Decoupling climate change: winter tourism and the maintenance of regional growth

Climate change poses a severe risk for economic growth. The negative effects of climate change are, however, variegated depending on the region and the type of dominant industries fuelling their economies. Winter tourism in the Alps presents a case of a regionally specific and climate-vulnerable growth driver. Despite increasing climate-related physical risks to winter tourism such as snow scarcity, investments into infrastructure expansion continue. This raises the question of why a potentially unviable growth strategy is actively maintained considering the inevitable climate change scenario. Through semi-structured interviews, field work and archival research, this paper explores how the winter-touristic growth coalition responds to climate change. The findings show that key actors discursively decouple climate change from their growth strategies, which allows them to maintain the winter-touristic growth driver. ‘There is no alternative’ narratives and sustainability frameworks characterise the growth coalition´s response to the challenge of climate change. This paper makes an important contribution by exploring winter tourism as regional growth driver that contributes to a national export-oriented growth model. It thereby provides a unique perspective on regional underpinnings of growth models and the politics perpetuating growth model stasis under vulnerable climate conditions.