Innovation for Sustainability in World Heritage Destinations: Opportunities and Challenges of the Idealistic Paradigm

Experience-based sectors are increasingly used to transform rural communities into attractive places to live, work, and visit. However, such experience-based transformations (EBT) can bring sustainability challenges. The fields of sustainability and innovation have merged and developed into three paradigms to innovation for sustainability (IFS): skeptic, pragmatic, and idealistic. This chapter explores and develops the idealistic paradigm by using the ecological economy (EE) and community-based sustainability (CBS) approaches. Narratives from two cultural world heritage destinations in Norway are used to illustrate potentials and challenges of using the idealistic paradigm in EBT. The comparison of EE and CBS shows some overlaps but also differences, hence possible complementarity. Holistic sustainability and broad partnerships are central, but also ambitious, complex, and still rare, calling upon methods for involvement and conflict solving. Further research exploring these and other approaches and empirical research are needed to further concretize the idealistic paradigm.