Strategic Stewardship: A New North Star for Destination Leaders
Recently, on a briefing call for an upcoming conference, I used the term 'Strategic Stewardship' and explained how I was working on a framework for this concept within tourism. There was an immediate reaction. 'Yes, that will be so valuable for our audience. The word 'stewardship' is showing up in a lot of documents and meetings now but we don't really have the words or the frameworks to even talk about it properly!'
That response was telling. It captures what so many public sector leaders are experiencing right now: a sense that the role has shifted, but the vocabulary and tools haven’t quite caught up.
Context and The Leadership Tension
Tourism leadership has long been shaped by what we might call management parameters: growth targets, compliance, reports, control. That playbook works when success is defined by more visitors, more spend, more bednights - as it has been for decades. However, the context has changed - maybe not a policy level but certainly at a place level. Climate pressure, cultural erosion, fragile communities, and declining public trust now need to be worked into the mix. Growth still matters, yet it matters differently. Success is no longer about volume alone not about revenue alone - it's also about the vitality of the place and the vibrancy of the communities that live in them.
Here’s the tension: leaders are being asked to deliver sustainable and regenerative outcomes while still being judged by management-era metrics alone. It feels like trying to navigate new terrain with an old map. It's no wonder so many feel stretched thin or pulled in opposing directions.
This tension results in 'sustainability' and 'growth' being seen as impossible bedfellows, needing to be traded off against each other, finding a balance that is less optimal than either side would like. While the philosophy of sustainable and regenerative tourism have gained ground and robustly argued the limitations of the growth only model, it has not adequately addressed how economic vitality can also comfortably sit within its narrative. It has not adequately mapped how we move from a growth model to a regenerative model, how we make the transition.
Somehow, a third way forward is needed - one that enables economic growth targets to converge with long-term legacy targets. This is where Strategic Stewardship comes in.
What is Strategic Stewardship?
Strategic Stewardship is leadership in service of people and place. It seeks to align policy, people, and purpose to create conditions for short-term returns on a road to long-term vitality.
It is a way of leading and managing that treats the act of stewardship not as a side activity, but as the central purpose of development. It recognises that tourism, culture, heritage, environment, economy, and community are not separate silos but parts of a single living system.
It is stewardship because it acknowledges our world today as an inheritance from past generations and accepts responsibility for passing on natural, cultural, social, and economic wealth in better condition to future generations.
It is strategic because it links stewardship directly to organisational missions, government mandates, and measurable outcomes, ensuring that caring for place is not just an ethical stance but a guiding compass for policy, investment, and delivery. Strategic Stewardship shows up in hard choices: in how funding is allocated, in which KPIs are prioritised, in whether place outcomes are embedded in contracts and policy frameworks. It is the difference between stewardship as an add-on and stewardship as the organising principle.
Naming What’s Really Happening
While definitions are helpful, what leaders often need is a way to see how this shift is playing out in practice over time. We find the Stewardship Spectrum helpful for this. It’s a framework that traces the evolution from a management era, through a transition era, and a proposal for an emerging Navigation Era as a step on the journey to the Stewardship Era. It maps across four variables: Place, Leadership, Responsibility, and Success.
It pivots on the Place variable: how we see place and consider its role in the tourism endeavour determines how we lead, who needs to be involved, and how we measure success.
The Stewardship Spectrum helps leaders understand the tension and discomfort of where they are now. They are caught in a paradigm gap, being handed mandates that increasingly lean toward Stewardship but still equipped with the metrics and reflexes of Management. Naming that gap, and having words to describe it, is the first step toward closing it.
The Transition Era is where we are right now. Many policymakers are still hedging their bets, not quite sure whether sustainability is here to stay or might be relegated downwards in the next version of a policy document. It has felt like a temporary dance, a flirtation with sustainability rather than a long-term commitment.
The Navigation Era is the potential next step. This one is worth pausing on. It’s a call for leadership. If we settle only in the Transition Era, it implies passivity, as if time alone would move us toward stewardship. In contrast, Navigation recognises that managing the interplay of Growth KPIs and Impact KPIs is actually the job of work for right now, requiring deliberate attention and skill.
The Navigator Leader
Seen in this way, leaders would take on the role of navigators: holding the compass, re-orientating when conditions shift, and steering systems through contradictions.
The Navigation Era raises the question: how do we orient ourselves when there is no clear route ahead?
Strategic Stewardship offers the guiding star - a shared framework that orients the compass toward vitality and resilience.
We can no longer call on the trusty roadmap, playbook or toolkit. Such resources, if they existed, would imply that we knew the route, that we’d been here before, had plotted the best way forward and could now replicate it. That’s not the case. We are in uncharted waters and now is the time for navigating and discovering.
A compass doesn’t give every step. It steadies you and those you lead, helping you hold orientation when certainty isn’t possible. For leaders, this compass rests on four orienting points that together define vitality:
- Economic Vitality
- Ecological Vitality
- Community Vitality
- Cultural Vitality
Seeing vitality and success in this way reframes growth itself. It isn’t discarded. It’s celebrated because growth (the Economic KPI) stands in service of resilience and regeneration (the Impact KPI).
Why This Matters for Public Sector Leaders
Strategic Stewardship provides the guiding star that allows leaders to navigate complexity with confidence. It aligns agencies and communities, and keeps direction fixed on vitality even when certainty is absent.
In practice, it means that when a new infrastructure proposal comes across your desk, or a funding decision needs to be made, you ask: Does this enhance the vitality of place, or does it diminish it? It gives that long-term depth and dimension to day-to-day choices.
As the comment from my meeting illustrates, these shifts are already emerging across destinations. What’s missing is the language and frameworks to name them, align around them, and lead with confidence.
This article seeks to contribute to this shifting paradigm: a framework and some shared language that can at least allow the conversation about stewardship to begin - and with it, a more confident, purposeful style of leadership for tourism in this time of change.
