This paper explores the key concepts behind resilience and sustainability, to identify areas where these concepts conflict and areas of commonality. Then, it examines how key stakeholders in the Ogasawara Islands, Japan, view local hazard vulnerabilities, and how the island could best address them within the context of the development of an airport. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, the authors identified that respondents were divided between maintaining environmental sustainability versus strengthening operational resiliency. Based on these results, an alternative approach to solve the controversy over the development of the airport, which could meet the demands of different groups within the islands, is proposed.

No matter how peripheral an island community may be, it is still a place formed through the forces of globalization as much as by local agency. This research addresses how the two forces of core dominance and local agency relate to one another through conflict and cooperation. Recently, small islands have been studied in a variety of ways. While researchers focused on sustainability or vulnerability in the past, they now pay more attention to resilience theory in the face of unchangeable global development. Following a literature review of the contextual analysis of the above three theories, this study found that sustainability is beneficial for generational preservation, a vulnerability focusing for disaster prevention, and resilience for disaster adaptation. Next, the similarities and differences among the three theories were compared and samples were made for tourism indicators for communities. Finally, the results showed that resilience theory affords the most appropriate guidance for peripheral island development using place making in the definitional, temporal, and spatial dimensions.

For Japan's small island communities, already facing an existential demographic crisis due to their aging, shrinking populations, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has proven to be a critical stress test. On islands with nascent tourism economies that have replaced declining primary and secondary industries, the situation has threatened to reverse precious economic and demographic gains that marginal communities can scarcely afford to lose. This study examines an island that had demonstrated successful small tourism micro-firm development in earlier research prior to the pandemic—success that was tied to community resourcefulness, where a localized, creative synergy of agency and capacity spurred entrepreneurial success. New field observations and interviews revealed entrepreneurs caught between competing priorities: preserving community health and preserving their own livelihoods. A sluggish response to the crisis from the local government led to unrest and tension among small-business owners, revealing divisions between stakeholder groups. However, a strong sense of community responsibility was observed among entrepreneurs, a number of whom pivoted toward creative, community-facing services, products, and initiatives—often in partnership with other community members. This study clarifies the role of community resourcefulness in transforming peripheral communities, articulating a place for resourcefulness alongside resilience in sustainability discourse.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential gendered impact of COVID-19 on island tourism Small and Medium sized enterprises (SMEs), so we can learn from the current crisis and be better prepared for the next. Through a brief exploration of three bodies of literature: SMEs and resilience; gender and resilience; and COVID-19, tourism and gender; and relating them to island destinations, we identify some gaps in knowledge and research, and make some suggestions for further research. A gendered understanding of the impact of COVID-19 is based on the understanding there is an unequal distribution of vulnerabilities and that these vulnerabilities cut across lines of gender, race, class, and so on. While more men have died than women, we need to understand the impacts on survivors and their businesses. The impacts are not only economic but embodied phenomena that have physical, psychological, and social effects on the individuals and communities that face a changing or unstable future. The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the problems of the global growth model for tourism and the resulting issues of overdependency on tourism, particularly in island destinations. It has also laid bare structural inequalities in particular gender, race and age within and between societies. Many have argued for a critical reconsideration of tourism and there is a lot of talk about how to "bounce back better." We suggest we should consider how to Build Forward Better, i.e. not going back to the present models but making considerable shifts. Putting Gender Equality at the centre of the Build Forward Better post COVID-19 recovery framework, could improve alignment of tourism with all the Sustainable Development Goals and lead to a greener, more inclusive and resilient industry for small islands.