(Re)thinking Sustainability in Tourism Partnerships: A Hybridity Perspective

Sustainability transitions scholarship has largely overlooked the colonial histories and epistemic hierarchies shaping how sustainability is defined and enacted—particularly in tourism. This chapter addresses that gap by examining sustainability transitions in tourism through the lens of epistemic coloniality. Drawing on critical tourism studies, decolonial scholarship, and Bhabha’s hybridity epistemology, it argues that dominant transition frameworks privilege technocratic, Western-centric knowledge while marginalizing relational, place-based, and Indigenous understandings.

This chapter critiques the colonial and neoliberal assumptions underpinning sustainability discourses, examines participatory tourism as a site where these are both reproduced and contested, and introduces hybridity as a resource for navigating paradox and advancing epistemic humility. It concludes by showing how hybrid organizing produces plural, situated transition pathways that challenge linear, regime-centric models of change.

Positioning tourism as a revealing lens, this chapter expands transitions scholarship by broadening what counts as a transition pathway and who counts as a legitimate actor—arguing for transitions that are not only technologically transformative, but epistemically reflexive, relational, and just.