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The purpose of this study is to expand our understanding of sustainable tourism research given that both researchers and policymakers consistently question the effectiveness of sustainable tourism and its practices, applications and practical adoption.

The aim of the research was to provide an update on previous studies by examining how sustainable tourism research has progressed in the five intervening years since Ruhanen et al. completed their 25-year bibliometric analysis.

This paper provides insights into how sustainable tourism research has developed over the 30 years since the publication of the Brundtland report. It shows that over the past five years, the field has matured to place greater emphasis on climate change, modeling, values, behavior and theoretical progression.

Future research in the field should aim to better understand the methods and analysis techniques being used in sustainable tourism, as well as how sustainable tourism and climate change policy and actions translate into policy and practice.

Bibliometrics and text mining shows that 30 years after the Brundtland report, sustainable tourism research continues to grow exponentially, with evidence that the field is starting to mature by broadening its horizons and focusing on more relevant, big-picture and hard-hitting topics, such as climate change.

Establishing a shared understanding of the environment and sustainable development between stakeholders should be fundamental to the raison d'être of ecotourism businesses. Indeed, many will begin ecotourism businesses with the objective of sharing their own personal environmental ethics and values with their customers through the tourism experience. Yet it is not always the business owner that interacts with the customer, the organisations’ employees will also interact with the guest and are thus responsible for communicating the environmental ethics and values that underpin the business. The purpose of this paper is to explore how ecotourism business owners ensure that their employees convey their environmental ethics and values to their customers. So how do ecotourism business owners ensure that employees convey their environmental ethics and values to their customers?

This paper reports on the findings of interviews with 18 eco-tourism business owners in Australia who sought to examine their strategies for disseminating environmental ethics and values with the organisation’s employees.

It was found that strategic recruitment to attract like-minded employees was important which was reinforced through education, training and mentoring to develop an organisational culture underpinned by shared values and responsibility.

This study has contributed to the growing body of literature focused on the supply side of ecotourism businesses. It has addressed a gap in our understanding by specifically investigating the strategies that ecotourism business owners adopt to disseminate their personal environmental ethics and values to their employees.

Despite the proliferation of the governance concept in the broader academic literature, there is little agreement on definitions, scope and what actually constitutes governance. This is arguably due to the fact that empirical research on the topic, with some exceptions, is generally limited to case studies without use of any common conceptual framework. This is certainly the case in other fields of study and is becoming increasingly obvious in tourism research also. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to explore and synthesize the governance literature with the objective of identifying the key elements and dimensions of governance.

Drawing on the two “parent” bodies of literature originating in the political sciences and corporate management fields of study, the paper provides a review and synthesis of the governance concept with the objective of identifying the primary elements and factors that have been employed in studies of governance to date.

A review of 53 published governance studies identified 40 separate dimensions of governance. From this review, the six most frequently included governance dimensions were: accountability, transparency, involvement, structure, effectiveness and power.

A synthesis of the governance literature has not been undertaken to date, either in the tourism literature or in other fields of study, and in doing so the authors provide a basis for tourism researchers to draw on a set of comparable conceptual dimensions in future research. Comparable dimensions which can be replicated and tested in empirical research will add additional depth and rigor to studies in this field.

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges for policymakers at both the international and national levels in the twenty-first century; there is no exception for the tourism industry, which is one of the most highly climate sensitive sectors. Tourism researchers have continued to explore the relationship between sustainable tourism and climate change to develop a range of effective strategies for policymakers. This paper aims to review published literature in the areas of sustainable tourism and climate change.

The review maps sustainable tourism and climate change domains between 1996 and 8 January 2016. The review encompasses 95 published documents obtained from the Scopus database on 8 January 2016. The search terms were “Sustainable Tourism” and “Climate Change” combined with Boolean Operator “AND” in the “Article Title, Abstract, Keywords”.

The outcomes of this study are: Identification of trends in research and the most influential papers on sustainable tourism associated with climate change research; evaluation of the contribution of authors, journals and institutions in this area; and guidance for policymakers to develop policies to mitigate the impact of tourist activities on climate change.

The study provides a basis for communication between academics and practitioners by revealing the research trends in sustainable tourism and climate change and by categorizing the contents of prior studies to provide guidance for future studies.

The originality of this paper is in determining possible research gaps and thereby providing guidance for future study. The study also makes a practical contribution by addressing the topics of interest to policymakers.

Multicultural nation-states face an added layer of challenge to social cohesion when countries already face various degrees of political, socio-economic and religious divide. Communalism has been a dividing threat, and some societies have encountered civil wars. Reconstructing social fabric in post-war countries is a challenge, and there is a need for a catalyst that can reinforce social cohesion. Although post-war countries use tourism, tourism is also perceived as a hegemonic activity, which still needs to be verified. This paper aims to analyze the relevance of tourism as a catalyst for social cohesion of post-war societies. This study discusses the notion of social cohesion and debates the prospect of tourism to act as a catalyst. The paper provides new insights on how tourism can be used to reflect on the society and social cohesion. This study contributes to theory and practice by developing a framework for assessing social cohesion via tourism, using a qualitative approach. The methodology uses a review of literature and policies in tourism and social cohesion. Findings support the validity of tourism as a catalyst, and this study proposes a framework for assessing social cohesion via tourism.

In this study, the notion of social cohesion is discussed and the prospects of tourism to act as a catalyst are debated upon. A review of literature and policies in tourism and social cohesion are used.

Findings support the validity of tourism as a catalyst, and a framework for assessing social cohesion via tourism is proposed.

This study proposes a framework for assessing social cohesion via tourism.