Harald Heinrichs · Pim Martens Gerd Michelsen · Arnim Wiek Editors

3 Open Issues: Sustainability Challenges of Tourism
One of the main challenges of sustainable tourism consists of determining how 
much environmental and social stress is acceptable in any given tourism operation. 
This question cannot be meaningfully addressed without preestablishing the devel-
opment objectives that are desirable for a destination. Thus, a key sustainability 
challenge that tourism faces consists of determining “desired or acceptable” devel-
opment objectives through processes in which conflicting values, opposing inter-
ests, and controversial information are systematically and fairly considered.
A more serious challenge is to address the paradox that a very limited success in 
reducing environmental and social impacts of tourism has been achieved so far 
despite the fact that the industry, regulators, and other major tourism players have 
widely incorporated the sustainable tourism perspective into corporative discourse 
and adopted a number of green practices (as illustrated in Sect. 
2
). In recent years,
particularly after the 2008 global financial crisis, tourism scholars have increasingly 
acknowledged that the attempts to balance the three dimensions of sustainability are 
not working. Economic growth is promoted in most destinations at the expense of 
the other two goals. This is often attributed to structural power asymmetries charac-
teristic of neoliberal globalization that favor private sector needs over the demands 
of civil society and host communities. As a reaction, “limits to growth” arguments, 
articulated in the 1970s by the Club of Rome, are being dusted off, while sustain-
ability is increasingly reformulated as a direct challenge to the hegemony of growth, 
to neoliberal ideologies, and to the “all that matters is profit” mentality that arguably 
still dominates the global tourism industry (Saarinen 
2006
; Matarrita-Cascante 
2010
; Gill and Williams 
2011
).
The idea of Tourism Sustainability brings about a new challenge: Can society use 
tourism as an instrument for promoting wider sustainability? Rather than trying to 
make tourism development and operations sustainable, tourism for sustainability is 
concerned with the role of tourism in promoting the broader transition toward a 
sustainable world. In this context, a number of tourism scholars are increasingly
revisiting political economy approaches and placing power relations at the center of 
tourism sustainability analysis.
In a nutshell, the key tourism sustainability challenge for the twenty-first century
consists of applying critical and relational theories of power in order to redirect 
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societies away from uneven forms of development. Tourism has the unique potential 
to redistribute income toward regions that have been marginalized from the global 
economy until now. In order to realize this potential, it is crucial to promote a greater
level of local involvement in the planning and development of destinations. This is 
basically a governance challenge that sustainability scholars are well equipped to 
address. A more meaningful involvement of local people in the planning of tourism 
destinations will require research that recognizes the complex and dynamic nature 
of destination development. Tourism resources are not static; they can be degraded, 
but also enhanced. Place-based and participatory approaches to tourism sustainabil-
ity should be complemented with research on the trade-offs, synergies, and scenar-
ios involved in the destination’s process of development. In the case of tourism, it is
crucial to establish the relationship between patterns of human activity and the 
social organization implications and types of environmental impact associated with 
these patterns. Thus, the destination process of development is not to be determined 
by the need to maximize economic growth. On the contrary, the creation of a desti-
nation becomes a social process and a democratic exercise in which tourism 
resources are consumed responsibly, as well as reproduced and enhanced through 
the social promotion and reinforcement of specific socio-ecological processes.
Some tourism scholars advocate the need to build on systems perspectives in 
order to improve our understanding of the characteristics and change patterns of 
tourism, as well as its dynamic interaction with the natural, technological, social, 
and economic environment (Liu 
1994
). This is a crucial step for the development of 
tourism sustainability as a field of study in which natural and social systems are 
studied as self-organizing, interdependent, and nonlinear systems that are in con-
stant evolution. Farrell and Twining-Ward (
2004
) have emphasized the need to 
acknowledge the existence of “complex adaptive tourism systems.” Research on 
tourism complexity may play a key role in envisioning and devising tourism sys-
tems that are more inclusive and socio-ecologically integrated. This type of research 
is key to situating tourism in a better position to act as a positive force in the transi-
tion toward sustainability (Farrell and Twining-Ward 
2005
). Yet, the task ahead 
goes beyond the analysis of the current situation and the visualization of future 
alternatives. In order to make the transition happen, tourism scholars can also sup-
port sustainability decisions, actions, and transformations, including strategies and 
tactics for transformation (Wiek et al. 
2012
).
The sustainability transformation of tourism encounters multiple forms of resis-
tance due to the stability of dominant governance systems and policy paradigms. 
The current situation, not only in the case of tourism sustainability but also in the 
case of sustainability research in general, is one of impasse. There is an increasing 
acknowledgement that the dominant discourses and policies for promoting sustain-
able tourism are insufficient. Yet, the problem is that tourism sustainability requires 
the destabilization of current policy paradigms, away from the drive toward constant 
accumulation and away from persisting colonial forms of domination. The task 
ahead for tourism sustainability consists of unraveling social power relations that 
have persisted for many years, but doing so in a way in which the unraveling actu-
ally results in less exploitative and more sustainable forms of organization. 
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Sustainability scholars can devise strategies to facilitate the emergence of new gov-
ernance structures, while carefully assessing the implications of changing existing 
patterns of power and dominance.