From Recovery to Regeneration

What if the industry most reliant on natural beauty and local charm was also one of its biggest threats? And what if its recovery, post-pandemic, became a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do better? These were the questions behind Nordic New Possibles, a project that set out to redefine what sustainable tourism means for the Nordic region. Engaged by the Nordic Council of Ministers, Group NAO was tasked with challenging the existing policy assumptions around tourism and sustainability. The goal was to bring sharper definitions, broader perspectives, and, ultimately, a new common language and framework to measure what really matters. But beyond that, the ambition was to stretch the horizon of possibility and design a process that encouraged real policy ambition.

Bringing in stakeholders from across the Nordics, Group NAO challenged participants to explore four future scenarios – growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation – and assess which paths the Nordics are on, and which ones they should be on. The work uncovered wide variation in how sustainability is understood and applied across the Nordic tourism ecosystem. Yet we also found a shared hunger to move from extractive growth to regenerative impact. The result was a comprehensive white paper with strategic recommendations, including a Nordic Tourism Charter to set shared goals for the future of tourism, new democratic tourism governance models, and regenerative funding models to ensure long-term investment into sustainable and regenerative development of the Nordic region.