Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur eleifend tortor nec augue pretium
Galápagos is one of the world’s most iconic ecotourism destinations – yet, like many protected areas, it finds itself at a crossroads. In just two decades, visitor arrivals to the inhabited islands have grown by more than 260%, driven largely by a rapid increase in land-based tourism and proliferation of tourism actors post-Covid-19.
This shift has placed mounting pressure on water supplies, waste management, energy systems, near-town visitor sites and the fabric of island communities.
The Galápagos paradox is one familiar to many tourist destinations around the world – the very success of tourism threatens the conditions that make a place worth visiting.
For destination managers, there is an increasing urgency to find solutions to mass or overtourism and the pressure on local communities and nature. From Barcelona to Bali, headlines echo similar approaches – new tourism taxes, fees, daily visitor caps or policy levers aim to stem the flow of visitors. While these appear win-win solutions that bring more funding while attracting higher-quality tourism, they often treat the symptoms of overtourism without addressing the deeper forces that continually recreate them.
To understand what it might look like to address root causes, we must begin to do what pioneering systems thinker Donella Meadows called for – to “dance with systems” and observe their rhythms, understand their internal logic, sense their constraints and opportunities, and move with intention towards a more life-affirming pattern. In the context of Galápagos, this means recognising tourism as an interconnected social-ecological system – one that must shift from pursuing growth for its own sake to supporting the flourishing of both people and nature.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused an economic shock around the world, especially in economies like the Galápagos that are highly dependent on tourism. Visitor numbers in 2020 collapsed and prompted an urgent rethink of the islands’ economic model, expressed in the Galápagos 2030 Plan, and academic analysis of resilient recovery scenarios.
However, in 2023, visitor numbers reached their highest ever at 329,000 (see below), prompting renewed concerns from organisations such as the Unesco World Heritage Committee, which, from 2007-2011, had placed the Galápagos on its ‘at-risk’ list. The urgency was clear – incremental adjustments would not be enough. What Galápagos needed was a systems-level shift in how tourism is imagined, managed and governed.
In August 2023, the Galápagos National Park Directorate (GNPD) convened a landmark three-day workshop with more than 60 tourism stakeholders, including authorities, NGOs, tour operators, naturalist guides and community representatives. It was the first time since the creation of the ecotourism model in 2011 that so many stakeholders in the tourism system were brought into the same room to diagnose its challenges.
Many policy recommendations arose from the workshop, including the need to better inform visitors prior to their arrival of the vulnerabilities the islands face, enhance community participation in tourism governance, diversify the local economy with innovative economic models linked to conservation, and enhance regulatory and governance coordination.
However, while one of the objectives of the workshop was to explore how tourism could become a more regenerative force for the islands, it was clear at the end of the three days that we had only just scratched the surface.
This workshop would be a first step in a long and multi-faceted dance with the very complex system that is tourism in the Galápagos. This workshop seeded an informal, multi-institutional policy advisory group – including Galápagos Conservation Trust, the Charles Darwin Foundation, Talking Transformation, the Galápagos Hub, the University of Cambridge, and Universidad San Francisco de Quito – to accompany the GNPD and local authorities in this dance to understand and orientate the tourism system towards life in the islands.
As tourism rebounded globally post-pandemic, so too did interest in alternative economic models that critiqued the infinite growth paradigm at the heart of ‘sustainable development’ discourses, which see economic growth as an essential ingredient to bring prosperity to all. These alternative models – from regeneration to degrowth to buen vivir (good living) in Ecuador – argue that a paradigm shift is necessary to see our planet as finite and understand how economic industries such as tourism could be in service to the wider living systems they are embedded within.
As an international tourism consultant and PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge, I became fascinated with these alternative models. Would regenerative approaches to tourism prove genuinely different from sustainable development approaches, or just another slogan? If the ‘endless economic growth’ paradigm could not be effectively questioned and transformed in the Galápagos – where only 3% of the islands allow human development within legal limits placed
on migration, hotel and tourism vessel numbers – then where?
While research in the regenerative tourism space became increasingly convinced it held the answers, I witnessed the confusion caused by introducing the terminology without sufficient space or time to explore its meaning. As a researcher, I decided to leave the term ‘regenerative’ aside and dive deeper into its underlying principles.
