Content

The tourism sector often functions as a policy tool to achieve sustainable development outcomes. From this perspective, tourism development is seen to lead to regional synergy effects, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative benefits for destinations. However, practically analysing and achieving the development impacts of tourism is often problematic because of the uneven distribution of impacts in space, among stakeholders, and between economic, ecological and socio-cultural spheres. In other words, tourism development provides opportunities to trigger sustainable development processes, but tends to lead to multiple unsustainabilities at the same time.

In this course, we discuss this field of tension between opportunities and bottlenecks that influences how tourism impacts sustainable development processes. Among others, we discuss: the effect of the tourism sector’s fragmentation on the sector’s contradictory impacts in social, environmental and economic manners; the role of multi-level governance when assessing tourism impacts; tourism impacts on sustainability processes in the Global North and South; and, tourism-labour relationships. The purpose of this course is to build bridges between theory and practice so that students have a critical mindset to assess how tourism affects sustainability processes, on paper and in reality.

Course material

slides from presentations, a reader of papers from the scientific literature, info documents for workshops
 

Format: more information

This course offers a mix of traditional lectures, guest lectures by national and international experts, and workshops