This special issue is a reflection by tourism scholars on the initial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world, with travel and tourism being among the most significant areas to bear those impacts. However, instead of an analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism places and sectors, as is the emphasis for many other journal special issues this year, the papers in this issue focus on visions of how the pandemic events of 2020 are contributing to a possibly substantial, meaningful and positive transformation of the planet in general, and tourism specifically. This is not a return to a 'normal' that existed beforebut is instead a vision of how the world is changing, evolving, and transforming into something different from what it was before the 2020 global pandemic experience. Comments from the guest editors for this special issue are individually identified in this introduction editorial.

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Overtourism is a contemporary phenomenon, rapidly evolving and underlined by what is evidently excessive visitation to tourist destinations. This is obvious in the seemingly uncontrolled and unplanned occurrence of urban overtourism in popular destinations and arguably a consequence of unregulated capital accumulation and growth strategies heavily associated with selling cities as tourism commodities. The vested interests of social movements has converged into growing protests against overtourism and associated degrowth campaigns have emerged out of this activism that calls for alternative governance and management measures that eschew touristic monoculture and simplistic economic growthoriented models. Accordingly, we explore the evolution of the tourism degrowth discourse among social movement activists in Barcelona, and in particular, where this is related to claims associated with overtourism and the extent to which this might be influencing a paradigm shift from 'tourism growth' to 'tourism degrowth'. Methodologically, we draw from an overarching framework that leverages long-term ethnographic research in Barcelona. Here, we employ Rapid Situation Analysis (RSA) including in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observations, informal conversations and retrospective evaluation of field diary entries.

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Global tourism growth is unprecedented. Consequently, this has elevated the sector as a key plank for economic development, and its utility is deeply embedded in political, economic and social-ecological discourse. Where the expansion of the sector leverages natural and cultural landscapes, this applies pressure to social and ecological underpinnings that if not reconciled, can become problematic. The way this plays out in Australia's Shipwreck Coast and the wider Great Ocean Road region, especially the implications for community resilience, is the focus. Emphasis is placed on the vulnerability of peripheral coastal areas to development that withdraws from destination endowments, yet fails to provide commensurate economic yield as a suitable trade-off. This is obvious where tourism intensification has led to concerns about the breach of normative carrying capacities. Temporal overtourism driven by seasonal overcrowding is countenanced as emblematic of tourism in the Anthropocene where focus tends to be largely growth-oriented, with much less attention given to bolstering social-ecological resilience, especially community resilience. At stake is the resilience of regional areas and their communities, who in the absence of garnering commensurate economic returns from tourism expansion find themselves in social and ecological deficit.