**1. Introduction**

The road to sustainability in tourism is bumpy and winding, with many innovation puzzles to solve along the way [1]. This chapter discusses the barriers to learning for innovation that tourism actors can face when they get certified in order to become more sustainable [2]. Integrating sustainability into the core activities of organizations and places has gained momentum as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become guides for tourism development.

Before the pandemic, there were increasing concerns regarding tourism, hidden social and environmental costs, and lack of management of the tourism industry. In the One Planet Vision, the UNWTO calls for a responsible recovery of the tourism sector [3]. Tourism actors can either try to continue with business as usual or choose a direction towards sustainability and the implementation of the SDGs. Getting certified can guide tourism destinations in a more sustainable direction and a vast range of certificates, labels and approval schemes have been developed to promote more sustainable tourism practices [1].

Sustainability certification is an indication of the offering of environmentally, economically and socially sound tourism products and practices and can be given out to businesses, destinations or clusters, products, services or management systems [2]. The benefits of these programs are that businesses or destinations become part of an exclusive club of high performers that bring new knowledge, best practices and learning opportunities [4]. However, lack of internal expertise, high start-up or investment costs, a lack of capital resources, competition from other projects, increased price sensitivity and a lack of communication and coordination among organizations have been identified as key obstacles to adopting sustainability certification programs [5].

Recent research shows that collaboration in networks can overcome (some of) these problems by providing the knowledge, support and savings on resources that are needed for getting a sustainability certification. Networks and collaborative arrangements like tourism destinations do not only supply an organization with new knowledge, they also put the organization in a good position to use and exploit the knowledge and transform it into concrete innovations and competitive advantage [6]. Correspondingly, local tourism networks have been conceptualized as learning destinations, inspired by the work of Senge [7] on learning organizations (OL) [8].

Even though the study of collaboration and learning has become a key element for explaining tourism innovation and development, gaps are apparent in organizational learning research in tourism, especially in understanding how interorganizational network practices enable and hamper the learning of tourism organizations [6, 9, 10]. Given that learning is a prerequisite for transformation toward more sustainable practices and innovations, a learning perspective on certification programs in tourism requires considerable attention. OL and tourism literature have been dominated by an optimistic belief that strategies, structures, values and norms for organizational learning can be implemented and will generally lead to positive results for the organization and its members [6, 11]. However, we have evidence from organizational studies that OL activities may be suppressed by political, cultural and structural forces [12]. Yet, understanding how this plays out in the tourism industry in its search for sustainability remains to be developed. While interorganizational learning has been suggested as a solution for addressing knowledge integration and organizationallevel learning challenges, it's important to note that collaboration for learning is not without its own difficulties. The following research question is therefore explored: *what barriers to collective learning for sustainable innovation do tourism destinations meet when getting certified?* Hence, the goals of this research are twofold: (a) to discuss collective learning impediments in the tourism destination certification process and (b) to integrate these aspects into a model of the tourism destination learning process. To achieve these goals, a qualitative case study of a Norwegian tourism destination that holds a collective sustainable tourism destination certification was conducted.

*Barriers to Interorganizational Learning for Innovation: A Case Study of a Sustainable Tourism… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112555*
