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The purpose of this study is to expand our understanding of sustainable tourism research given that both researchers and policymakers consistently question the effectiveness of sustainable tourism and its practices, applications and practical adoption.

The aim of the research was to provide an update on previous studies by examining how sustainable tourism research has progressed in the five intervening years since Ruhanen et al. completed their 25-year bibliometric analysis.

This paper provides insights into how sustainable tourism research has developed over the 30 years since the publication of the Brundtland report. It shows that over the past five years, the field has matured to place greater emphasis on climate change, modeling, values, behavior and theoretical progression.

Future research in the field should aim to better understand the methods and analysis techniques being used in sustainable tourism, as well as how sustainable tourism and climate change policy and actions translate into policy and practice.

Bibliometrics and text mining shows that 30 years after the Brundtland report, sustainable tourism research continues to grow exponentially, with evidence that the field is starting to mature by broadening its horizons and focusing on more relevant, big-picture and hard-hitting topics, such as climate change.

Establishing a shared understanding of the environment and sustainable development between stakeholders should be fundamental to the raison d'être of ecotourism businesses. Indeed, many will begin ecotourism businesses with the objective of sharing their own personal environmental ethics and values with their customers through the tourism experience. Yet it is not always the business owner that interacts with the customer, the organisations’ employees will also interact with the guest and are thus responsible for communicating the environmental ethics and values that underpin the business. The purpose of this paper is to explore how ecotourism business owners ensure that their employees convey their environmental ethics and values to their customers. So how do ecotourism business owners ensure that employees convey their environmental ethics and values to their customers?

This paper reports on the findings of interviews with 18 eco-tourism business owners in Australia who sought to examine their strategies for disseminating environmental ethics and values with the organisation’s employees.

It was found that strategic recruitment to attract like-minded employees was important which was reinforced through education, training and mentoring to develop an organisational culture underpinned by shared values and responsibility.

This study has contributed to the growing body of literature focused on the supply side of ecotourism businesses. It has addressed a gap in our understanding by specifically investigating the strategies that ecotourism business owners adopt to disseminate their personal environmental ethics and values to their employees.

Governments frequently utilise tourism as a means of enhancing the economic participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Australia. Yet, the ‘systemic wickedness’ (Carson & Koster, 2012) of problems, purportedly addressed by government policies for Indigenous Australians more broadly, can arguably be seen as inhibiting the creation of a thriving and sustainable Indigenous tourism sector. For too long, authors have questioned the appropriateness and effectiveness of tourism policy developed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Hudson, 2016; Whitford & Ruhanen, 2010), and importantly, over and above governments’ apparent poor understanding of what ‘works’ and under what conditions, is the absence of First Nations peoples voices in driving the development of the First Nations sector. Utilising a wicked policy lens, this chapter explores Indigenous tourism policy in Australia and discusses the extent to which one particular initiative, the inaugural Queensland First Nations Tourism Plan (QFNTP) 2020–2025 addresses a range of complex and wicked policy challenges.

Women are key participants in the tourism labor market. Maldivian women are recognized as being among the most emancipated in South Asia and the Islamic world. There is no institutional discrimination along gender lines in access to education, health services, or for jobs in the public sector (The World Bank 2004). However, the proportion of women working in the Maldivian tourism industry is relatively low. This chapter explores one of the key outcomes of a broader study on the participation of locals in the Maldivian tourism industry. The role of government in balancing religion, politics, and economy is considered imperative in positively influencing local tourism labor market participation and employment for women.

Despite the proliferation of the governance concept in the broader academic literature, there is little agreement on definitions, scope and what actually constitutes governance. This is arguably due to the fact that empirical research on the topic, with some exceptions, is generally limited to case studies without use of any common conceptual framework. This is certainly the case in other fields of study and is becoming increasingly obvious in tourism research also. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to explore and synthesize the governance literature with the objective of identifying the key elements and dimensions of governance.

Drawing on the two “parent” bodies of literature originating in the political sciences and corporate management fields of study, the paper provides a review and synthesis of the governance concept with the objective of identifying the primary elements and factors that have been employed in studies of governance to date.

A review of 53 published governance studies identified 40 separate dimensions of governance. From this review, the six most frequently included governance dimensions were: accountability, transparency, involvement, structure, effectiveness and power.

A synthesis of the governance literature has not been undertaken to date, either in the tourism literature or in other fields of study, and in doing so the authors provide a basis for tourism researchers to draw on a set of comparable conceptual dimensions in future research. Comparable dimensions which can be replicated and tested in empirical research will add additional depth and rigor to studies in this field.

The concept of development has gone through several paradigm shifts in the last six decades, from the post World War II idea of “modernization” to sustainability and gradualist institutions-concerned strategies, although the neoliberal laissez-faire approaches still hold considerable influence, even in international organizations. Development is a complex concept. Definitions have changed throughout time and it is crucial to understand the concept vis-à-vis tourism. It is no longer possible to defend that tourism investments will automatically create development. Understanding the nuances of the concept has become essential if one is to sustain that tourism does play a role in development.

Tourism and events have been identified as providing opportunities to revitalize regional and remote economies. In Australia such areas have limited economic opportunities and are constrained by a range of development barriers, including access to markets and human capital. Importantly, tourism in particular is seen as an economic activity that provides scope for Indigenous communities and individuals in regional and remote parts of the country to leverage development opportunities. A number of the island communities of the Torres Strait, the most northern region in Australia, are exploring the potential of tourism and events as an economic development strategy, yet the region is severely constrained by a number of development barriers.

Climate change poses a significant challenge for the tourism industry and is a further inhibitor to the sustainable development objectives of tourism destinations. Recognizing the importance of these issues in 2011 and drawing together a number of the leading works in the field, this chapter provides a contextual background to climate change and tourism, debates the implications for the industry and issues such as adaptation, mitigation, and poverty alleviation. The discussion concludes with recommendations for governance and policy, adaptation and mitigation, and knowledge management, research, and education.

Samirah Al-Saleh <sameeraalsaleh@hotmail.com> is a lecturer in geography and tourism at King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She is also a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Business and Law at the University of Sunderland, United Kingdom. She has participated in numerous tourism conferences in Saudi Arabia and abroad. She has contributed to the journal, Al Aqiq, in a recent special edition on the topic of domestic tourism in Saudi Arabia.