Vision

We believe in the capacity of tourism as a tool for sustainable development in disadvantaged regions of the world. By sustainable development we mean the expansion of the real freedoms that people today and in the future have reason to value. We desire to contribute to this process through our support of on-site projects, our advocacy and awareness raising work, and the advancement and coordination of academic research in the field.

Our understanding of Sustainable Development

Our conception of sustainable development is adapted from the notion “development as freedom“, coined by Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen in 1999.

Development as freedom includes an important but not exclusive economic income component. Additionally, it also contains widely ramified non-income facets. These comprise, for example, basic capabilities like the avoidance of deprivations such as starvation, undernourishment, escapable morbidity, and premature mortality, as well as basic freedoms such as education, health care, gender equality, political participation, uncensored speech, and access to safe water. Most of these latter are ends in themselves, as they are elemental to enriched human lives. But they also have an important instrumental value and contribute to the achievement of other constitutive components. Better education, for example, also enhances knowledge about health care, opportunities of political participation, a better understanding of legal issues and fundamental rights, or the chance to be economically productive.

Development is sustainable if it “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland Commission, 1987). Hence, sustainable development is the expansion of the real freedoms that people today and in the future have reason to value.

As a consequence, the use of tourism as a tool for sustainable development can have many diverse dimensions. These include, among many others, economic opportunities for underprivileged individuals, the improvement of social equity, and the protection of the environment.