ENACTING CLIMATE ACTION IN DESTINATION GOVERNANCE: Effectual reasoning, intrapreneurial work, and enabling conditions

We examine how sustainability managers in destinations enact climate action. Drawing on data from European destination managers, we analyse the interaction between effectual decision-making, intrapreneurship, and enabling contextual conditions. Managers use effectual reasoning to make progress under uncertainty and translate this into intrapreneurial practices that mobilise others, reshape priorities, and coordinate action across fragmented destination systems. Whether these efforts can be sustained and scaled depends on institutional, relational, and cultural–cognitive embeddedness, which provide legitimacy, access to partners and expertise, and shared understandings that normalise collaboration and climate responsibility. By integrating effectuation and intrapreneurship into tourism governance, this study offers a process-oriented explanation of how destination organisations move beyond symbolic commitments toward more substantive climate action under conditions of constraint.