Tourism represents a tool for change. For individuals, families, and social groups, tourism is an activity providing a way to take a break from everyday life, enjoy a change of routine, and connect with new places and people. For entrepreneurs and businesses, tourists and tourism phenomena are vehicles for making a living and creating surplus and commercial growth. Through this, various changes occur in the socio-ecological and economic environment ā both good and bad. Governments and authorities see the tourism industry as an instrument to maintain and create new economic activity and employment, leading to local and regional development. Since the turn of the 1990s many international organisations and policy-makers have increasingly framed the tourism industry and its local and regional development connections as high-potential tools for putting sustainable development into practice. This prospective connection between the idea of sustainable development and the industry serving the needs of tourists and localities has created the widely used and discussed concept of sustainable tourism, referring to tourism development that aims to meet āthe needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunities for the futureā (World Tourism Organization, 1993, p. 7).
In a way, the core of the connection between tourism and sustainable development lies in the production and consumption of tourism, which is largely driven by the tourism industryās role to serve the needs of non-local people, i.e. tourists and visitors, in the tourism system. This production and consumption creates positive and negative externalities for localities and the environment. Because of the challenges of balancing these, while also integrating the needs of the tourism industry with the common good aim of serving current and future generations, sustainable tourism thinking has become very popular in academic tourism research, with high policy relevancy (Hall, 2011; Saarinen & Gill, 2019). In this respect, the capacity of tourism to work towards sustainable development has recently been highlighted in connection with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Hughes & Scheyvens, 2016). This connection underlines the importance and responsibility of tourism, as one of the worldās largest industries, to contribute and make a difference to development and sustainability on a global scale. Basically, the UN SDGs are a strategy to create and realise a better and more sustainable future for all of us. One key question is how can the consumption and production of tourism play a constructive role in this strategy?
This chapter serves as an introduction to the Tourism Geographies Virtual Special Issue (VSI) on Tourism and the Sustainable Development Goals. As indicated by Scheyvens (2018) only a few tourism scholars thus far have engaged with the issues related to the SDGs. The SDGs were established relatively recently, in 2015, but global concern over tourism and sustainable development targets has been a focus of tourism research since the 1990s (see Bramwell, Higham, Lane & Miller, 2017). The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (UN MDGs) preceded the SDGs by several years and provided a context for tourism research focusing on the relationship between tourism and development in the Global South (see Saarinen & Rogerson, 2014). Indeed, despite limited engagement with the SDGs specifically, there has been a long and evolving research interest in sustainable development in geographical studies on tourism.
From this perspective, this VSI aims to provide a context for research on the SDGs in tourism by introducing a selected collection of previously published articles focusing on tourism and sustainability in Tourism Geographies. This rich body of research provides a fertile and critical ground for studies on the SDGs in the future. Before introducing the selected articles published in Tourism Geographies during the period 1999ā2018, the SDGs are briefly introduced with a reference to the role and capacity of tourism for development. The idea of development refers to qualitative dimensions in social and economic processes, such as quality of life and well-being (Saarinen, Rogerson & Hall, 2017). In this respect, development has two connected threads of meaning: development as a discourse and an ideal, and development as a concrete material process (see Lawson, 2007). The SDGs integrate these two threads by emphasising concrete targets, and the idea that states that no one should be left behind (United Nations, 2015). The agenda also indicates the need to rethink the current economic growth ideology with respect to social well-being and environmental needs in development. This is a highly timely and urgent matter in the context of a global tourism industry that reaches new growth records every year!
Sustainable Development Goals
The United Nations member states ratified the SDGs in 2015 (United Nations, 2015). These goals define the agenda for global development to 2030 by addressing challenges related to poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice, for example. Specifically, there are 17 goals (Table 1.1) and 169 specific targets, which are set to transform the world by 2030. They relate to earlier UN MDGs, but in contrast to those, the SDGs are truly global by nature. Instead of having a main focus on the challenges of the Global South, as was the case with MDGs, the SDGs holistically include Global North dimensions in their development agenda. This is crucial as many of the global development challenges depend on the impacts and actions taking place in both the Global South and North, such as climate change mitigation and adaptation, and global partnerships.
