Sustainability of Management Processes and Tourism Products and Contexts

In recent years a growing interest in the concept of sustainability has manifested itself in the tourism field in the form of policyand planning-related materials which address the environmental and, to a lesser extent, the cultural dimensions of sustainability in tourist industry practices. In essence this literature has focused on the resources on which the tourism industry draws for its product — the environmental or cultural experience — and has tended to ignore the sustainability of the service delivery system itself, the nature of the industrial structure, the human resources employed in the industry, the management practices followed and the economic impact of such industrial structure and management practices. There is a clear need to develop an understanding of what might constitute good practice, not simply in terms of the sustainability of the tourist product, but also of the systems of service delivery developed for such tourism products — what might be termed ‘sustainable management practice’. In addition, there is a wider need within the tourism education literature, to establish how the curriculum may reflect the philosophy of sustainable development. This paper seeks, therefore, to clarify the relationship between sustainability of the tourism product and of management and policy process, and to identify how these concepts may be developed in a tourism education curriculum. The paper thus proposes a prescriptive model of tourism education which seeks to foster a more environmentally, culturally, socially, and economically responsible approach to industrial development in this sector.