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Tourism is a big and complex system which incorporates a large number of public and private sectors that offer a wide range of products and services for different segments of tourists. Therefore, tourism development has become important for many organizations from different industries in the region. While tourism affords significant positive effects to tourism destination, it also adds large environmental footprint; to be more sustainable, the tourism industry needs to apply specific strategies to make it more environmentally friendly. Thus, sustainable tourism development becomes a paradigm shift to include a green orientation as a way to achieve these goals.

This chapter is focused on a green orientation in tourism in the Western Balkan countries. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the importance of a green orientation in tourism as an important way to achieve sustainable tourism development. The major method of research was secondary data collection. Key sources of information included literature concerning sustainable tourism and the green economy, green strategies in tourism, as demonstrated in the work of UNWTO, UNEP and WTTC. Data gathered from these organization’s web pages were examined.

The Western Balkan countries accepted and applied the idea of sustainable tourism development in practice, but they remain insufficient in application when it comes to green orientation in tourism. All countries in this region should adopt more precise green strategies for future tourism development to provide long-term benefits for local population, environment and economy in tourism destination.

It is widely recognised that hotels, as important members of the global tourism value chain, have negative impacts on the environment. Many hoteliers feel the adoption of environmental measures is expensive, with little commercial benefit. A further obstacle to improving hotels' green credentials is the perception that adapting staff attitudes and management operations to become more environmentally friendly is too complicated and produces only negligible results. The present study aims to create a snapshot of best practices in sustainability in the hospitality industry adopted by eleven hotels in Germany and Estonia. It also aims to contrast the development of sustainable management systems in these two European countries with different economies and cultures.

The chapter describes the research objectives and different steps of the systematic literature review of existing studies on greenwashing. Both academics and practitioners may find this literature review useful, as it identifies the key features of the greenwashing research in a wide range of disciplines (management, marketing, accounting, corporate communication, etc.). The systematic literature review sheds light on the greenwashing types (and research gaps) in which the phenomenon takes shape. Time horizon (1990–mid 2021), keywords selection for queries on academic search engines, data collection, filtering criteria, etc., are explained and discussed in detail before presenting the main results in terms of frequency of publications over years, leading outlets in greenwashing research, trending articles, levels of analysis, geographical affiliation of first authors, theoretical approaches and methods used in this field of research. The chapter concludes by summarising the main types of greenwashing and possible avenues of research.

The clean beauty phenomenon is gaining momentum and beauty brands are getting creative with on-pack sustainability claims. With the increasing focus on sustainability from both brands and consumers, sustainability communication has the potential to raise the profile of sustainable production and consumption. Further attention is needed on the creative approach behind on-pack sustainability marketing communications as companies no longer focus on single eco labels but instead use a bundle of claims to advertise their commitment to sustainability which finds consumers confused and brands open to accusations of greenwashing. This chapter explores on-pack sustainability communications in the beauty industry through the lenses of creative marketing communications which need to be both original and appropriate. This study contributes to the longstanding debate on the role of sustainability claims in marketing communications and addresses the role of on-pack sustainability claims design and creativity.

This chapter aims to discuss the key issues of green entrepreneurship in tourism (GEiT), paying special attention to the environmental performance of green entrepreneurs and its relationship with strategy, brand reputation and long-term business growth.

Literature review is conducted on conceptual issues and several hotels first-hand experiences that were categorised to provide readers with business-world examples.

This chapter highlights how small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs are the agents who started green innovation initiatives and how larger corporations tested and validated them. A myriad of small green interventions awaits to be undercovered and implemented. Most of them can bring financial improvements to the entrepreneurs as the required initial investments are not necessarily high.

This chapter is explorative in nature, based on a literature review and interviews-based analysis of consolidated green initiatives, most of them being successful ones.

The forces driving green initiatives are identified and classified. Most important categories of green entrepreneurs are described and emphasis was placed on the managerial and marketing benefits linked to green initiatives and action plans.

This chapter presents models and concepts in an integrated way, facilitating a useful knowledge for prospective entrepreneurs wishing to acquire a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges related to eco-friendly business.

This chapter examines the increase in global demand for quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) and considers the impact of such demand on the Peruvian and Bolivian farmers who produce it. Specifically, it analyzes the social media marketing of U.S. based I Heart Keenwah (IHK) and considers the role of “storied food” with respect to corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in a Web 2.0 context. This chapter reports the results of textual, rhetorical, and cultural analyses of the digital marketing materials IHK deploys, and considers IHK’s use of Web 2.0 tools to mobilize discourses of socially responsible marketing, and implications of industrial quinoa production on Andean biodiversity and indigenous culture. This chapter principally concludes that the social media and digital marketing materials that IHK deploys obfuscate the social, economic, and ecological complexities surrounding the quinoa industries in Peru and Bolivia. This chapter provides evidence of new tendencies in capitalist commodification, and demonstrates how the traditional and indigenous protectors of the quinoa plant species are being denied their agricultural and cultural heritages. Further more, it demonstrates how the language of corporate social responsibility is abused in the service of less sustainable, branded, and extractive imaginaries and corporate profit. Given the significant rise in international quinoa demand, IHK’s explosive economic success, and IHK’s reliance on Andean quinoa, this case study provides unique insights into global food capitalism in the age of social media.

We aim to comb the current policies that have been developed to promote the environmental industries in China and analyze them in a comparative manner.

We mainly use the method of text study to study the existing policies that Chinese central government published to promote the development of environmental industry. We built a database of policies and regulations from 1979 to 2015 by searching the official website of the Ministry of Environmental Protection of China.

We find that the existing policies focus on command and control approaches. Policies are more oriented to the stage of production instead of stages of investment and consumption. They rely more on negative incentive when stimulating supply and positive incentive when encouraging demand. Based on existing academic wisdom, we suggest that Chinese government should pay more attention to environmental economic policy and to stimulating demand for environmental products.

Few studies provide a systematic overview of the policy systems that have been developed to promote environmental industry in China in a systematic manner.

This research initiates an exploratory research assessing the general attitudes of hoteliers from independently owned properties toward environmental management issues and determines the facilitators motivating them to introduce environmental management policies as well as the inhibitors hindering the adoption. This study distributes the questionnaires via email to 250 medium-sized hotels, from the rating of three to five stars, in Germany. As a result, 41 useful questionnaires are obtained and analysed. The findings suggest that the communication of new environmental initiatives between hoteliers and environmental organizations is not so effective. In general, the respondents agree that environmental policy is necessary and they view that sound environmental management systems would have a positive effect on customers’ perception of the hotel.