World Heritage, tourism, and the SDGs: A metagovernance approach
While sustainable development and tourism have long been elements of the UNESCO World Heritage system, tourism has only been an official part of policy since 2009, whereas the inclusion of sustainable development is more recent and with an explicit emphasis on the need to align World Heritage management with the UN SDGs.
However, global aspirations often downplay the various governance clashes that occur at regional, local, and site levels. To this end, this talk will present a conceptual model of sustainable tourism metagovernance within the context of World Heritage.
Given the clashes visible across governance scales, the metagovernance framework aids in the discussion of the implementation of sustainable development within the World Heritage system. It also provides an alternative approach in the understanding of complex governance systems and their ability to self-regulate in novel forms of decision-making that put local communities and socio-ecological sustainability at the center of the policy discourse.
Thus, this model contributes towards the analysis of institutional and contextual barriers to scaled and fit-to-purpose coalescences encompassing elements of government, market, network, and community governance for the fulfilment of the SDGs pillars of planet, partnerships, and people.
The seminar is organised by the Knowledge Environment Sustainable Tourism (KEST).
Short Bio
Bailey Ashton Adie is a researcher in the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu, Finland, where she is part of the Frontiers of Arctic and Global Resilience Research program as well as the EU Horizon Project “Cross-Border Cultural and Creative Tourism in Rural and Remote Areas”. She is also the Chair of the Leisure Studies Association and Director of Communications for the Recreation, Tourism and Sport Specialty Group (RTS), part of the American Association of Geographers. Her research interests include World Heritage, heritage tourism, community resilience, community-based tourism, natural hazards and tourism, tourism and development, second homes, and dark tourism.
Her work has been published in book chapters as well as in leading journals, including Annals of Tourism Research, Current Issues in Tourism, and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. She is the author of the book World Heritage and Tourism: Marketing and Management (2019) and co-editor of Second Homes and Climate Change (2023). She sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Heritage Tourism, Tourism Geographies, Tourism Planning & Development, and Tourism Management Perspectives.