On Tuesday, September 16 2025 the session was delivered by Dr. Aisling Ward as one of the researchers in MTU and moderated by Anis Qomariyah S.A.B., M.Ling. Dr. Aisling shared her knowledge about regenerative strategies for small tourism enterprises. She defined what regenerative tourism is and why we need to move from sustainability to regeneration. Then she explained the features of a regenerative tourism diagram that focused on each aspect that involved. She mentioned stages of embracing regenerative approaches, one of them is to engage local communities.
Also she discussed the mindset shift in changing the way we measure the impact of tourism. Traditional tourism often uses volume based indicators as success metrics while regenerative tourism encourages us to shift the indicators based on long-term values. Dr. Aisling provided concrete examples such as Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. Their focus not only on sustainability, but also on environmental restoration, local community empowerment, and preservation of M?ori culture.
The next discussion is talking about how a business can grow by creating conditions for communities, visitors, residents, and the environment to thrive and some research project that completed recently, called “Circular Economy For Regenerative Tourism (CE4RT)”. The project was focused on supporting 80 tourism SMEs across five European Countries of Ireland.
Several important questions were raised during the session to stimulate deeper reflection. In terms of sustainable projects, responsibility was questioned regarding who should be regarded as the local champion to ensure that initiatives are sustained after external support is withdrawn. In the African context, consideration was given to how cultural generification and youth out-migration could be addressed through regenerative approaches to tourism, and what perspectives could be offered on this matter.
Attention was also drawn to the challenges of measuring intangible aspects of regeneration. Since many value-based indicators in regenerative tourism—such as sense of place, cultural vitality, and community empowerment—are inherently difficult to quantify, the way in which these could be meaningfully incorporated into planning and evaluation frameworks was questioned, without the risk of reducing them into oversimplified metrics.
Finally, the issue of degenerative tourism practices was highlighted. Both speakers and participants were invited on what perspectives exist regarding such practices, and what actions are required both locally and globally to counter them so that tourism contributes to regeneration rather than depletion.
