Doing culturally sensitive tourism business in the Arctic: A practice-based approach

Before the COVID19 pandemic, tourism in the Arctic was growing rapidly resulting in various kinds of disturbances in local communities, such as tourists photographing through local people’s windows or husky safaris hindering reindeer herding. An increasing number of outsiders with little knowledge of local cultures was participating in the Arctic tourism business. In this paper, we analyse and sketch socially and culturally sustainable ways of doing tourism business in the Arctic based on the notion of cultural sensitivity, practice theory and interviews with local tourism entrepreneurs and other relevant local stakeholders in Finnish and Swedish Lapland, Northern Norway and Greenland. In short, we investigate two practices: the practice of collaboration and the practice of authenticity, and reflect on how their large-scale implementation might change tourism after-COVID19, especially in the Arctic areas. According to our analysis, local knowledge stemming from existential insideness in the local place is an important element in both practices and should be highlighted in culturally and socially sustainable tourism development and marketing.