Framing behavioural approaches to understanding and governing sustainable tourism consumption: beyond neoliberalism, “nudging” and “green growth”?

Three different sets of approaches to understanding behaviour with respect to sustainable tourism mobility and consumption are identified in this paper: the utilitarian, social/psychological and the systems of provision/institutional approach. Each is based on different sets of assumptions on the factors that affect consumer sustainability behaviour. These assumptions not only affect the selection of policy tools to change behaviours but are also related to different modes of governance. Assumptions with respect to human behaviour and behavioural change and modes of intervention and governance are interrelated and mutually reinforcing and act as policy paradigms. Failure to recognise the importance of social structures in affecting behaviour has created a path dependency in which solutions to sustainable tourism mobility are only accepted within the dominant governance and behavioural paradigm. Other policy options and academic research that identify structures and institutions in systems of provision as a sustainability problem that requires non-market intervention and/or significant system change are regarded as marginal to the policy process or are ignored. It is concluded that all three different ways of approaching consumer behaviour are required if a sustainable transition to the socio-technological system of tourism mobility is to be made in a timely manner.