Factors affecting the attitude of tourism-destination local authorities towards sustainable planning tools in a networking context: the Balearic Sustainability Network

Koh Phi Phi, Thailand, and Gili Trawangan, Indonesia, are two islands in Southeast Asia that face several developmental challenges associated with the rapid growth of tourism. Both islands are part of a marine park, are small in size and have several natural resources that need protection. They both face burgeoning tourist numbers that have increased tourism infrastructure development and are leading to environmental degradation. These islands have discussed ways to incorporate sustainability into their management and marketing practices, and they have looked to tourists as a support for change. This study examines the motivations, profiles and perceptions of tourists in island destinations, their level of awareness of environmental issues there, the extent to which they feel responsible about preserving or protecting their natural resources and the role they may be willing to take in their management, including their willingness to pay for environmental protection. The findings showed that the majority of the tourists to both islands were young, had relatively high levels of income and were from English-speaking nations. Tourists in both islands stated that they were willing to pay for sustainability practices, but there were differences around who they felt should be primarily responsible for implementing sustainability measures.     

Ecotourism-related products and activities, and the economic sustainability of small and medium island chalets

Environment-related products and activities in the tourism industry are popular among visitors to Malaysia. Such is the case off the coast of East Peninsular Malaysia, where several coral islands offer various ecotourism activities. The present study examines the products and activities offered in the four islands and related issues on the economic sustainability of small and medium island chalets (SMICs). Through the multi-method approach, results show that island hopping and combination tours are the most popular products. Meanwhile, snorkeling, round-island trips, and diving are the most highlighted activities. These ecotourism-related activities are mainly due to the attractiveness of the environment, which has drawn large numbers of tourists to the chalets on these islands. SMICs established their businesses in the late 1990s on the back of growing confidence in the tourism industry in the 1980s. Visitors include almost equal numbers of both local and international tourists. SMICs’ product and activity development are highly correlated with environmental attractions, thus positively contributing to the economic sustainability of SMICs. The present study proposes that the most appropriate business model for SMICs would be that of a small local business community operating in the island. This model would help maintain the sustainability of the island-tourism sector.     

Assessing environmental sustainability in tourism and recreation areas: a risk-assessment-based model

This paper presents a three-stage model that applies the principles of risk assessment to the evaluation of environmental sustainability in the tourism and recreation sectors. The model uses both qualitative and quantitative data. While assessing environmental risk at and from tourism and recreation areas is fundamental to sustainable management, existing methodologies rely on sets of environmental data that are often poorly linked and difficult to interpret in a holistic manner. Risk assessment is a concept that can overcome current limitations in environmental assessment methodologies. This model demonstrates its utility by assessing the environmental sustainability of two tourism and recreation sites in Ireland, with 25 environmental hazards identified at the rural Lough Derg (Shannon River) site and 29 at the relatively urban Dublin Bay site. The results show that the practical production of holistic and representative data on environmental risk from tourism and recreation areas is possible, with water quality, amenity value, traffic and transport, boating activity and noise found particularly relevant. The strengths and limitations of the proposed model are considered and compared with three existing tourism impact models: the use of sustainability indicators and two tourism-planning frameworks, limits of acceptable change (LAC) and visitor impact management (VIM).     

Can community-based tourism contribute to sustainable development? Evidence from residents’ perceptions of the sustainability

In this paper, the research gaps in sustainable tourism development were addressed by examining residents' perceptions of the sustainability of community-based tourism based on tourism area life cycle theory. The survey questionnaire was distributed to the residents of six Taiwanese communities, and it was designed to determine the residents' perceptions of the economic, socio-cultural, environmental, and life satisfaction sustainability of tourism. In total, 849 usable questionnaires were collected. The analytical results further elucidated the sustainability of nature-based tourism and suggested that the economic, socio-cultural, and environmental sustainability varied significantly in the consolidation, development, and involvement stages of community-based tourism development. The four dimensions of sustainability were evaluated according to the pre- and post-development perceptions of tourism sustainability, and significantly different results were obtained. The study concludes that the residents’ perceptions differed across the developmental stages; thus, managers should consider the development opportunities and adopt appropriate strategies across different development stages.     

Changing tourism patterns,capital accumulation,and urban water consumption in Mallorca,Spain: a sustainability fix?

