. The Social Kitchen can produce indirect economic value for stores through improving their image of corporate social responsibility or supporting employment through enhancing personal well-being and integration, for instance. The Social Kitchen has a cooperative mission to bring people together to cook and is a result of multi-stakeholder cooperation. It has been implemented under the city’s EU-funded project Green and Sustainable Kemi. The concept and actualization are a result of cooperation between Meri-Lappi food services, the health inspector, Kemi’s Lutheran congregation, local gathering places, for instance for immigrants and the unemployed, and the local stores that provide the spare food.

Social innovations informing tourism in Kemi

This article suggests that social innovations can potentially inform tourism in Kemi in many ways (Figure 4). The social innovation cases represent processes enhancing sustainability and wellbeing in non-tourism fields, while the fields of employment and processing food are linked with tourism. It is important to evaluate how tourism could learn from social innovations and how tourism could support their operation. In this way social innovations can be relevant for the sustainability of tourism while tourism could enhance the overall sustainability in a destination—yet surely the relevance of social innovations to tourism needs to be critically evaluated case by case.

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Figure 4.

Social innovations informing tourism in Kemi.

In Northern Finland, tourism is seen as a way to enhance regional development (Saarinen, 2003), and tourism is generally regarded as an important generator of jobs (Ladkin, 2011). Although this discourse is present, some experts noted that clients of employment services have difficulties in finding a job in tourism, even though tourism enterprises are in need of staff: “There is a lot of talk that tourism is attractive. . . that there are jobs. But I have not noticed that…. I have tried to get customers to a work trial but that is very hard. I find it paradoxical…. We’ve had customers willing to go but they might never get a response from them. They may have tried to call several times. When someone answers, they tell them to send an e-mail. But they never reply to that.”

It was noted that tourism industries have high recruitment standards that are hard to fill. Here, it is important to note that representatives of the tourism industries have not been interviewed for this article. What is clear, however, is that from some experts’ perspective, there is a match in needs but a mismatch in practices. From a social innovation perspective, for instance Kohtaamo could be used as a collaborative space to try to match the needs in employment questions and at the same time plan tourism also from young people’s perspective. This could potentially address the needs of jobseekers and tourism enterprises by creating unique, transformative visions for tourism products and services, and enhance local support for tourism.

The Social Kitchen could likewise be cooperatively applied to tourism for novel solutions. For example, it could enhance circular economy in tourism, a topic which has sparked interest in recent years and has been increasingly recommended (Manniche et al., 2019). The need for circular economy is connected with rising consumption due to tourism growth and touches also grocery issues linked with tourism. For instance, waste food could be gathered from restaurants and hotels and a collaborative cooking club for tourists or, perhaps, for tourists and locals could be arranged. By that means, the visitors could get local food experiences (see Bell, 2015), which also enhances their sense of the visited place (Bezzola and Lugosi, 2018). At the same time, they could learn about sustainability, and tourism could be better connected to locals’ lives.

The examined social innovations emphasize multi-stakeholder perspectives and collaborative planning and doing. They can effectuate the connection of different sub-sectors and grass-root views of locals in order to transform top-down and sectored tourism planning. As one expert noted, “I like to mix things a bit. I like multidisciplinary work — to think collaboratively.” Another suggested that non-tourism businesses as well as the social innovations created at the third and public sectors could contribute to developing and co-creating tourism with mutual benefits. Finding and bringing different perspectives together helps co-create novel or contextually novel ideas. As a result, transformative visions could be formed to meet social needs and inform business strategies to make tourism unique in Kemi. Tourism could also move from a growth-focus toward holistic value-creation. Then, the value of tourism as a livelihood providing vitality, jobs, and ways to take better care of the environment could overshadow the negative impacts expressed in the materials.

Widening the understanding of what constitutes a tourism stakeholder

Tourism development has wide ranging impacts on many different groups of stakeholders, which can be defined as actors affecting and/or being affected by the development (Reed et al., 2009; see Starik, 1995). The success of a destination is often measured through growth; tourism impacts, however, are more complex and less commonly taken into account (Gill, 2004). According to Saarinen (2006: 1131), there is “an urgent need to re-evaluate the perspectives from which the industry and its sustainability are perceived.”

One of the key challenges of tourism is to genuinely and effectively include communities (Richards and Hall, 2000). In communities where tourism is growing, the challenge is to initiate community-wide dialogue to “circumvent the problems that stem from tourism activities by bringing more residents on-board before it becomes uncontrolled and potentially unsupported” (Reid et al., 2004: 627). In the case of Kemi, where tourism growth is expected, there is an opportunity to make structurally proactive decisions on how to develop tourism wisely.

