Regenerative Capability Pedagogy in Small Island Tourism and Hospitality Education

In Small Island Destinations (SIDs), tourism sustains livelihoods while reproducing dependency, ecological fragility, and social precarity. Hospitality curricula often reinforce this paradox by emphasizing employability over resilience and sovereignty. This study employs narrative inquiry with Caribbean educators, analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis, to explore curricular practices, systemic constraints, and reformist aspirations. Findings reveal strong endorsement of the Regenerative Capability Pedagogy (ReCaP), a framework grounded in Sen’s Capability Approach and Nussbaum’s notion of human flourishing, across its four dimensions: empathy, capability expansion, sovereignty-building, and resilience. Respondents also identified institutional and structural “capability traps” that constrain transformative reform, underscoring the recursive tension between aspirations for educational sovereignty and systemic fragility. ReCaP operationalizes a spiral curriculum that integrates service foundations, digital fluency, indigenous knowledge, and empathy-driven metrics. It repositions higher education from a mechanism of labor-market compliance to developmental infrastructure capable of cultivating sovereignty and sustainable futures in SIDs. This paper contributes to the literature by extending the Capability Approach into tourism education, theorizing pedagogy as a regenerative capability system, and empirically demonstrating how ReCaP can align curricular practice with resilience and sovereignty in fragile, tourism-dependent societies.