This paper presents interdisciplinary research based on in-depth, comparative analysis of water consumption and land use patterns over a range of urban-tourist forms in Mallorca. The changing tourism patterns towards residential and quality tourism are studied, on the basis that capital investment for capital accumulation and increasing gains are its main drivers. Social awareness about overcrowding and resource limitations has moved the regulatory planning framework toward allowing further urban sprawl, based on the alibi of quality tourism. The rhetoric of this framework represents a first sustainability fix, a fix that hides the higher water demand and climate change issues. The socio-metabolic dimension of this process is analyzed in relation to how it has resulted in an uneven socio-spatial urban landscape of water consumption. This urban-tourist landscape is vulnerable to changes in climate, because it is sustained by an excessive use of water. Water supply is a serious constraint which has been resolved through its commodification and supply privatization, which are considered as a second sustainability fix. This tourism development process worsens rather than solves the metabolic rift, resulting in the second contradiction of capital accumulation between the imperative of continual growth and finite natural resources.     

Tourism in Small Island States: From Vulnerability to Strengths

This article argues that the narrow and frequently negative conceptualisations of small island states as environmentally vulnerable and economically dependent are problematic for sustainable tourism development and for economic development, generally. Scenarios presented to date are often incomplete. Narratives suggesting that island peoples are unskilled and lack resources, and that their islands are ‘tiny’ and ‘fragile’, can undermine their pride and stifle their initiative, reducing their ability to act with autonomy to determine and achieve their own developmental goals. A range of more positive conceptualisations is given, demonstrating the strong social dimensions of sustainability in small island states and the resilience and adaptability of island states. Examples describe a number of positive development paths to sustainable tourism in small island states.     

Tourism's regional development impacts : A comparative analysis of the Greek islands

This paper explores the conditions that determine tourism development and theorizes how these conditions lead to a variety of impacts on host communities. Thirty-eight Greek islands were statistically analyzed using secondary data and a smaller sample was studied in greater detail through a comparative case-study approach. While the quantity of tourism development was found to be subject to demand, its quality and integration with other sectors were associated with the size of the community. Tourism impacts were found to be beneficial in larger islands. In smaller islands with high tourist activity, while a reverse in declining demographic patterns has been observed, tourism was found to create unstable, short-term, and dualistic development. The paper concludes that factors such as the local institutional capacity to absorb development and the potential interaction of locals and tourists should be considered in the making of tourism policy.     

Post-disaster tourism: building resilience through community-led approaches in the aftermath of the 2011 disasters in Japan

Abstract

Post-disaster tourism is often perceived as a form of Dark Tourism associated with death, loss and destruction. In Japan, the term Dark Tourism has gained prominence following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. This paper focuses on a community-led approach to post-disaster tourism development, initiated in the coastal area of Minamisanriku and labelled by the locals Blue Tourism. From its inception Blue Tourism incorporated non-dark activities which concentrated on the beauty of nature, social and environmental sustainability and the development of an enriched tourist experience. Its co-creational ethos helped transform some of the negative narratives of loss associated with Dark Tourism into positive accounts of communal renewal and hope. The paper highlights the limitations of Dark Tourism to post-disaster recovery and contributes new insights to the community-based tourism literature. We argue that Blue Tourism is not a type of Dark Tourism but a form of resilience which builds around local place-based practices and traditional community knowledge. Consequently, it is capable of achieving sustainable disaster recovery and tourist satisfaction simultaneously.     

The influence of the political environment and destination governance on sustainable tourism development: a study of Bled,Slovenia

In the context of sustainable tourism development, there are many studies about the exchange process between residents and tourism, yet this issue is practically unexplored with respect to the political environment of tourism. Therefore, this paper introduces and posits that the political environment is a necessary enabler for implementing sustainable tourism. The authors extend the established three-pillar sustainability concept by adding in the political dimension. Then they surveyed how residents' positive and negative perceptions of tourism impacts determine their satisfaction with life in the tourism destination and thus their support for tourism in their community. The model was empirically tested within the context of the long-established Alpine destination of Bled in Slovenia. The findings confirm the importance of the political environment and question the sustainability of Bled's tourism development. It is suggested that the community has relatively weak destination governance due to the underdeveloped political environment. The survey expands and deepens the tourism sustainability debate by adding in the political environment and how it relates to the emerging growth of research on destination governance. The proposed model can be adapted and applied to any destination in order to improve its governance, including the implementation of sustainable tourism development.     

Sustainability approaches and nature tourism development

This article shows how combinations of different sustainability approaches of tourism entrepreneurs and other actors restrict nature tourism development in a nature park context. Drawing on the literature on nature tourism and sustainable entrepreneurship and a case study of a Danish nature park, we show how different actors' sustainability orientations cannot clearly be assigned specific theoretical sustainability approaches. Instead, they express different degrees of focus on various parameters of sustainability, thereby shaping the actors' ‘sustainability DNA’. The analysis shows how different DNAs are incommensurable and that this limits nature tourism development. The incommensurability arises from underlying ontological beliefs about sustainability, including the reasons for which sustainability is included in organisational strategies. We suggest a root-cause model to help solve conflicts arising from the incommensurability.     

