Tourism meets the Doughnut: seven examples

Going back to the roots of filoxenia, and finding seven examples from around the world of tourism practised in a new way.

By Ilektra Kouloumpi, Sectors & Systems Lead, DEAL

Rethinking tourism

Imagine an island where the ferry still comes and goes, and visitors still fall in love with the place. But something fundamental has changed: everyone who steps off the boat is asked to make a promise, to treat this place a little more kindly than they otherwise would. Most people, it turns out, are glad to. At the end of my keynote at WadNext, a conference on regenerative tourism on the Dutch island of Ameland, we used this as a visioning exercise. Wind shook the tent poles, rain drummed on the canvas and a plane flew over, and still nearly everyone closed their eyes to imagine it.

Where I come from, hospitality is older than tourism. Filoxenia, the love of the stranger, is an ancient Greek duty: every guest, the saying goes, comes from Zeus. Somewhere along the way we swapped that relationship for numbers. Today we measure tourism in arrivals, overnight stays and spending, and we ask places to carry more of each, year after year.

At DEAL, part of my work is to ask what the sectors of our economy would look like if they followed the principles of Doughnut Economics, and tourism is one of them. What would it mean to go back to the roots of filoxenia? Robin Wall Kimmerer offers a way in with the Honorable Harvest in Braiding Sweetgrass: ask permission, take only what you need, give something back, and sustain the ones who sustain you. It describes the right relationship, between human and land, between guest and host, and between visitors and the place that receives them.

Seven examples, seven principles

All around the world, people are already practising this kind of right relationship in tourism and hospitality, often without ever naming it. Some know Doughnut Economics and some have never heard of it, but they speak its logic. Here are seven examples, one for each of the seven  Doughnut Economics principles. None is a perfect model, but they offer a lot to learn from. Together they show how differently the same ideas can land: a Belgian tourism agency, a Scottish river catchment, a Pacific island nation, a UNESCO archipelago, Namibian communities, a Catalan valley and a European capital.

1. Change the goal | Visit Flanders: Travel to Tomorrow | Flanders, Belgium
2. See the big economic picture | Bioregioning Tayside | Scotland, UK
3. Nurture human nature | The Palau Pledge | Palau
4. Get savvy with systems | Galápagos post-Covid recovery policy | Galápagos, Ecuador
5. Be distributive by design | Communal conservancies | Namibia
6. Be regenerative by design | Muga Valley Regeneration Project | Catalonia, Spain
7. Think again about growth | Amsterdam's caps on tourism | Amsterdam, Netherlands

1. Change the goal: from volume growth to destination flourishing

Visit Flanders: Travel to Tomorrow (Flanders, Belgium)

Links: Travel to Tomorrow magazine, Toerisme Vlaanderen · Practice summary, EU Urban Initiative

What it is: Flanders' tourism agency asked what would happen if the goal were not more visitors, but a flourishing destination. Working with Anna Pollock and hundreds of people from inside and outside the tourism industry, including residents, entrepreneurs and artists, it developed Travel to Tomorrow, launched in 2018. The vision moves from counting arrivals to asking whether tourism actually makes Flanders' towns and neighbourhoods better places to live. It treats the destination's residents, visitors and entrepreneurs, and the place itself, as parties whose interests all count.

Link to the principle: The first principle swaps GDP, the monetary value of everything sold, for a goal of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. Tourism has its own version of GDP: arrivals, overnight stays and spending. Travel to Tomorrow replaces that measure of success with a goal about wellbeing and flourishing, which is a shift of the same kind.

2. See the big economic picture: from council borders to the bioregion

Bioregioning Tayside (Scotland, UK)

Links: Cateran Ecomuseum · Introduction to Bioregioning Tayside

What it is: A community-led initiative that chose to organise economic and ecological activity around the River Tay watershed instead of around council boundaries. It includes the River Ericht Restoration Initiative and a regenerative ecomuseum pilot, a museum without walls. It also works with local tourism businesses to move from sustainable to regenerative tourism and to design new visitor experiences.

Link to the principle: The second principle replaces the picture of the economy as a closed loop of money between households and businesses with an economy embedded in society and the living world. A river catchment makes that embeddedness visible. The boundary that matters for tourism is the one the visitor's experience, and the place's health, actually depend on, not the line on an administrative map.

