Ecotourism originated in the 1980s, at the dawn of sustainable development, as a way to channel tourism revenues into conservation and development. Despite the “win-win” idea, scholars and practitioners debate the meaning and merits of ecotourism. We conducted a review of 30 years of ecotourism research, looking for empirical evidence of successes and failures. We found the following trends: Ecotourism is often conflated with outdoor recreation and other forms of conventional tourism; impact studies tend to focus on either ecological or social impacts, but rarely both; and research tends to lack time series data, precluding authors from discerning effects over time, either on conservation, levels of biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, local governance, or other indicators. Given increasing pressures on wild lands and wildlife, we see a need to add rigor to analyses of ecotourism. We provide suggestions for future research and offer a framework for study design and issues of measurement and scaling.

Although nature-based tourism is often promoted as benefiting local destinations through income generation, employment, and direct conservation support, it is also believed to influence tourists’ environmentally friendly attitudes, knowledge, and ultimately their behavior. Yet, few studies have empirically documented these outcomes, and those that do are inconsistent in the variables measured and the time frame analyzed. This paper examines the empirical research on nature-based tourism's ability to foster long-term stewardship behavior among travelers by conducting a systematic review of peer-reviewed tourism research published between 1995 and 2013. This search, focused on literature addressing changes in tourists’ environmentally related knowledge, attitudes, intentions, and actual behaviors, yielded just 30 empirical studies. Outcomes related to new environmental knowledge were commonly reported in these studies, but findings related to environmental attitudes and behaviors were inconsistent. Few studies measured environmental behavior directly, and fewer still include longitudinal assessments of persistent changes in attitudes or behaviors. We suggest potential future areas for research as well as programmatic strategies that may facilitate favorable outcomes from nature-based tourism, particularly those related to tourists’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Key areas include understanding visitors’ prior experiences and background, designing and delivering more effective interpretive messages, and using social media.

This article presents a review of the peer-reviewed scholarship that explores the relationship between tourism and empowerment. The concept of empowerment has attracted much interest from social scientists, and we begin by briefly synthesizing those perspectives. Our query of scholarly databases reveals 53 peer-reviewed articles that focus either conceptually or empirically on the topic of tourism-related empowerment. A thematic analysis of these writings revealed five main areas of focus: (1) issues related to local residents, (2) issues related to gender, (3) issues related to employees of tourism and hospitality firms, (4) issues related to disempowerment, and (5) issues related to tourists. We emphasize three main summary points about this literature. First, empowerment is typically assessed via single-shot case studies that focus on outcome rather process. Second, subjects of research on empowerment are not limited to local resident "hosts." Third, although scholars have addressed a related notion of disempowerment, it is not clear whether this exists at the opposite end of a single empowerment continuum or if instead these are two distinct concepts, each occurring along a unique dimension. Finally, we build upon other social sciences and our synthesis of the tourism literature to offer a reconciliatory definition of empowerment as "a multidimensional, context-dependent, and dynamic process that provides humans, individually or collectively, with greater agency, freedom, and capacity to improve their quality of life as a function of engagement with the phenomenon of tourism." We conclude by suggesting several opportunities for further empirical research on tourism-related empowerment.