Tracking the concept of sustainability in Australian tourism policy and planning documents

In the current climate of intense turbulence, tourism must transform to a more sustainable development platform. Yet it remains unclear how the concept of sustainability is embedded at different levels of government policy and planning, and how this has evolved over time. This paper identifies the concept of sustainability as it is articulated in 339 Australian tourism strategic planning and policy documents published between 2000 and 2011. The paper examines the extent to which the concept of sustainable tourism is evident in the discourse of Australian tourism strategic planning documents at the national, state, regional and local levels, as well as the balance of the discourse in relation to sustainability objectives. The results show that the frequency of occurrence of sustainability as a concept has slightly increased in strategies over the past decade. At the same time, there has been a shift in the conceptualisation of sustainability, with thinking evolving from nature-based, social and triple bottom line concepts toward a focus on climate change, responsibility, adaption and transformation.     

Examining the predictive validity of SUS-TAS with maximum parsimony in developing island countries

The Sustainable Tourism Attitude Scale (SUS-TAS) has been used as a tool to gauge the sentiment of local residents toward sustainable tourism development. This scale has been validated in cross-cultural settings by several scholars. In a like manner, in order to validate this scale, data were collected in the Cape Verde islands (off the coast of Africa) and the results showed (1) a parsimonious version of the 21-item SUS-TAS that facilitates the process of data collection without compromising its robustness and psychometric properties, (2) a validated second-order factor model, confirming that the seven factors of SUS-TAS can be loaded in two broader dimensions named “perceived tourism impacts” and “expected tourism sustainability”, (3) a SUS-TAS second-order factor model with validity in predicting residents’ support for sustainable tourism development, (4) that SUS-TAS can be interpreted by seven individual factors and/or as a global factor as indicated by the hierarchical measurement model and predictive validity. Methodological and theoretical interpretations are discussed and future refinement and applications are also offered.     

Conceptualising a contemporary marketing mix for sustainable tourism

This paper outlines how marketing, though traditionally considered an enemy of sustainability, can play a role in implementing sustainable tourism. It notes the redefinition in 2007 by the American Marketing Association of marketing's aims to consider wider societal issues beyond those of clients and customers. It illustrates how the recognition of the importance of sustainable tourism at all scales of tourism activity provides marketing with an opportunity to pursue sustainability outcomes. We review the strategic tourism marketing planning process and conceptually develop a sustainability tourism marketing model that embeds sustainability considerations at each stage of the planning process. Our proposed model contributes to sustainable tourism theory development and offers a conceptual tool for managing a tourism organisation's ecological and societal footprint on the supply side and a critical opportunity for transforming consumer decision-making on the demand side, irrespective of tourism scale. A 30-cell matrix is proposed that cross-references a strong set of 10 marketing elements (product, price, promotion, place, participants, process, physical evidence, partnership, packaging and programming) against the questions posed by the triple bottom line of economic factors, the environmental and sociocultural concern, creating a check list of indicators for management purposes.     

The environmental sustainability of protected area tourism: towards a concession-related theory of regulation

Demand for Protected Area (PA) tourism continues to grow, raising concerns for its environmental sustainability. Numerous sustainable tourism guidelines and best practice examples exist for separate aspects of PA regulation and management. However, such efforts are insufficient to reliably and holistically understand how regulation can mediate the relationship between tourism development and PA environmental sustainability. This paper proposes a theory development project, to map the compatibility and interplays among various regulatory approaches, and their consequences for sustainable PA tourism. The project is initiated here by taking the first steps toward a concession-related theory of regulation. The focus on concessions has been chosen because concessions are the most under-researched aspects of PA tourism regulation. Four regulatory aspects are selected and conceptualized in this paper: the approaches to PA planning, the types of monitoring undertaken, the methods of concession allocation and the design of environmental requirements in concession contracts. Methodologically, grounded theory is used, with data collection relying on written sources. The paper develops two sets of narrative statements regarding the prospects for PA environmental sustainability, under particular examples of concession-related regulation. The conclusion articulates several research questions, as an immediate research agenda, and calls for an international research group to be formed.     

