Tourism Geographies and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
In the 1990s sustainability emerged as a major innovation and point of departure for tourism development and research. Since that many scholars and regional development and policy-making organisations have considered the tourism industry as a high-potential tool for putting sustainable development into practice. Recently, the capacity of tourism to work for sustainability has been highlighted in relation to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These goals were adopted in 2015 and they define the agenda for global development to 2030 by addressing global scale challenges related to major issues such as poverty reduction, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice. The established positive connection between tourism and these kinds of major challenges highlights the role and responsibility of tourism as one of the world’s biggest industries to contribute and make a difference to people, environment, and sustainable development. The aim is to ‘leave no one behind’ in development. Emerging scholarship demonstrates a fertile ground for seeking positive solutions for using tourism for development aligned with the principles of the SDGs. However, there is an urgent need for critical approaches on the questionable role and positionality of the growth-oriented private-sector industry and how it could be able to genuinely contribute to the SDGs. This collection aims to include some of the key contributions that have defined and influenced the research on tourism and the SDGs. Furthermore, the collection will integrate new contributions to the existing body of knowledge covering the role to tourism in SDGs and its’ predecessor the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).