The 17 SDGs in Table 1.1, along with a numerous specific targets, provide a plethora of topics and issues for tourism scholars to focus on, and opportunities for the tourism industry and tourists to contribute to. Related to this, the United Nations General Assembly established 2017 as the āInternational Year of Sustainable Tourism for Developmentā, highlighting the importance of international tourism in fostering development and better understanding among people everywhere (UNWTO, 2017). According to the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, the industry could specifically work towards the following three SDGs: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all (SDG 8); ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns (SDG 12); and conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development (SDG 14). These are high-profile and important goals for tourism to focus on, but they only provide a limited perspective on the relationship between tourism and sustainable development.
Based on the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, the World Bank Group (2017), for example, has expanded the connection between tourism and the SDGs. In their list of 20 reasons why tourism works for development, the five core pillars are as follows: (1) sustainable economic growth; (2) social inclusiveness, employment, and poverty reduction; (3) resource efficiency, environmental protection, and climate; (4) cultural values, diversity, and heritage; and (5) mutual understanding, peace, and security. These pillars greatly expand the potential connections between tourism and the SDGs, and each pillar provides a context of reasons why tourism can work for sustainable development. Under the sustainable economic growth pillar, for example, tourism stimulates GDP growth, increases international trade, boosts international investment, drives infrastructure development, and supports low-income economies. The interpretation of these reasons, however, becomes problematic as there seems to be a confusing relationship between development as an ideal and framework, and growth as an action and emphasised target: all of these connections focus on the growth ideology associated with current neoliberal economic thinking. They are also in potential conflict with some of the other SDGs, such as climate action (Goal 13).
Indeed, while many international development agencies, such as the United Nation World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and the World Bank, consider (sustainable) tourism as a designated tool for achieving the SDGs and ābenefitting communities in destinations around the worldā (World Bank Group, 2017, p. 5), academic responses have often been more doubtful and critical in regard to the tourism industryās potential role in contributing to sustainable development. There is a widely shared view that the industry has the capacity to contribute to sustainable development, but to do so requires stronger (external) regulatory measures that go beyond self-regulation by the industry itself (see Mosedale, 2014), which often seems to be primarily focused on sustaining the tourism economy and its rights to utilise natural and cultural resources in destination regions. This potential incompatibility between external and internal modes of regulation has led to criticism among scholars of the very applicability of sustainable development thinking to tourism (see Scheyvens, 2009; Sharpley, 2000). From this critical perspective, tourism is seen as a global-scale growth industry, which hides āits unsustainability behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it appears so sustainableā (Hollenhorst, Houge-MacKenzie and Ostergren, 2014, p. 306). Thus, the growth of the industry, referring to growth in GDP, international trade, investments, and infrastructure, for example, may not necessarily lead to (sustainable) development for localities where tourism takes place (see Schilcher, 2007).
However, a key task for research in tourism is a need to find sustainable solutions for the industry, and despite all the criticism and frustrations (see, Liu, 2003; Sharpley, 2009), moving away from sustainable tourism thinking has turned out to be a very challenging task (McCool & Bosak, 2016; Saarinen & Gill, 2019). Sustainability is widely utilised by tourism policy-makers and institutions when defining the goals and governance models for the tourism and development nexus (Hall, 2011). Those models and processes should interest us as they do not only define global discourses on tourism and development but also local realities and practices. Thus, it is important for tourism scholars to try to influence those policies in a way that they would better ā and hopefully truly ā meet the needs of sustainable development, i.e. quality of life and the well-being of people and the environment. Based on the current scholarship in tourism, this calls for less focus on growth ideology referring to tou...
