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Research in the area of sustainable tourism continues to grow, however a lack of understanding regarding necessary action inhibits progress. McCloskey’s (Citation2015) critique regarding the failure of the MDGs, as a direct result of a lack of critical consciousness, and understanding of the structural contexts of poverty and under-development, provided the impetus for our work. McCloskey (Citation2015) signals the important role of education in fostering transitions to sustainability. As such, we have applied our critical lens to the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Our paper offers tools for critically thinking through the potential for the SDGs to help shape the tourism industry for more sustainable, equitable, and just futures. We positioned six themes to serve as a conceptual framework for interrogating the SDG agenda in tourism; arising from our considerations of both reformist and radical pathways to sustainable transitions in tourism: critical tourism scholarship, gender in the sustainable development agenda, engaging with Indigenous perspectives and other paradigms, degrowth and the circular economy, governance and planning, and ethical consumption. We address these core themes as essential platforms to critique the SDGs in the context of sustainable tourism development, and highlight the cutting edge research carried out by our contributors in this special issue.
Boluk et al. (Wed,) studied this question.