Accelerating Sustainability Transitions in the LTH domain: the SPRONG Project.
The hospitality domain – encompassing leisure, tourism, hospitality and (accommodation‑based) recreation – is at a crucial tipping point. Around the world, destinations are becoming overloaded, local communities are reaching their limits and ecosystems are under pressure. The traditional extraction‑based model is beginning to crack. At the same time, a new reality is emerging: sustainable, regenerative, inclusive and climate‑conscious. The question is no longer *why* we need to change, but *how* we do so quickly and decisively.
Fortunately, pioneers in the sector are showing that things can be done differently. Think of steward‑owned business models, circular hotels, climate‑neutral events and regenerative placemaking. These are powerful innovations, but still too fragmented to trigger a broad system transformation.
We are developing transition arenas: incubators where entrepreneurs, education, governments and communities come together. These are places for experimentation, redesign and building new systems. Within these arenas, we focus on climate neutrality, broad prosperity, healthy regions and regenerative placemaking. We identify opportunities and barriers, develop shared future visions, formulate strategies and implement pilots, alliances and local interventions. We scale up the insights and energy from these arenas so that promising initiatives can grow into the new norm and help shift existing systems.
A call to all innovators
Support the pioneers who dare to build alternative futures. Invest in arenas that accelerate innovation. Ensure that policy and practice align. Only by connecting local initiatives with system‑level impact can we speed up the essential sustainability transition. That transition has already begun. Let’s redesign the sector together: from competition to collaboration, from depletion to regeneration, from promise to practice.
The project brings together 8 research groups, 4 programme managers and a project leader. This team holds extensive expertise in sustainability, sustainable mobility, (social) impact measurement, behavioural interventions, transition mechanisms and scenario planning related to the hospitality domain, as well as ample experience in collaborating and conducting practice‑based research with and for stakeholders at local, regional and (inter)national levels.
Together with frontrunners and “disruptors” from the hospitality domain, the SPRONG group will work within four regional transition arenas in an interactive, design‑led and experimental way on the transition themes of climate neutrality, broad prosperity, healthy region and regenerative area development. These four themes are directly connected to the policy agendas and societal challenges in these regions.
The optimal design of these transition arenas, knowledge sharing and the creation of a learning effect at domain level will be facilitated and organised by a national transition forum. This forum supports consortium and network partners in enhancing the practical possibilities and conditions for scalability and replicability of successful practices, thereby enabling impact at the level of system change.
Accelerating sustainability transitions requires collective effort. Together, we work to strengthen an ecosystem in which stakeholders develop solutions for local societal challenges and scale them up into a continuous and purposeful movement towards a sustainable sector. Would you like to join and combine forces?
Dr. Stefan Hartman is head of the European Tourism Futures Institute (ETFI) at NHL Stenden University in the Netherlands.