Conclusion: Strategic Policy and Governance in Tourism for Development

It is a paradox of our times that knowledge and technology exist to solve many of humankind`s longstanding predicaments, yet institutions often intentionally ignore both the problems and the solutions. Issues including development, poverty, climate change, hunger, education, and health have ceased to be intractable conundrums. However, self-serving interests of the power structure and short-lived political agendas mask the key relevance of these matters, blanketing public discussion and neglecting relevant research, information, and innovation. Tourism as an instrument for development is no exception, and while the expression “tourism development” (meaning tourism growth) is frequently used in an equivocal manner, the fact remains that most programs, initiatives and projects do neither explicitly nor seriously attend to the goal of socioeconomic development. The supposed positive effects of tourism activities usually relate to the creation of employment and incomes, and this is widely advertised as achieving development, without further consideration of the quality and quantity of the jobs generated, their opportunity costs in terms of other longer-term strategies, and their contribution to human capital and institutional improvement, and thus to the true significance of development.