The 5 Leadership Challenges Beneath Sustainable and Regenerative Tourism
Holding ambition, accountability, and delivery in public sector tourism
Over the past few years, ideas such as sustainability, regeneration, stewardship, and place-led development have firmly entered the tourism conversation.
They are now present in strategies, programmes, funding criteria, and policy discussions. They show up in conference agendas and board papers. For many working in public sector tourism, it’s been quite a while since they felt new or fringe. They are simply part of the landscape.
As those ideas have embedded themselves, it has become clearer that the conversation itself now needs to go deeper.
While the intent behind sustainable and regenerative ideas is widely shared, the work of implementing them is proving far more complex. The challenge is no longer whether sustainability or regeneration matter. The challenge lies in what it actually asks of leaders to hold these ambitions (and execute on them) within systems that were designed for a different time.
That’s where a particular tension is starting to surface, and it’s captured in this sentence that I hear regularly, in some form or other: “I buy in hook, line and sinker.
The problem is that I still have a policy to implement.”
Here are the five challenges I see public sector tourism leaders grappling with as we journey into 2026:
1. Leading for long-term outcomes inside short-term systems
This is a structural challenge. Leaders are increasingly expected to lead for long-term place outcomes e.g. vitality, resilience, community benefit, environmental health, while working inside systems designed for short-term delivery, mostly economically based.
Policy cycles, funding windows, reporting frameworks, and political timelines were not built with regeneration or stewardship in mind. They reward certainty, speed, and measurability, even when the work itself is complex and emergent.
This creates a constant balancing act. Leaders know where they are trying to get to, yet they are still required to account for progress using tools that don’t fully reflect that direction.
2. Being ahead of the curve without choosing to be
When I wrote last year about whether regenerative tourism was out of touch or simply ahead of the curve (Regenerative Tourism: Out of Touch or Ahead of the Curve?), I was responding to a pattern I kept noticing in conversations with leaders.
A growing number of public sector tourism leaders now find themselves firmly located in the sustainable and regenerative space as their lived professional reality. Through programmes, funding criteria, policy commitments, or organisational mandates, they are already associated with agendas that carry ambition and visibility, regardless of whether they initiated them or had the opportunity to shape how they would land.
The difficulty is that this shift has not been uniform. Senior leaders, government officials, or external partners who still hold influence over budgets, approvals and careers may not yet share the same level of understanding or confidence.
That leaves some leaders exposed, expected to represent and advance work that sits ahead of the prevailing comfort level of the system around them.
3. Navigating without a Roadmap
In October 2025, I wrote about Strategic Stewardship and the Stewardship Spectrum as a way of naming how our collective approach to tourism is evolving. Strategic Stewardship: A New North Star for Destination Leaders
What has become even clearer to me since then is that, for many leaders, navigation is no longer a phase on the way to something else. It is the work of the moment.
They are making decisions without a roadmap. They are aligning across silos. They are working with ever-increasing complexity. They are adjusting course as conditions change.
That kind of leadership requires judgment, coherence, and a new confidence, which doesn’t always show up cleanly in traditional performance indicators.
Yet, without it, nothing meaningful shifts.
4. Carrying risk quietly and personally
Many leaders are carrying a disproportionate amount of risk on behalf of the system. They are holding contradictions, absorbing uncertainty, and managing exposure quietly, so programmes, partnerships, and people can keep moving.
Much of this risk is not formally recognised or shared. It shows up in conversations that have to be handled carefully, decisions that are taken without full cover, and judgements made about when to push, pause, or soften a message.
Over time, this creates a sense of always needing to justify, translate, or defend. It is tiring, and it can be quietly corrosive, particularly when the load remains largely invisible.
5. Lacking language that fits the moment
One of the most practical challenges I see is a linguistic one. Leaders are not short of frameworks or strategies. However, these tools are not written in a language that fits the moment they are actually in. They are written in language of certainty and clear direction. What’s needed is language that allows us to:
- Acknowledge uncertainty without undermining confidence
- Explain navigation, and take it on, without sounding fluffy
- Signal direction without pretending the course is clear or the work is finished
When leaders don’t have that language, they default back to what feels safest - 5 year targets, compliance, mitigation, what can be measured in numbers, what can be defended upwards and outwards.
When they have that, conversations can change and spaces can open up for alignment and re-orientation. Leaders and teams relax and stakeholders can lean into the collaborative moment.
What this means for leadership now
If you recognise yourself in any of these challenges, you’re not alone.
Many thoughtful, committed public sector tourism leaders are doing this work quietly, carefully, and with more integrity than they often give themselves credit for, and certainly more than others give them credit for.
Strategic Stewardship as a leadership practice has moved from being an abstract aspiration waiting somewhere in the future. For many, it is already being practised, albeit in imperfect conditions.
Naming that reality doesn’t solve any of these challenges. However, it does legitimise them. That in itself is a support and allows a meaningful conversation around addressing them.
As we move into a new year, perhaps the most useful thing we can do is to be honest about where we are, and to give ourselves language that allows us to lead from there.