3. Nurture human nature: from tourists as consumers to tourists as members of the community

The Palau Pledge (Palau, Western Pacific)

Links: Palau Pledge · National Geographic: Palau's passport-stamp pledge

What it is: Since 2017, every visitor to Palau signs a pledge that is stamped into their passport. It was co-written by Palauan schoolchildren and is addressed to them. Its roots lie in bul, a Palauan tradition in which a community's elders can declare a moratorium that halts all use of a place or a species until it recovers. The pledge applies that idea to tourism. Its words ask visitors to tread lightly, act kindly and explore mindfully.

Link to the principle: The third principle replaces the lonely, calculating consumer with people who are caring, reciprocating and part of the web of life. The Palau Pledge treats visitors as guests who can take responsibility for a place, rather than customers to be managed. It also speaks directly to future generations, and it draws on a local tradition of restraint instead of importing one.

4. Get savvy with systems: from mechanical equilibrium to dynamic complexity

Galápagos post-Covid recovery policy with Doughnut Economics (Galápagos, Ecuador)

Links: For the later regenerative tourism work in the islands: Galapagos Conservation Trust, Imagining a new model of tourism for Galapagos

What it is: In 2022 the Galápagos applied the Doughnut to design their post-Covid economic recovery policy, asking what tourism business models would contribute to conserving the local ecosystem. The process ran as a series of workshops with a wide range of local actors. They built physical models out of clay and everyday objects, one of tourism now and one of tourism in the future, and used them to identify the root systemic causes of the problems they saw.

Link to the principle: The fourth principle asks us to give up the idea that a system can be simplified, predicted and controlled, and to work with its interconnections and surprises instead. Building models by hand lets people see tourism as a living system with feedback loops, and look for root causes rather than treating symptoms one by one.

5. Be distributive by design: from divisive to distributive

Communal conservancies (Namibia)

Links: NACSO: Registered communal conservancies

What it is: A Namibian communal conservancy is a community-based institution that obtains conditional rights to manage wildlife and tourism on communal land. An elected committee runs it and members vote on decisions. The conservancy manages tourism activities, often through joint ventures with private lodge operators, and the income pays for salaries, scholarships, community needs and development projects. Not every conservancy earns strong income from tourism, and for most members farming is still the main livelihood.

Link to the principle: The fifth principle asks how opportunity and value can be shared with everyone who helps create it, instead of being captured by a few. In the conservancies, the rights over land, wildlife and tourism are held by the community itself, and the revenue is decided democratically and reinvested locally. That is distribution built into the design of the institution, not added afterwards as charity.

6. Be regenerative by design: from degenerative to regenerative

Muga Valley Regeneration Project (Catalonia, Spain)

Links: Pioneers of Our Time · The European Nature Trust

What it is: A project to restore a 100,000-hectare watershed, with 68 communities involved. It combines low-intervention forest management, river restoration and the recovery of keystone species. A retreat centre called The Home, which opened in 2022, folds nature tourism and co-living into the wider economy of the valley, so that tourism money flows uphill to fund the forest and river work.

Link to the principle: The sixth principle is about economic activity that restores and works within the cycles of the living world, instead of running them down. Here tourism is not the goal but one of the funding streams for regenerating the whole system it depends on. The question shifts from how tourism can reduce its damage to how it can pay for repair.

7. Think again about growth: from growth-addicted to growth-agnostic

Amsterdam's caps on tourism (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Links: CMS: Amsterdam tightens the screw on tourism · DutchNews: Amsterdam sets limit of 100 cruise ships a year

What it is: Amsterdam is deciding where tourism should stop growing. Since 2024 it has held the number of hotel rooms at approximately 50,000, and the development pipeline has shrunk from dozens of projects to a handful. Sea cruise calls are limited to 100 a year from 2026, down from around 190, and the cruise terminal is due to leave the city centre by 2035. Holiday rentals have been cut step by step, from 60 nights a year in 2019 to 30, and to 15 nights in the city centre and De Pijp from April 2026.

Link to the principle: The seventh principle asks for economies that help us thrive whether or not they grow, instead of economies that need to grow whether or not they make us thrive. Setting a cap is a way of saying enough. The caps came late, after the city had already passed its limits. But they show what it looks like in practice to stop chasing growth: a city that decides what level it can live with, and plans from there.

What the seven have in common

Read side by side, the seven examples start less from a new tool than from a different question: what is this place for, who is it for, and what does it need? Some are led by communities, some by governments, some by a mix of both. Some are young and some have been tested for years. Most are honest about being unfinished, which is probably why they are useful.

I ended the talk where the thought experiment began, by inviting the room to close their eyes and picture a place. If you are working on tourism with Doughnut Economics, or are curious to try, I would love to hear your story, and I hope you will share it on DEAL's Community Platform.