The Islander Way
Flinders Island | Tasmania
The Islander Way is a multi-year community-led project on Flinders Island, Tasmania, reimagining the relationship between visitors and permanent residents.
Flinders Island sits in Bass Strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania, and is home to around 1000 permanent residents and a growing stream of visitors drawn by its wildness, remoteness and ecology. Those visitors are both an opportunity and a pressure. They are economically necessary, but capable, if unmanaged, of undermining the very qualities that make the island worth visiting.
The Islander Way project began from a different premise than most tourism development work. Rather than asking how to grow visitor numbers or improve the visitor experience, it asked:
What kind of hosting do the people of Flinders Island want to offer? And what kind of relationship between visitors and this place would actually serve both?
In 2018 the Tourism Colab gave the world this reframing, and in 2022 we showed how these questions could be answered in the Islander Way.
About
The Regenerative Living Lab
Islands are natural laboratories. Small, bounded, and ecologically sensitive, they make visible what larger systems can hide — the fragility of community economies, the speed at which different kinds of exploitation (in our case it was overtourism) can destabilise a place, and the extraordinary capacity of people to respond when they feel ownership over their future.
The Islander Way began in September 2021 as a response to a series of pressure points on Flinders Island, the social and economic heart of the Furneaux archipelago in Bass Strait. Overtourism during the Covid-19 pandemic had exposed deeper tensions: a mismatch between the values of a growing visitor cohort and the values of the island's 950 residents; fragile economic infrastructure; and questions about what kind of future the community actually wanted.
The project was funded by the Tasmanian Government and delivered in partnership with Flinders Island Council, Visit Northern Tasmania, and Designing Tourism.
Instead of asking "how do we grow tourism?", the Islander Way flipped the question: How might tourism contribute to a flourishing community, place, and environment?
This reframe changed everything about how tourism is traditionally addressed.
Want to know more?
Visit the project site: islanderway.co
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Community-led place practice
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Living systems
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Island thinking and ecologies of knowledge
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Hosting as relationship, not transaction
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Systems change vs. experience design
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Stories of place, people, belonging and stwardship
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Networked governance for a changng world
Most projects have an end date, a report, and a sign off. This one didn't end. It evolved. Flinders Council adopted the Hosting Visitors the Islander Way Regenerative Framework, a milestone that marks the formal close of the funded project and the beginning of something less bounded. The ideas keep moving. The community work continues. The questions that surfaced about resilience, about what a thriving remote community economy really looks like, about who tourism serves and who it doesn't are still circulating, but from a larger and more holistic lense.
Post-project, the work from Place Ecologies continues in a different register: sense-making, documentation of what emerged, and the slow translation of what was learned on Flinders Island into practice and thinking that can travel, not as a model to be replicated, but as a set of hard-won insights about how communities can navigate systems change when the conditions are right.
The Portals to Place gathering (May 2026) marked one of the first expressions of what comes next.
Work in Progress
Every stage of the Islander Way was shaped by the people who live on the island. It was co-designed, they were not just consulted. There is a meaningful difference. Consultation produces feedback. Co-design produces ownership.
Engagement was sustained and genuinely open: surveys, forums, conversations with councillors, business owners, environmental stewards, and community members who had rarely been included in tourism planning before. The aim was to hear what tourism actually does to the community, not just what the sector assumed it does, and to create the conditions for a different kind of future.
Community-led projects emerged from that process: new visitor experiences, a code of conduct, business development initiatives, and partnerships between tourism operators and conservation groups. None of these were pre-designed. They emerged from the conversations.
Community-Led
The Islander Way adopted regenerative tourism not as a label but as a logic. It asked three things: how do we design out the negative impacts that deplete the social, ecological, and cultural resources on which tourism depends? How do we design in actions that actively restore and enhance those resources? And how do we shift the mindset and systems - governance, finance, decision-making - that shape how tourism works in the first place?
This meant treating Flinders Island not as a product to be marketed but as a living system to be tended. The goal was not to optimise visitor yield. It was to build the conditions under which tourism could genuinely contribute to the wellbeing and resilience of the place.
Regeneration at this scale is not a sprint. It is measured in relationships built, trust earned, and the slow change of what a community believes is possible. We continue to work on developing a monitoring, evaluation and adaptation framework to understand the efects of this work.
Regenerative design
Flinders Island is the smallest local government area in Tasmania. It is characterised by an extraordinary natural environment — granite peaks, wild coastlines, migratory shorebirds, and landscapes shaped by deep palawa knowledge of Country. It is also a place with real economic pressures: limited housing, flight and barge dependency, workforce shortages, and an economy that can tip toward fragility when visitor seasons end.
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated visitor numbers precisely because the island felt remote and safe. What residents experienced was the opposite of safety: a rapid intensification of pressure on the community and natural assets. The Islander Way took this not as a problem to be managed but as a signal: the system needed to change, not just be optimised.
The project was shaped by a brand story co-created by the local community with Brand Tasmania — a story about place, belonging, and stewardship. It was a story that became foundational for everything that followed.
Place-Based
