Superseding sustainability: Conceptualising sustainability and resilience in response to the new challenges of tourism development

Abstract

The theoretical concept of sustainability has much intuitive appeal in the study of tourism. Indeed sustainability became deeply embedded in tourism studies in the years since the UN Brundtland Report was released in the 1980s (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). It is now described as "perhaps the most prominent feature of contemporary tourism discourse" (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2010, p. 116). The importance of sustainability emerged initially in the 1980s from growing concern for the predominantly local impacts of tourism (Hall & Page, 1999; Mathieson & Wall, 1982). In challenging the ideology, discourse and hegemony of the UNWTO (Mowforth & Munt, 2008), which promoted tourism as a 'smokeless industry', the attention of the academic community has become increasingly focused on critical questions of tourism sustainability (Edington & Edington, 1986). The sustainability tradition has been taken up in a range of disciplinary fields including social anthropology (MacCannell, 1973), sociology (Cohen, 1972), geography (Duffus & Dearden, 1990), and ecology (Newsome, Moore & Dowling, 2012), which have offered critical insights into questions of local sustainability (Espiner, Orchiston & Higham, 2017). More recently the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have drawn attention to the broader challenges embodied in tourism within the broader context of sustainable development.