Tourism & sustainable development
Tourism is both the engine and the stress-test of island economies. This theme explores how islands can harness tourism's economic potential without sacrificing the environments, cultures, and communities that make them worth visiting.
About this theme
For many islands, tourism accounts for the majority of GDP, employment, and foreign exchange earnings, making it both indispensable and deeply precarious. A single hurricane, pandemic, or geopolitical shift can collapse an economy built on tourist arrivals overnight, as COVID-19 demonstrated with devastating clarity.
At the same time, mass tourism strains water supplies, degrades coral reefs, drives up housing costs, and can erode the very cultural authenticity that attracts visitors. This track asks hard questions: Who benefits from tourism? What is its true environmental cost? And how can island communities take back control?
Curaçao is navigating these questions in real time, diversifying beyond cruise tourism, developing sustainable diving infrastructure, and debating how much growth is too much. Its experience offers rich material for scholarly and policy debate.
Topics of interest
- →Tourism-dependent economies: resilience, diversification, and shocks
- →Overtourism, carrying capacity, and visitor management on islands
- →Community-based and regenerative tourism models
- →Cruise tourism: economic leakage, environmental impact, and governance
- →Heritage tourism and the commodification of island culture
- →Ecotourism, nature-based tourism, and conservation finance
- →Tourism and housing affordability in island communities
- →Digital nomads, remote work, and changing tourism patterns
- →Post-COVID recovery strategies and future-proofing island tourism
Submission formats welcome
Research papers, practitioner case studies, policy analyses, and comparative studies are all welcome. We particularly encourage contributions from island-based researchers and tourism professionals.