73 INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO SUSTAINABILITY IN TOURISM RESEARCH – Contributi
73 INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO SUSTAINABILITY IN TOURISM RESEARCH – Contributions by Hale Özgit
Tourism is not an industry satisfying consumers through a final tangible product. It is more than satisfaction felt due to consumption of a product as it leads people to live with memories. None of us can take ownership of a tourism product as we do for our properties, shoes, clothes or any other tangible goods. Gunn and Var (2002, p.4) defined tourism as an abstraction of many different developments and plan pieces. Hence, its intangible nature and interrelationships with many different sectors and industries make tourism necessary for economic, social, environmental, natural, and cultural existence and create a matter for sustainable development. Understanding the interrelation of tourism with different sectors and looking at it from a wider window always excited me. Therefore I completed my PhD in Education Administration and related my dissertation to tourism education and training in higher education.
My dissertation topic was my first attempt to interrelate my work to a different discipline, although my master thesis was related to community involvement in tourism planning and policy development. When I started to teach at University, tourism planning and policy was one of the lectures I have started my career as an instructor, which helped me a lot in looking at the interrelationship of tourism with different sectors.
Tourism scholars should indeed share their experiences collaborating with interdisciplinary research groups (Okumus & van Niekerk, 2015). Having an opportunity to live in an island country with scarce resources then led me to search more for the development of sustainable tourism plans and the need for collaboration in enhancing those plans in small island destinations. From this perspective, I and Ali Öztüren, have published two theme issues (Özgit & Öztüren, 2021; Öztüren & Özgit, 2022) focusing on sustainable tourism development in small island states with the contributions of the industry practitioners as one of the most important stakeholders for the development and academics from different disciplines. In the first theme issue, we questioned the barriers to sustainable development and sought to develop potential solutions for overcoming these obstacles (Özgit & Öztüren, 2021). One of the most significant outcomes of the first theme issue was the need for collaboration in sustainable tourism development. The outcome was not only giving insight to me as a researcher to understand the role and importance of stakeholders’ involvement in sustainable tourism development plans but further led me to rethink the sustainability of tourism with environmental, energy efficiency, cultural, and technological aspects with my corresponding authors from different disciplines (Özgit & Adalıer, 2022; Özgit & Abbasoğlu, 2021; Özgit & Akanyeti, 2022; Özgit et al. 2022). One of the studies in the first theme issue evaluated the current state of