I analysed how the very notion of tourism growth, depending on one’s perspective in the system, was an ecological threat for some and an economic lifeline for others. I engaged with diverse stakeholder groups – authorities, international tour operators, local tourism stakeholders and educators – to ‘map’ the tourism system using playdough and pipe cleaners, identifying leverage points for transformation. I conducted surveys with 600 tourists departing the islands to learn how their visit shaped their understanding of their own impact on and relationship with the natural world.
Throughout this research process, I kept returning to Meadows’ work, including her early research in the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth report and later work advancing the application of systems thinking to solve complex environmental and social challenges. Her research on leverage points was invaluable, later conceptualised using the ‘iceberg model’, where we often seek to effect change in the 10% of the system visible on the surface as observable consequences. The deeper we go beneath the surface – exploring patterns of behaviour, system structures and, ultimately, mental models or paradigms – the more effective the leverage we have to create transformative change.
I saw this unfolding in the context of Galápagos. While my research identified deeper system structures – such as fragmented governance, weak visitor communication and inequitable development – as contributing to overtourism and its consequences, policy solutions often only addressed shallow leverage points, such as increasing the Galápagos National Park entrance fee. While such solutions are not wrong, a much more profound ‘dance’ was required to understand the system and how it might be transformed.
As Meadows writes: “We can’t control systems, we can only dance with them!” In Galápagos, this ‘dance’ requires listening deeply across sectors, embracing complexity and designing interventions that shift underlying structures – not just symptoms. Across our initial workshop, my PhD research, and our working group efforts, a key intervention at both the structural and mental model level emerged – creating better information systems that can ensure every visitor is aware of what makes the islands so special, and what their role can be in protecting them for the future.
More than half of visitors today arrive without a pre-arranged tour or tour guide; and my research demonstrated how few visitors are aware of issues such as water scarcity (53%), energy (33%) or waste management (55%). Meanwhile, locals commonly feel that tourism overlooks their communities, with few visitors aware of local towns or social challenges, such as access to education or health services. The solution? Create a code of conduct for visitors, written by and for the community, that will serve as a commitment to contribute to the economic, environmental and social wellbeing of the islands for future generations.
With technical and financial support from the Galápagos Conservation Trust, Funcavid and the University of Cambridge, the GNPD has led participatory workshops across all four inhabited islands in collaboration with Galápagos Governing Council, the ministry of tourism and local municipalities, engaging park rangers, naturalist guides, tour operators, municipal actors, fishing communities and residents to co-construct the code of conduct.
We invited participants to ‘dance’ with the tourism system, understanding how we can reorientate the system structure, as well as its purpose. In our public survey and in each workshop, we ask: “What should be the purpose or spirit of visiting Galápagos?” and “How can tourism contribute to that spirit or purpose, economically, environmentally and socially?”
The code will become a unifying framework for guiding visitor behaviour, shaping pre-arrival communication and orientating tourism services toward shared values of care and coexistence. Importantly, it seeks to orientate all stakeholders within the system – residents, guides, operators, visitors and authorities – towards a shared purpose, where tourism is in service to life on the islands, rather than the other way around.
In Meadows’ list of leverage points, the most effective leverage is found at the bottom of the iceberg – not just the goals of the system or the paradigm underpinning the system but the power to transcend paradigms. She writes: “There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realise that no paradigm is ‘true’, that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own world view, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension.”
In the end, this work in the Galápagos may never fully realise the vision of a “regenerative paradigm shift” – but that may be exactly the point. Our work to engage the system in a dance with the concept of regeneration itself may, like any living system, create small openings for new life to thrive or shift an entire ecosystem into a new state of being. Staying unattached to the idea of regeneration as the right paradigm – to continue experimenting, transforming, engaging, dancing – might be what this work calls for.
The Galápagos continues to be a living laboratory, not just in the evolution of natural species but in the evolution of a world-class ecotourism model towards a system that is increasingly in service to life on the islands. It is a dance that may never be perfected, but each step serves as an example for other destinations willing to listen to the music of the system and try.
Author: Chloe King, Galápagos Conservation Trust/University of Cambridge
