Research Progress and Enlightenment of Tourism Socio-Ecological System Resilience in Foreign Countries

Resilience thinking and method are applied to socio-ecological system, providing a fresh and useful way to explore global sustainable development. Sustainable tourism is an important part of global sustainable development and tourism destination also is an important socio-ecological system. Therefore, resilience theory can better explain the complexity,dynamic and synthesis of tourism destination. It has become an important way to study the tourism sustainable development. It is conducive to better understand the changing relationship between tourism and environment. Based on a large number of foreign studies on socioecological system resilience, this article provides an overview of the related theories and summarizes the scale, the object, the methods and the contents on resilience. Scales in these case studies include large, medium and small scales. The objects are divided into two categories, one is for different types of tourist destinations, such as protected areas, national parks,etc., and the other is the key factors and interference factors of socio-ecological system of tourism destinations, such as communities, stakeholders, and other sudden events. In research methods, currently studies use sociological survey methods, statistical methods, mathematical modeling and GIS and remote sensing, etc. In research contents, studies focused on the understanding tourism socio-ecological system, analyzing relationship between resilience and other concepts, identifying the threshold and driving factors, building the conceptual model and quantitative assessment, adaptive management, and so on. Foreign scholars currently have reached a consensus on tourism socio-ecological system. First, tourism should be included in socio-ecological system. Second, resilience thinking and methods are suitable for tourism socio- ecological system research. At the same time, there are indiscriminate use,such as resilience, sustainability, vulnerability and sensitivity, etc. Therefore, we suggest some future study for better understanding tourism socio-ecological system resilience. There are still critical questions to be solved in the future.