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RESOURCES


RESOURCES: PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS

Author : Menno Houtstra
School/Work Place : ECEAT International, Netherlands
Contact : m.houtstra@eceat-projects.org
Year : 2006

The integration of sustainability within the domain of tourism has recently made considerable progress. For instance, in the UK and the Netherlands, the most important federations of tour operators, the FTO and the ANVR, have introduced obligatory minimum standards to contribute to sustainability. In fact, most tourism companies seem now to accept that they have corporate responsibility for the integration of sustainability into their practices. The UN-WTO has recently identified 15 goals for member states that should be adopted as policy orientation to reach sustainability in tourism. Nevertheless, not all stakeholders in tourism are ready to accept their exact roles in this process. For example, the European representation of the hospitality sector (HOTREC) has had until now an active policy to avoid environmental restrictions upon their hotels and restaurants. Furthermore, if sustainability principles are applied in the tourism sector there is a broad tendency to focus on minimising environmental impact rather than maximising the contribution to sustainable development. Finally, this environmental focus seems to be exported to the tourism sector outside the EU as main aspect of sustainable tourism. This orientation has been heavily criticised by NGO’s such as the International Ecotourism Society and the French GRET. So are we, considering the fact that there is a general willingness to take responsibility, on the right track or not?

In this article it is noted that there is hesitation to take full responsibility for sustainability in tourism and there is confusion on what should be the focus of responsible tourism management. The current trend to address to corporate responsibility of individual tourism companies need to be complemented by a strong approach of tourism sectors as a whole. There is a need of a better insight on what is the exact relation between the effects of their actions, responsibilities and roles for sustainable development. First, the different tourism sectors should agree on a definition of what is exactly the relative pressure that their activities have on the capacity of the region (in this case tourism destination) to develop in a sustainable way. Secondly, the sectors need an agreement on a fair assignment of roles and responsibilities to enlarge the capacity of the region for sustainable development. The tourism sectors need to know what the priorities are in order to invest effectively their scarce resources.


List of Articles
No. Subject Viewssort Date
82 Think Tank V Managing Risk and Crisis for Sustainable Tourism: Rese... file 5908 Dec 14, 2013

Many tourism professionals are afraid to speak about terms such as tourism security and tourism safety. There is a common feeling among tourism and travel professionals that these terms will frighten customers and that the less said the bett...

Author: Peter E. Tarlow 

Year: 2005 

OPA: Keynote Speech 

81 Think Tank XII Opportunities and Obstacles for Sustainable Tourism Mo... file 5922 Nov 06, 2013

Cross border destination management is characterized by some extra challenges: national, district or county interests, different administrative structures, a high impact of politics and policies, inequality of tourism infrastructures, power ...

Author: Tatjana Thimm 

Year: 2012 

80 Think Tank XIII Striving for Environmental Sustainability through Soci... file 6024 Nov 06, 2013

The question how native societies cope with the increasing pressure of global values, such as sustainability, westernization and democratic institutions has been asked in the last decades (Smith, 1989; Honey, 1999; Nash, 2001; Honey, 2008). ...

Author: Peter Varga 

Year: 2013 

79 Think Tank VII Volunteer Tourism: Sustainable Innovation in Tourism, ... file 6074 Oct 13, 2013

This is a study of the relationships between two volunteer tourism host communities and the volunteer tourists who visit them. One is a declining rural community located in the Appalachian mountains of the United States. The other is in a ra...

Author: Nancy McGehee 

Year: 2007 

78 Think Tank XII Creating Tourism Transport Flow Maps with GIS: A Pract... file 6113 Nov 06, 2013

This paper explores various options to visualize tourism transport flows with spatial analysis tools and show them on maps. To facilitate implementation of these options, procedures for data preparation and map creation are explained through...

Author: Martin Landré & Paul Peeters 

Year: 2012 

77 Think Tank XV A vacation from capitalism; what happens when the ‘mas... file 6243 Jul 27, 2015

Philosophical and theoretical debates in tourism must be situated not just within economic and cultural contexts, but also political and social ones (Ataljevic, Pritchard & Morgan, 2007). Tourism is more than an ‘industry,’ Freya Higgins...

Author: Amy Savener 

Year: 2015 

76 Think Tank X Innovation of and in Informal Actor Network file 6256 Oct 13, 2013

How the informal sectors create and share innovation in gaining competition is very important in tourism development. Commonly, informal sectors are embedded in their routines and lack of innovation capacities. Based on the case of pedicab ...

Author: Maya Damayanti 

Year: 2010 

75 Think Tank XIII Measuring Tourism: Developing a Regional Level Framewo... file 6310 Nov 06, 2013

In the field of tourism impacts research it is often assumed that certain characteristics of tourism are related to the nature and extent of tourism impacts on the destination’s community well-being. However, a standard set of measures for t...

