Resident Well-Being and Sustainable Tourism Development

Dear Colleagues,

Despite increasing attention to well-being issues in tourism research generally, researchers have devoted little explicit attention either to interpreting or measuring resident well-being as essential for sustainable tourism development. It is fair to say that in tourism research, sustainability and well-being are generally studied as independent subjects despite their essential interconnections with limited attention to the role of well-being measures in tourism policy formulation, implementation, and assessment. The essential dynamic dimension of sustainable development, and the roles of changing capital stocks in generating resident well-being outcomes, are unable to be captured within static models of the type typically constructed by tourism researchers. Substantial conceptual and empirical challenges face tourism researchers, practitioners and policy makers in articulating the concept of sustainable development and in formulating strategies to achieve and maintain resident well-being. These challenges include better understanding of the dynamics of the sustainability concept and its essential interconnection with human well-being; valuation of capital stocks; delinking the standard sustainability concept from its pro-growth neoliberalist underpinnings; better appreciation of the complex nature of well-being pertaining to present and future generations of destination residents; improved understanding of the role played by changing quantities and qualities of capital stocks in well-being transmission; and the extent to which capital stocks are substitutable for each other in maintaining resident well-being. Assessment of tourism’s progress toward achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is incomplete without a full accounting of the outcomes of tourism development on current and future resident well-being. Well-being indicators remain conspicuously absent from the indicator sets developed to assess destination competitiveness and assessment of special events.  Failure to distinguish sources of current and future well-being has prevented sustainability considerations to be properly addressed in tourism study. Unless tourism researchers adopt or develop the types of well-being measures employed by social scientists and policy makers, their studies will have little relevance to the wider public debates on appropriate resource allocation to foster sustainable development. Tourism research must recognise recent advances in sustainability theory, including critiques of this notion, if it is to progress both theoretically and in the policy domain. Addressing these and related challenges will inform useful directions for future research on theory and good practice in the area of sustainable tourism development and its effects on resident well-being.

Researchers are invited to submit manuscripts for consideration on this topic, which covers, but is not limited to, the following areas:

• Exploring the development of new metrics of resident well-being for tourism industry development that go ‘beyond GDP’.
• Sustainable tourism development as an essentially dynamic concept achieved by maintaining or enhancing the total stock of tourism related capital that transmits ‘well-being’ over time.
• Exploration of the links between tourism productivity, sustainable destination development and resident well-being outcomes.
• Resident well-being outcomes associated with tourism degrowth as an alternative to sustainable development.
• Types of tourism policy formulation and implementation aimed at enhancing social well-being of disadvantaged or marginal demographic groups within a destination (youth, disabled, poor, females, informal economy).
• Analysis of the distributional well-being effects of local and global tourism development on current and future generations of residents.
• Development of frameworks, tools and institutions to ensure resident inter-generational equity is embedded in assessment processes and in policy advice.
• Relevance of the weak and strong sustainability concepts to tourism development for determining levels of ‘critical’ capital stocks that affect resident well-being outcomes.
• Determine how DMO’s and regional development agencies can usefully integrate the concepts of critical trends and thresholds relating to different capital stocks to improve the tourism sustainable development policy agenda.
• Types of well-being outcomes of tourism development affecting residents of local communities including tourism industry workers.
• How resident and worker well-being outcomes intra- and inter-generationally, can be incorporated into tourism firms’ mission statements and business models.
• Study of resident well-being outcomes to measure tourism’s progress in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
• Links between tourism progress in respect of SDG achievement and well-being outcomes for different segments of the resident population, both within and outside of the tourism industry.
• Trade-offs between the well-being outcomes of different tourism development strategies and the possibility of multiple sometimes conflicting resident well-being outcomes.
• Use of participatory techniques to determine community values associated with tourism developments.
• Overcoming the behavioural and institutional barriers to embedding well-being measures into tourism policy making.
• Enhancing destination capacity to deliver resident well-being outcomes from tourism development.
• Transboundary effects of tourism development on the well-being of citizens in other destinations.
• What can tourism research learn from advances in sustainability theory and practice that are taking place in the wider social science literature?
• Should the notion of ‘sustainable development’ be discarded in favour of other arguably more meaningful and relevant concepts such as regenerative tourism or tourism degrowth?

Prof. Dr. Larry Dwyer
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainable tourism development
• resident wellbeing
• destination performance
• sustainable development goals (SDGs)
• beyond GDP