This work analyzes academic work from 2004 to 2020 with an influence on the blueprint for sustainable tourism innovation strategies. Criteria used include verifying which are the main concerns, the contribution of sustainability indices, and implications to practitioners and high educational institutions in the area. This is increasingly important due to present and future challenges undermining the existence of a sustainable tourism industry. Accurate metrics can empower destinations, and higher education and its inner research must have a key role in the development of effective instruments. The challenge comprises selecting and monitoring them for sustainable tourism policy. Educational and research institutes with tourism studies should include in their syllabuses real cases and tools for developing key sustainability models and metrics to integrate and respond more promptly to critical challenges and trends.
TopIntroduction
Sustainable tourism is defined as the creation and promotion of a tourism industry that preserves or enhances a country’s social, cultural, or environmental capital. Data reveals that the environmental strength of a country is directly related to tourism revenue. Although there is no evidence of direct causality, the more pristine the natural environment of a local the more tourists are willing to access it. Consequently, as the natural capital deteriorates, destinations lose revenue. It is important to recognize that processes and activities associated with tourism also damage the environment.
Given the close relationship between natural resources and a very large segment of the tourism industry, a lack of progress on fostering sustainability will reduce tourism development opportunities. Besides environment, also cultural and socio-economic issues become involved in this equation of tourism sustainability (Simão & Partidário, 2012). Many works and reports discuss this subject, revealing its increasing importance for today’s global and local decisions about tourism development. This chapter aims to establish what proportion of academic works, listed in the scientific repository of open access in Portugal (RCAAP), have proposed innovative governance strategies for sustainable tourism. And among these, which portion has used approaches grounded on international/national sustainability indices.
Thus, the main objective is to investigate in what ways academic research (e.g., doctoral theses, papers, reports) has reacted to the projections on the growing pressure that tourism is placing on the environment and society today. The related research questions are the following:
The academic production object of study was produced in Portuguese and Brazilian higher education institutions. The first period considered was 2004-2017, due to a first project for the University of Algarve in Portugal. Then, especially due to the current pandemic impact on tourism, an increased number of works was considered in the period 2018-2020.
To accomplish this aim, next sections are structured as follows: section 2 approaches the trends in sustainable tourism research; section 3 presents the research framework used in the present study; and section 4 develops a content analysis on the collected documents using Nvivo software. Section 5 discusses the results obtained and section 6 further use. Finally, the last section concludes the study referring implications for tourism planners and education/research in the area.
The Portuguese Context
Portuguese higher education is organized in a binary system, integrating university education and polytechnic education. In the years 2015/16, the number of master and PhD students increased slightly. Regarding graduation in the tourism area, master’s degrees accounted for 21.3% of their total number, while doctoral programs represented 3.2%. The areas of engineering, business, law, and health exhibited the uppermost expression.
The Bologna process then inspired considerable curricular changes in tourism degrees in a way that this area was fully integrated in the European space for higher education to enhance its employability/mobility. During the first period under review (2004-2017), a total of 80 PhD dissertations were concluded in Portugal. The themes focused on tourism management and planning; heritage, and development; and cultural tourism.
The University of Aveiro had the largest number of doctoral theses in tourism, followed by the Faculty of Economics at Algarve’s University. This last was followed by the Institute of Geography at Lisbon’s University. The themes developed at the University of Aveiro were more related with rural tourism, destination competitiveness, tourist behaviour, and investment factors. And those developed at the Faculty of Economics at Algarve’s University were mainly related to destination’s image, welfare, and economic evaluation. Finally, those developed at the Institute of Geography were mostly related to tourism management and cultural tourism.