Author: Elena Konovalov, Laurie Murphy & Gianna Moscardo 

Year: 2013 

74 Think Tank XIV The Roles of the Public, Private and Voluntary Sector ... file 6351 Jun 26, 2014

Social tourism refers to initiatives that aim to include groups into tourism that would otherwise be excluded from it. The earliest definition of social tourism by Hunzicker (1951) described social tourism as ‘‘the relationships and phenomen...

Author: Lynn Minnaert 

Year: 2014 

73 Think Tank XIII Understanding Sense of Place in Tourism Development: T... file 6424 Nov 06, 2013

This paper introduces the rationale for a study which explores the relationship between sense of place and sustainability at Tunku Abdul Rahman National Park (TARP), Sabah. Sense of place encompasses an understanding of the meaning bestowed ...

Author: Paulin Wong Poh Lin & Balvinder Kaur Kler 

Year: 2013 

72 Think Tank XIV The Development of a National Tourism Research Agenda ... file 6543 Jun 26, 2014

A national research agenda identifies the research priorities that need to be addressed to “inform future policy and service delivery” by government and “for use by academics and practitioners to stimulate research, partnerships and collabor...

Author: Leo Jago & Margaret Deery 

Year: 2014 

71 Think Tank XIII Exploring the Relationship between Cultural Capital in... file 6578 Nov 06, 2013

There is substantial literature on the impacts of tourism on culture, both positive and negative, however, there are relatively few articles that explore the relationship between cultural capital and sustainable tourism. This paper will repo...

Author: Laurie Murphy & Andrea Schurmann 

Year: 2013 

70 Think Tank XII A Global Tourism Geography - The Role of Transport file 6652 Nov 06, 2013

After decades of tourism research definitions and statistics of global tourism, flows are still not uniformly defined. A problem is that scholars, sector stakeholders and policy makers tend to have a biased image of the global tourism system...

Author: Paul Peeters & Martin Landré 

Year: 2012 

69 Think Tank V Political Instability and its Effects on Tourism file 6687 Oct 13, 2013

Tourism today is second only to oil as the world’s leading export commodity, accounting for global earnings of more than $300 billion, or nearly 25 per cent of total world GNP (Poirier 2000, p30, cited in Dieke, 2000). Over the last two deca...

Author: Sarah JR Ryu 

Year: 2005 

68 Think Tank XIII Assessing the Impact of Rural Tourism Development on t... file 6696 Nov 06, 2013

Past literature has posited that tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors and has been signified as an attractive investment proposition. Rural tourism sector has been actively promoted by the Malaysian government and currently, it is c...

Author: May-Chiun Lo, Vikneswaran Nair, Peter Songan & Helen Lee HuiHui 

Year: 2013 

67 Think Tank XII Employee Work Attitudes, Mobility and Promotional Oppo... file 6767 Nov 06, 2013

The issue of employee mobility is brought into sharp focus in times of economic and social uncertainty. Previous studies into the causes of employee mobility have investigated, among other determinants, the link between the promotional oppor...

Author: Margaret Deery, Leo Jago & Michael Stewart 

Year: 2012 

66 Think Tank VII The Practical Application of Sustainable Tourism Devel... file 6810 Oct 13, 2013

The internationally acclaimed Blackstone Valley Tourism Council continues to create a sustainable visitor destination using whole place-making techniques. Under its auspices, the Sustainable Tourism Planning and Development Laboratory share...

Author: Robert Billington, Natalie Carter & Lilly Kayamba 

Year: 2007 

65 Think Tank VIII Destination Competitiveness and Policy Making for Pove... file 6830 Oct 13, 2013

This paper has five aims. First, to discuss the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) and the method of its construction. If the TTCI is to have policy significance it is essential that its components be identified and analysed as ...

Author: Larry Dwyer 

Year: 2008 

64 Think Tank XII Are We Moving Towards Education for Sustainability? A ... file 6833 Nov 06, 2013

It is nearing the end of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) (United Nations, 2011), an awareness raising campaign which “seeks to mobilize the educational resources of the world to help create a mo...

Author: Erica Wilson, Tania von der Heidt, Geoffrey Lamberton & Dayle Morrison 

Year: 2012 

» Think Tank VI Sustainable tourist accommodation management: The role... file 6844 Oct 13, 2013

The integration of sustainability within the domain of tourism has recently made considerable progress. For instance, in the UK and the Netherlands, the most important federations of tour operators, the FTO and the ANVR, have introduced obli...

Author: Menno Houtstra 

Year: 2006 

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