Sustainable Tourism Development: A Critique

By Zhenhua Liu. 2003

1,176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sustainable tourism has become an increasingly popular field of research since the late 1980s. However, the sustainable tourism debate is patchy, disjointed and often flawed with false assumptions and arguments. This paper is a brief critique of some of the weaknesses in the sustainable tourism literature. In particular, it explores six issues that are often overlooked but must be addressed in research: the role of tourism demand, the nature of tourism resources, the imperative of intra-generational equity, the role of tourism in promoting sociocultural progress, the measurement of sustainability, and forms of sustainable development. Finally, it is argued that in order to transform research on sustainable tourism to a more scientific level, a systems perspective and an interdisciplinary approach are indispensable.

Subfields: Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb7eb13ca0710c6f4ce1d7cb77910e3efc819a03

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Citations in the corpus

Critical Sustainability: Setting the Limits to Growth and Responsibility in Tourism (2013, background): “Indeed, there are many problems involved in sustainable tourism and especially in relation to sustainable development—issues which have been widely discussed elsewhere (see [6,33,35,36,87]).”
Changing Communities, Community Satisfaction, and Quality of Life: A View of Multiple Perceived Indicators (2010, background): “The interaction between locals and visitors also promotes exchange of ideas leading to economic and social progress (Liu 2003) and interest in expanding education and knowledge (Nyaupane et al.”
Are tourism livelihoods sustainable? Tourism development and economic transformation on Komodo Island, Indonesia (2018, background): “As Liu (2003) points out, the tourism industry is highly prone to fluctuations in response to external events (see also Dahles and Prabawa (2013).”
Paths to success: Benchmarking cross-country sustainable tourism (2012, positive): “In recent years there has indeed been significant progress in the definition of indicators for the sustainable management of firms and tourism destinations (Dwyer, Forsyth, & Rao, 2000; Dwyer, Forsyth, & Spurr, 2004; or Liu, 2003 ).”
Global shark currency: the distribution, frequency, and economic value of shark ecotourism (2011, background): “Established ecotourism operations present visitors with new and exciting ways to experience nature in exchange for money (Liu, 2003; Wearing & Neil, 2009).”
Tourism Development and the Environment: Beyond Sustainability? (2009, background): “Indeed, despite the degree of academic attention paid to the subject over the last 20 years, the failure to achieve definitional consensus, or even an agreement over terminology, is seen by some as evidence of the inherent fallibility of the concept (Twining-Ward and Butler, 2002; Liu, 2003).”
The Economic Promise of Ecotourism for Conservation (2007, background): “…1998; rodriguez, 1999). in these places, ecotourism is a catalyst of change in household economies, leading to new opportunities for employment, new sources of cash income, and new information about technologies (Barkin, 1996; Eadington & Smith, 1992; levy & lerch, 1991; liu, 2003; nash, 1996).”
Environmentally Responsible Behavior in Ecotourism: Exploring the Role of Destination Image and Value Perception (2014, background): “Ecotourism promotes sustainable development by limiting the negative impact of tourism on, as well as the long-term maintenance of, the environment (Liu, 2003).”