Tourism for Development

A broad agreement exists that tourism is an effective instrument for social and economic development. However, there is no specific theoretical or practical framework of tourism for development to be found. Even the key issues have remained unformulated: concept of development, tourism's contributions to development, and tourism policy and governance for development. This chapter first summarizes the development paradigms held in the last decades (modernization, neoliberalism, dependency, and sustainability) vis-à-vis tourism, and then goes on to consider proposals emanating from New Institutional Economics and the Theory of Social Capital. It concludes with the results of a 2011 enquiry, involving some 60 international experts.