Communicating Resilience: Narrating Transit-to-Destination Transformation through Culinary Identity and Coastal Tourism in Brebes

Abstract

This study examines how resilience is communicated through narrative practices in a corridor-based tourism destination, using Brebes Regency, Indonesia, as a case study. While tourism recovery is often approached through infrastructure and economic strategies, this research argues that recovery is fundamentally a communicative process involving the construction and negotiation of destination meanings. Employing a qualitative case study design, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with eight stakeholders, document analysis, and field observations across four tourism clusters: coastal tourism, mangrove ecotourism, Pantura corridor stopover nodes, and culinary MSMEs. The findings reveal four key communicative pillars shaping Brebes’ tourism resilience: narrative repositioning, culinary storytelling, stakeholder communication networks, and environmental communication. The study identifies a persistent “transit narrative” that constrains destination development, alongside fragmented stakeholder communication and a digital storytelling gap among MSMEs. However, innovative practices such as mangrove-based ecotourism and culinary identity development offer strong narrative resources for transformation. This study proposes a Communication-Based Sustainable Recovery Model, emphasizing grand narrative construction, storytelling capacity-building, stakeholder coordination, and integration of environmental communication into tourism experiences. The findings contribute to tourism resilience literature by highlighting communication as a central mechanism for transforming transit regions into sustainable destinations.