Seven Steps Towards Sustainability: Tourism in the Context of New Knowledge

This paper is about tourism and change. It examines changes that have taken place in politics, policy, development, conservation, human–environmental relations, and the convergence of these areas over the past 30 years, especially during the past decade. As the result of international cooperative scholarship, some old concepts of how the world works are shown to be givingwayto anewfocus. It discusses how, instead of managing tourism through attempting to maintain stability, new thought guided by close observations of reality, depicts a world full of uncertainty that is constantly changing and evolving, and where enhancing resilience to disturbance replaces the former focus on achieving stability. This is not a universal paradigm shift, but it is a shift nevertheless. It shows how a new world-view is gradually supplanting the old, and it suggests that this view and its leaders, cannot be ignored. The paper presents readers with seven introductory steps on the road to greater understanding of sustainable tourism in the context of complex system dynamics, in the hope of enabling a more effective transition to sustainability.