Reflections on Tivat Tourism Think Tank 2022 — Regeneration for Montenegro and the Western Balkans.
I’ve been curious to visit a family sustainable tourism business by Emma and Ben Heywood for a few months. They moved to Montenegro close to Skadar lake in 2008 and started to provide adventures in nature spots of this country and the neighbouring ones under the ‘Undiscovered Balkans’ brand. They even invite volunteers to help with working with tourists, babysitting and general help. But our calendars and mode of operation constantly didn’t fit each other.
Nevertheless, thanks to this rare communication Emma sent me an announcement about Tivat Tourism Think Tank 2022. As the key topic of this 3-day-event was stated ‘Regeneration for the Region’ and the program/speakers were promising, I dropped in for the first part of the second day.
Tivat is a kind of luxury town with a marine for ‘top yachts’ on the Montenegrin coast. Although in my mind it’s more about
- the Special Nature Reserve Solila. The brackish wetland spanning across 150 hectares is a home to 178 bird species (according to the Center for Protection and Research of Birds report).
- the town’s park — the largest botanical garden in the South Adriatic (dating back to 1892),
- and Vrmac mountain with its woods and eagle-eye views on the surrounding bays; proposed to be the next protected area as Nature Park.
Just a couple of days earlier I’ve been a speaker at an informal conference on Budva’s campus of Adriatic College initiated by biotech entrepreneur — Andrei Afanasiev during his short stay in Montenegro. Budva is also a coastline town within 30 minutes ride from Tivat and it is today also known as a hub for Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarus expats and refugees. The new war-caused waves of migrants bring not only economic growth, but it’s also the potential for environmental activism and education as a significant number of activists, teachers, and researchers have chosen Montenegro to start a new life here.
As we were in school and it was already announced about Liberal Arts faculty creation I made a talk based on my eco-initiatives findings in the region with a title: Sustainability/Regeneration Grassroots in Montenegro. Opportunities for: Kids' Education, University Research, and Citizen Science (it mainly photos there, the text is in progress).
So coming back to Tivat’s event. It was really an “unconference” and a think tank as it was promised. Even no sits in ‘listen to a speaker mode’. In the main plenary hall, we were clustered with eight or more tables to sit around them. In social media, it is possible to search twits/posts with this #TTTT22.
The session by Prof. Dr. Claudia Brözel had been run in a magic round table format where all the participants have their set of minutes, with an option to share your minutes with other participants if you feel that they speak so important things so you want to grant your time. You can see that by design in this format everybody participates and can experience interbeing. You can’t just attend it; you are a part of the round table. I would mention only a couple of topics raised there:
- How to raise awareness and start change towards the regenerative vision by Snježana Derviškadić from Bosnia and Herzegovina
- How we (as people in the tourism industry) personally can find that alternative kind of experience towards caring for Nature, so further we can implement in the development of our destinations by Aleksandar Donev from North Macedonia
- HR (by Murat Dernek) and communication between the local community and Airports of Montenegro (Milica Minic) local issues.
- How important it is to come together again despite the divided situation we live in (Patricia Pobric)
At all the events I go I always look for the youngest participants as listening to them and asking questions gives an opportunity to see some outlines of the future and to feel what kind of energy it will be driven. Thanks to the round table I met an environmentalist Vuk Koljensic. He works at NVO Nasa akcija (NGO Our action). They have a permaculture garden in Podgorica — Bašta Ekologika and do continuously amazing nature protection and education work with young people.
Another contact brought by the Magic Round Table: Boris Stijepović. When it comes to ecology there are always people who stepped out from IT to come to nature-related entrepreneurship. So did Boris who 12 years ago started an adventure company providing canyoning, rafting, paragliding, biking, and hiking in Durmitor National Park. Now his business goes well, so Boris looks for approaches to make the local community less dependent on external situations while gaining awareness and implementing exact measures for stronger nature protection.
In a parallel session with the Magic Round Table was “Regeneration Lab” dedicated to digital marketing strategies for destinations and opportunities brought by remote work / digital nomads guided by Montenegrins Andjela Djokic and Jovan Radnic. Andjela runs FitCamp Montenegro — a well-being & mindfulness retreat with self-sustainability goals. Jovan is a co-founder at “Montenegro Digital Nomads & Remote Workers” community.
I could join their session, but it was very smart of Prof. Dr. Claudia Brözel to have her own talk before the Magic Round Table, where she presented a much more general topic far beyond tourism (but with exact ideas that could lead to its transformation) — ‘Resonance Experience as a Health Measure’. I would not retell this story, instead, I put here a link to a short text titled ‘Ecosystems Resonance’ by Andrew McMillion, a member of Norwegian Seed Savers. But what I have to mention about Claudia’s talk is that during it she invited Thalia de Haas, a scientific researcher at DMAD — Marine Mammals Research Association to share a perfect example of how local people can find more opportunities for sustainable tourism while benefitting from changing their attitude.
