Grassroots resistance and tourism resilience in post-disaster Beirut: a panarchy perspective

This study uses panarchy as a heuristic to examine how tourism resilience develops in fragile, crisis-prone urban contexts. Drawing on in-depth interviews in Beirut’s tourism-dependent creative hub of Mar Mikhael and Gemmayze, it explores how local actors mobilized and adapted in response to state absence and uneven recovery efforts following the 2020 Beirut port explosion. The analysis highlights how these dynamics produce uneven and layered resilience outcomes. The study found that tourism functioned as a distinctive redevelopment pressure in Beirut. The sector shaped recovery through accelerated reinvestment, the normalisation of nightlife economies, and the commodification of heritage. While catalysing collective action, tourism-led recovery often intensified exclusion and pre-existing vulnerabilities. Although bottom-up initiatives in Beirut strengthened local adaptive capacity through narrative and tactical forms of action, their long-term structural impact was constrained by weak institutional learning and limited state support. This suggests that in contexts of chronic governance failure, grassroots-driven adaptive cycles risk shifting responsibility for adaptation onto communities rather than trigger institutional change.