Tourism governance research has increasingly recognised the importance of leadership during periods of crisis and uncertainty. However, tourism leadership scholarship remains dominated by managerial and operational perspectives that often overlook the lived realities of governance practice in politically unstable and institutionally fragmented environments. This paper addresses a substantive gap concerning how public-sector tourism leadership is experienced, negotiated, and enacted from within Malaysian institutions, together with a methodological gap concerning how insider experience can be examined rigorously. Adopting a constructivist triangulated autoethnographic design, the study brings the researcher’s reflexive journal and insider governance narratives into dialogue with a 79-minute focus-group discussion and chronological documentary materials, with the principal documentary episode concentrated between 2005 and 2012. Four interconnected themes were developed: leadership under political instability, fragmented institutional memory, adaptive governance and informal coordination, and emotional labour in crisis governance. The findings suggest that tourism crisis leadership is enacted through adaptive sensemaking, institutional negotiation, relational coordination, preservation of tacit knowledge, and the regulation of emotion under public and organisational scrutiny. Methodologically, the study illustrates how triangulation can contextualise and critically interrogate insider experience without treating it as self-validating evidence. Theoretically, it reconceptualises tourism crisis leadership as an adaptive, relational, and emotionally demanding governance practice.
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