34 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM – Contributions by Rachel Dodds
34 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM – Contributions by Rachel Dodds
Even before I started my career in academia, I have worked to try to make the tourism industry more sustainable. It is for these reasons that my aim has always been to do practical, applied research that is relevant to the stakeholders in industry and communities rather than just solely for the gain of academic publication. I aim to provide information that will help make change, whether it be for policy makers, communities, or businesses.
Not all my work has been marvellous and not all of my work has resulted in the changes I hoped for. Not all of my work that I spent the most time on has been the most widely cited either. What I am most proud of, is the work that has resulted in change, and it will be these insights that I share with you.
I first started examining how policy is much more difficult to implement than we may think. There are relatively few studies of actual policy implementation or solutions as most work is prescriptive. I am proud that my PhD work in both Spain and Malta (Dodds, 2007 a & b) was used to inform future tourism development policies in those destinations. Although my work in Spain; Dodds (2007b) has also been widely cited, I am most proud that it was rewritten for the UNWTO to help inform policy makers and is still being used today as an example of the need for a multi-stakeholder approach. I have since done a number of studies for a variety of stakeholders in Canada (Dodds, 2012; Dodds & Ko, 2012; Dodds, 2020) and Norway (Aall, Dodds, Sælensminde & Brendehaug, 2015) and a book written with my colleague (Graci & Dodds, 2010) that is still being used to inform sustainability in island policy.
I then realised that businesses sometimes need real evidence, not just policy, in order to shift behaviour or make change. Font & McCabe (2017), Font, Elgammal & Lamond (2017), Juvan & Dolnicar (2014) and others have done much work in these areas which has helped not only shift behaviour but change beliefs. In Thailand research with tourists about their willingness to pay a conservation tax (Dodds, 2013; Dodds, Graci & Holmes, 2010), helped business on Koh Phi Phi island in Thailand implement the tax which helped fund many initiatives. I love working with industry groups as well as businesses to assess how they could, or couldn’t become more sustainable and there have been some rewarding positive changes from this work. Both Canada and New Zealand made some industry shifts in sustainability practices within their wine industries (Berghoef & Dodds, 2011; Dodds, Graci, Ko & Walker, 2013) and the hotel sector saw how they could reap competitive advantage through sustainability practices that often were low hanging fruit that just needed to be highlighted in order to be taken advantage of (Walsh & Dodds, 2017). On a larger scale, business globally has to recognize the opportunity to look more responsible by realising their decisions on business travel can impact sustainability beh