Thalia also coordinates volunteers (biology students from Universities around the World) in Montenegro Dolphin Research. Once they hired a local person with his boat to do dolphin watching. He used to get tourists in the Bay of Kotor “from A to B” at high speed (and loud motor sound), so it was no opportunity to see dolphins in such a mode. Now, thanks to working with that scientific mission, that guy has learned how to use his boat in a more polite way, so he includes dolphin watching in his tourist service list. A win-win-win case for his guests, himself and the dolphins!
That example reminds me of the Dolphin Embassy founded by Alexander and Nicole Gratovsky. I believe there is a potential to create something similar here in Montenegro, or at least start by including dolphin-related topics in the cultural events in the coastline towns. Here I put the film ‘Intraterrestrial. A Fleeting Contact’ by Gratovsky to highlight the importance of our contact with these species and accepting their rights to see positive images of possible more-then-humans future.
One of the neighbouring experiences was shared by Tadej Rogelja from Slovenia; he is a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Tourism Studies Turistica Portorož, University of Primorska. Slovenia is well-known as an advanced country in terms of ecological practices in the region (a year ago I did this long-long and insightful interview with Nara Petrovic — a Slovenian ecologist). Tadej shared numerous initiatives (e.g. FairBnB.coop, TourismFromZero) and good practices for the development of rural regions and their stakeholders including cooperation with universities and digital nomads (I asked him to share his slides — they are here).
One of the general impressions that I’ve got here is that local government and global businesses really should work ever more closely together in the tourism industry (and from Anna Pollock´s speech everyone learnt on the 1st day we are part of a living system, not an “industry”). Aleksandra Gardašević-Slavuljica from the Ministry of Economic Development presented Montenegro Tourism Development Strategy and the Action plan for 2022–2025. Looking through its 220 pages I see how goals and actions are up to date with the local and global context, which still isn’t quite often in the government’s plans. However, the questions posed by the participants also showed the extreme importance of communication and implementation of that Action Plan.
Here I would stop the story (mentioning that it was just a tiny part of the whole event) and say a lot of thanks to the team that made this meaningful gathering (and special thanks to Kirsi for proofreading this text):
- Danica Banjevic — Director of the Tivat Tourism Organisation,
- Kirsi Hyvaerinen — a Finnish-origin coach and consultant, a tourism expert with over 30 years of experience, and a community builder who lives in Montenegro since 2006. E.g. she co-founded viable Montenegrin Travel Massive with 220+ members,
- and Vicky Smith, the founder of Earth-changers.com — a platform to announce and find extremely well-researched trips related to ecosystem protection and restoration.
To have more info about Tivat Tourism Think Tank 2022 I invite you to browse its website. The event’s video recordings will be available soon. One of the important things the organizers did, is that they gathered from all the speakers’ answers to the question:
“How I currently look at the development in travel and tourism?”
and published it on the event’s website. So even before the event, it was possible to explore personal visions and take a bigger picture out of them.
When in 2021 I started to think about what exact topics could be pilot projects to create a cooperation framework between universities, schools, ecovillages, nature parks, and indigenous people places idea to choose sustainable & regenerative tourism was looking like not deep enough. While in the meantime it was promising as quite obvious and easy-to-start with student projects. So when I discovered that in Sweden the distance between Suderbyn Ecovillage and the Gotland Campus of Uppsala University is just four kilometres away and they have a master’s programme in Sustainable Destination Development. I’ve found mutual understanding with the program’s manager — Ulrika Persson-Fishier: Her approaches to transdisciplinary research and transformative learning were exactly what I was looking for, though I drafted a transborder (for the Baltic region) seed project with Russia and Finland.
A couple of months later it become obvious that projects with Russia will be cancelled or frozen, while I had to start my Balkan field trip as I couldn’t imagine myself staying in the country that began its terrible aggression on the neighbouring state and, actually, on its own citizens.
Now, thanks to Tivat Tourism Think Tank 2022 I’ve met people in the industry and gotten some insights, so the idea of pilot projects in the field of regenerative tourism to bring together universities/schools and sustainable initiatives in the countryside and in the wild nature looks as a perfect direction to start long-term collaborative programs and that Montenegro could be a right sandbox to verify various formats for it.
In the next year, Tivat will host the regional Tourism Think Tank again, so save the date: 15–17 November 2023.
This is my third experience joining an ecology-related event in the Balkans. The previous ones:
- Reflections on Summer School on Environmental Activism and Climate Change. 2022 Novi Sad, Serbia.
- Unaware (Unconscious) Violence and Seeds of In-action. Deep Live Gathering 2022 in Montenegro.
My other ‘Balkan reports’ are:
- Serbian Ecologists,
- Interview with Nara Petrovic (Slovenia).
- Expats in the Montenegro Countryside (in Russian).
- Social Slow Travel: Lowcost&Zerowaste (it’s a more general overview, but it’s heavily based on the latest experience in the Balkans)
