Tourism has been increasingly used for and directly linked with rural poverty reduction in developing countries. However, the application of, and to an extent the principles of the widely used organizing framework for considering poverty reduction, the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), may not fit fully the tourism situation, and vice versa.
Based on a review of the literature, the authors first suggest that sustainable livelihoods for tourism should be viewed in a broader tourism context rather than merely taking tourism as a development tool.
Second, the SLA seeks household livelihood sustainability at the individual or household level, while tourism sustainability is often applied to the industry itself at wider more macro level scales. Thus, a deep understanding of the sustainability trade-off between the SLA and tourism needs to be found.
Third, tourism research has demonstrated local residents’ increasing concern about participation in political governance associated with tourism development, with less participation jeopardizing local people’s assets from a livelihood perspective.
Therefore, an additional concept of institutional asset (mainly community participation) needs to be incorporated within the SLA. Given the above understandings, a sustainable tourism livelihood was defined, and a Sustainable Livelihood Framework for Tourism approach is proposed and discussed.
The paper was presented at The Council for Australasian Tourism and Hospitality Education (CAUTHE) Conference 2008.