An integrative framework for sustainability evaluation in tourism: applying the framework to tourism product development in Finnish Lapland

The adoption of sustainable practices has become widespread in tourism and has led to the proliferation of sustainability evaluation tools. They focus mainly on measuring outcomes, making scientific expertise an essential part of evaluations. This study argues that involving stakeholders throughout the evaluation process is essential if evaluation is to play a role in promoting the necessary understanding of sustainability to address the ecological and social concerns within a tourism setting. Drawing upon multi-stakeholder thinking, ethics, the Bellagio Principles and action research, this paper introduces a theoretical and methodological framework for engaging tourism organisations in collaboration with stakeholders in planning and implementing sustainability evaluations. The application of the framework is illustrated using a study of tourism product development, involving a group of eight craft-based entrepreneurs and their stakeholders in Finnish Lapland. A focus is placed on using ethical theories to promote dialogue and critical reflection and to expose the plurality of moral orientations behind the multiple views of sustainable tourism. Through discourse analysis, four moral discourses, ethical egoism, utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics, are constructed and examined. The paper shows how each influences the various ways in which stakeholders perceive sustainable tourism and the practical outcomes of the process.     

Social-ecological resilience and community-based tourism: An approach from Agua Blanca,Ecuador

Socio-ecological resilience (SER), as a theoretical framework, provides an original approach to the study of socio-ecological sustainability, affirming that sustainable development can only be achieved in sufficiently resilient socio-ecosystems. Sustainability is one of the major challenges facing tourism. Therefore, the exploratory application of this theoretical approach to tourist contexts could be particularly apt. Practically all current modes of tourist operation profess a commitment to sustainability, but this is much more significant in experiences of community-based tourism (CBT). This paper presents an ethnographic case study in Agua Blanca, an Ecuadorian community that engages in turismo comunitario, a community-based tourism development strategy. The study explores the expediency of studying socio-ecological resilience in tourist research and attempts to open up new pathways for analytical and methodological development.     

Competing industries in islands a new tourism approach

Many islands host both tourism and offshore finance, but their coexistence has been little researched. This paper examines their relationship via a case study of the British Channel Island of Jersey. Both sectors require labor, land, and capital—all frequently scarce in small islands. The study considers the nature of the relationship and resource competition. In light of the unusual context of small polities and the political power of external actors, it also analyzes the dynamics of tourism, offshore finance, and the state in islands. The overall impact of the relationship between tourism and offshore finance is further examined, to suggest how this affects islands’ economic development.     

Exploring the Sustainability of Mining Heritage Tourism

This paper considers the development of redundant coal mine sites into industrial heritage attractions as a process compatible with sustainable development objectives. An overview of literature in this field outlines existing social, environmental and economic perspectives on the sustainability of this form of tourism development. The economic aspect of the analysis includes an exploration of the sustainability of UK mining heritage attractions as viable tourism enterprises, using findings from a survey of UK mining heritage attractions undertaken in 2002.     

Paths to success: Benchmarking cross-country sustainable tourism

Given the complexity of the issues surrounding the concept of sustainable tourism, the current paper tries to provide a unified methodology to assess tourism sustainability, based on a number of quantitative indicators. The proposed methodological framework (Sustainable Tourism Benchmarking Tool – STBT) will provide a number of benchmarks against which the sustainability of tourism activities in various countries can be assessed. A model development procedure is proposed: identification of the dimensions (economic, socio-ecologic, infrastructure) and indicators, method of scaling, chart representation and evaluation on three Asian countries. This application to three countries shows us that a similar level of tourism activity might bring on different sorts of improvements to implement in the tourism activity and might have different consequences for the socio-ecological environment. The heterogeneity of developing countries exposed in the STBT is useful to detect the main problem that each country faces in their tourism sector.     

The Role of Food Tourism in Sustaining Regional Identity: A Case Study of Cornwall,South West England

This exploratory paper examines the role of food tourism in developing and sustaining regional identities within the context of rural regeneration, agricultural diversification and the creation of closer relationships between production and consumption in the countryside. It focuses on Cornwall, South West England, an area with rural development issues, increasing tourism impacts and contested issues of regional identity. A literature and policy analysis, and in-depth interviews with 12 restaurateurs, were undertaken in four popular tourist locations. Correlation was found between increased levels of food tourism interest and the retention and development of regional identity, the enhancement of environmental awareness and sustainability, an increase in social and cultural benefits celebrating the production of local food and the conservation of traditional heritage, skills and ways of life. The paper draws attention to three issues: the role of food tourism in increasing tourist spending, the potential role of food tourism in extending the tourist season, and the re-examination of food tourist typologies within a sustainability framework.