Today, Canada’s population is over 80 percent urban as exemplified by our growing cities. As a result of outmigration to urban centres, many rural economies in Atlantic Canada are struggling socially and economically. This research examines the redevelopment of rural communities through a lens of continuous cycles of adaptive change - based on Holling’s ecological concept of panarchy. By drawing on the characteristics of ecological communities, this panarchy-based theoretical framework uses a novel approach to reflect on a community’s position along its own adaptive change cycle and identifies leverage points where policy intervention may be most advantageous. This research also examines the practical application of this framework via interviews with economic development officials. Overall, the results of this research suggest that the panarchy-based framework offers constructive guidance to policy makers seeking to push or pull rural communities into positions of higher resiliency and to expedite times of economic uncertainty.

Although the cruise industry and ROPAX ships have achieved steady growth with increased capacity, innovative service provisions and constantly being prepared for events of emergencies, they were not prepared for the sudden COVID-19 pandemic, and the travel restrictions and No Sail order put a halt to their services. Organisational resilience has received a growing interest in the world since its capabilities can support organisations to anticipate, cope and adapt to internal or external changes due to a crisis or unexpected event. This exploratory scenario study seeks to examine the cruise ships organisational resilience and service attributes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.The empirical findings have been collected by using qualitative semi-structured interviews with four key managers and decision makers within the industry. The findings were themed to find qualitative variations and then analysed in relation to the presented literature through the adaptive change cycle. The adaptive change cycle has been used to explain the drastic and partially chaotic crisis and recovery of cruise services.