Social innovations cross and challenge organizational boundaries. Bottom-up, grass-roots initiatives are more inclusive of marginal stakeholders than planning- and business-oriented approaches. Of course, the role of tourism operators is also central (see e.g. Burns, 2004), but in order to enhance sustainability, the idea of stakeholders could be extended to include more diverse groups such as young people, immigrants, and marginal actors in addition to those in business and policy-making. This could enhance employment and local support for tourism, for example, but could also respond to local social needs. From a Kohtaamo perspective, unemployed youths could be matched with tourism enterprises to respond to possible workforce needs. Furthermore, employing marginal actors is an image issue. From The Social Kitchen perspective, the extra food produced in tourism operations could be used as a resource, and arranging cooking clubs for tourists and locals could enhance local inclusion and approval of tourism.

Toward holistic, multi-sectoral tourism development, and value creation

Tourism destinations are most often challenged with holistically maintaining a balance between “sustaining environmental quality, stimulating a healthy tourism industry, and maintaining community viability and support” (Gill, 2004: 577). In management and planning, sectoral silos are considered a key challenge to recognizing mutual needs and meeting policy objectives (see Steurer, 2007) or to meeting the social needs of the groups targeted by the policies. Nevertheless, tourism development is often handled by business planning and guided by top-down policy-making rather than being multi-sectoral and community oriented (Richards and Hall, 2000). Structurally transformative views obtained via social innovations could bring light to sectored challenges. The results in the previous section highlighted the importance of varied, multi-sectoral partnerships as a key to success.

In Kemi, expanding the understanding of the relevant sectors is needed in order to move toward holistic planning. Business services and the city-owned company are at the center of tourism planning. According to a news article (Yle Uutiset, 2019), small entrepreneurs hope for a better cooperation. A solution could be to co-create new cross-sectoral forms of collaborations in the same manner as Kohtaamo and The Social Kitchen. This could expand tourism beyond traditional options and connect it to local needs. In fact, the city of Kemi is planning to move toward more cross-sectoral practices in its organization, and the same could be considered in tourism planning. Local governance practices could form a basis for unique constellations of sectors engaging in enhancing sustainability of tourism. This could create social and economic value with novel synergies between different actors and through local perspectives, enhance the uniqueness of the destination.

Social innovations can also highlight environmental issues in tourism and show how conflicts between economic and environmental values might be overcome. There has been an increasing debate about how to include environmental consideration in policies and planning, especially due to climate change (Haigh and Griffiths, 2009; Starik, 1995). Huijbens and Jóhannesson (2019) argue that a voice and a platform for environmental issues should be included in tourism development (and research). In this article, special attention has been paid to examining environmental sustainability through the issue of waste food. The Social Kitchen is an example of a social innovation that creates environmental value. It has been started through the city’s Green and Sustainable Kemi project, which implies that the environment is increasingly being recognized in planning and policies in Kemi. Further considerations of environmental issues, potentials of circular economy, and social innovations to create environmental value in the context of tourism could lead to tangible benefits and also improve the green image of tourism in Kemi.

Views on collaborative spaces for planning tourism

Successful community-based tourism requires a collective sharing of responsibilities and motivated and committed stakeholders. Participation in tourism planning involves “meeting and engaging in dialogue and debate at the beginning, but eventually it should turn into a real process of decision-making.” (Salvatore et al., 2018: 48). It can be assumed that collaborative spaces are needed for bringing stakeholders together, connecting different sectors, and finding solutions to contested sustainability issues (see Gollagher and Hartz-Karp, 2013). The sustainability approach has highlighted a need for collaborative deliberation and planning, but calls for such development often remain on a theoretical level when unequally divided power relations often shape planning and practices (Gill, 2004).

The examined social innovations are practical examples of co-creating and using collaborative spaces. Kohtaamo serves as a space for jobseekers and as a partner for employers. It demonstrates ways to bring employers, social security services, and young people together to discuss issues, build capacities, and develop expertise. The Social Kitchen has a collaborative element via multi-stakeholder cooperation and by forming the social spaces where people meet. Using spaces like these or using exactly these spaces in tourism development emerges as an interesting opportunity. Applying the idea of a collaborative space could create social and other values by moving toward multi-stakeholder cooperation and holistic well-being of the destination. Developing tourism in unconventional spaces could yield unique innovations for local tourism services and products. Importantly, the spaces could help in re-imagining the power relations of tourism planning.

With respect to cultivating multi-actor deliberations the social innovation examples highlight that tourism developers could interact with the heterogeneous actors and sectors of the destination. Then, tourism could plausibly help in identifying, recognizing, and even meeting the social needs of the destination. However, how to match tourism and local needs or even locals’ individual needs is not self-evident. Nevertheless, it is important that the traditional sectors remain open to novel ideas and developing collaboration. Social innovations can form independently, apart from policy support or enabling market mechanisms, but purposeful planning of supportive policies can increase the potential for their emergence (Ludvig et al., 2018). In addition market solutions, such as those based on corporate social responsibility, can also support their emergence (Chell et al., 2010). Therefore, it is good to remember that collaborative spaces co-created by and for social innovations can be purposefully supported by the tourism sector as well. Kohtaamo and The Social Kitchen have been examined as social innovations with collaborative spaces which have been supported by private-public sectors.