Responding to COVID-19 in the tourism sector: Acknowledging the complexity

The restrictions in movement have not only suffocated the tourism sector through closing out international travellers, but have also limited the room for expanding the already limping domestic tourism. Jobs within the sector are highly threatened and some have been lost. The aftermath of COVID-19 has exposed the social, economic, ecological, and social threads connecting tourism sector to the rest of Botswana’s economy and beyond.

Over the years, there has been an increasing interest in complexity analysis approach as a framework for understanding social and economic systems. A complex system is loosely defined as a system that shows emergence behaviour that is more than a sum of the parts of the system alone. In this context, the concept of ‘emergence’ describes a system that portrays properties such as rich, dynamic and non-linear interactions that often provide output known as feedback. Therefore, a complex system exhibits manifestation of various nascent properties that cannot be merely defined from the behaviour of its component. The interdependencies that characterise the system contribute to the manifestation of emergent properties.