Determinants of resilience-building strategy endorsement in Zambia's tourism industry: Stakeholder evidence and policy implications

Abstract

The transition from reactive crisis response to proactive resilience-building represents a paradigmatic shift in tourism sector crisis management. This paper investigates stakeholder endorsement of resilience-building strategies in Zambia's tourism industry, examining which strategies attract strongest support, what drives variation in endorsement levels, and how the resulting profile of stakeholder-validated interventions informs evidence-based crisis management model design. The theoretical foundation for this study integrates resilience theory with sustainable tourism development principles to provide a framework for understanding both the nature of tourism resilience and the strategies most likely to build it effectively. Using a convergent parallel mixed-methods design, 137 stakeholders were selected through stratified purposive sampling from five categories — government institutions, private sector tourism operators, community-based organisations (CBOs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and tourists — across Livingstone, Lusaka, South Luangwa National Park, and Kafue National Park. The study finds that the composite resilience-building strategy endorsement mean of 3.97 out of 5.0 (t = 26.85, p < 0.001) is the strongest positive finding across all four constructs measured. Environmental conservation leadership (M = 4.32) and multi-stakeholder collaboration (M = 4.21) attract highest endorsement, followed by gender and youth inclusion (M = 4.08), digital technology integration (M = 3.96), community-based tourism empowerment (M = 3.88), renewable energy investment (M = 3.85), training and capacity development (M = 3.74), and financial resilience mechanisms (M = 3.72). Tourist sustainability preferences confirm strong demand-side alignment, with 84% preferring destinations that support local communities during crisis recovery and 79% preferring destinations with documented environmental protection commitments. The 0.99-point gap between resilience endorsement (M = 3.97) and preparedness reality (M = 2.98) precisely quantifies the implementation deficit that a structured crisis management model must address. The study proposes the Zambia Crisis Management and Resilience Model (Z-CMRM) as a multi-phase framework for converting stakeholder-validated resilience endorsement into operational preparedness capacity. This study concludes that Zambia's tourism stakeholders not only recognise the need for resilience investment but strongly and significantly endorse specific resilience-building strategies that would, if implemented, substantially improve the sector's crisis management capacity. This study recommends that the Ministry of Tourism and Arts should formally adopt environmental conservation leadership and multi-stakeholder collaboration as the two priority pillars of the National Tourism Resilience Strategy, reflecting their highest endorsement levels and their cross-cutting impact on other resilience dimensions.