MTA Fall 2015 Colloquium

On Friday the 20th of November I participated in the MTA Fall 2015 Colloquium. The event was presented by the student run organization Tourism For Tomorrow. The topic for this evening’s debate was Community Involvement, Stakeholder Management and Human Rights in Tourism. Even though it was a cold Friday night, a fair amount of people had shown up – probably also because this event had a hidden agenda to honor Dr. Kristin Lamoureux, Director of International Institute of Tourism Studies at GWU, who are moving to a new position in NYC. For this event she was the Discussion Moderator, and was accompanied by Seleni Matus, founding member of Sustainable Destination Alliance for the Americas (SDAA), and Dr. Jane Henrici, independent researcher and consultant within the field of gender, diversity and socioeconomic policy and programming.

From the left: Dr. Kristin Lamoureux, Selini Matis & Dr. Jane Henrici

Matus’s presentation mainly evolved around the interesting work she had done with SDAA in the Caribbean. SDAA’s work has brought forward just how difficult it is to create a truly healthy tourism industry. Even though the industry has been focusing on becoming better, greener and more sustainable over the past decades, the result of SDAA’s work showed that there is still long way to go. The biggest problem seems to lie in balancing the expectation between visitor demand, the need of the local (tourism) industry, while still respecting and supporting the local cultures.

Dr. Henrici’s talk on the impact of tourism and socioeconomics changes on gender inequality was very elaborate, and grew beyond the impact of tourism.  However, one important takeaway from her presentation was that tourism and the socioeconomic changes it bring to a community, have a much bigger impact on the internal relationship within a community, then I first expected. Individuals and sectors may be put in competition with one another when tourism grows, which can disturb the harmonies in a community. 

Dr. Henrici's presentation on gender

The discussion between the panelists were cut down to only a few questions, since the event started 20 minutes late, and the last half hour of the session was dedicated to honoring Lameoureux. 

Achievement Award given to Dr. Lamoureux

However, one interesting question evolved around how tourism stakeholders could successfully encourage community engagement in order to create sustainable tourism. Dr. Henrici mentioned, that for many members of a community, there is no incentive to spend time on community engagement since it takes time away from other important daily tasks – this is especially true in poorer communities. Matus mentioned the important of creating a neutral environment for the stakeholders and find a neutral initiator. Many stakeholders have different expectations and needs, which can lead to more discussion than engagement.

The takeaway from the discussion, from my point of view, is that we have al the right ideas and initiatives to create sustainable tourism. However, the field seems to be much more complex than first acknowledged, and human behavior plays a big part of this complexity and makes it more difficult to foresee and handle.