The tourism landscape is currently facing profound challenges, triggered for instance by its vulnerability to climate change, the transformational forces behind the sharing economy, the phenomenon of over tourism, or at present the COVID-19 crisis which has dramatically implicated tourism as one of the hardest-hit sectors globally. Against this backdrop effective evidence-based policy intervention appears to be crucial to address the many contemporary problems modern tourism faces and to ensure more sustainable outcomes. Leuz (2018) defines evidence-based policy making as “a rigorous attempt to base policy decisions on scientific and empirical evidence”, and Head (2008) offers a model of three interconnected lenses or perspectives to understand knowledge and evidence in policy making: systematic scientific research, professional practice, and political judgement.
The appeal of evidence-based tourism policy and decision making is relatively palpable. With the tourism sector as a specific case in point this PhD project attempts to explore possible barriers and opportunities to evidence-based policy making. How can, for instance systematic scientific research inform better tourism policy making in achieving a successful integration of environmental, economic and social development goals, or how can the capacity of governments be increased to access, interpret and employ different perspectives of knowledge and evidence in pursuit of sustainability.
Despite increasing academic discourse about the political dimensions of tourism
since the mid-1990s still relatively little has been written about tourism as public policy. However, the increasing consideration of tourism policy issues by governments as well as by the tourism industry demands a much greater focus on the political nature of tourism development and especially on studies devoted to the tourism policy process (Pforr, 2021). This project advocates contemporary perspectives on the study of tourism public policy to aid the description, analysis and explanation of recent wicked and interconnected policy problems governments aroucixnd the world are confronted with.
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|