Place attachment has become an important concept in tourism-related research, with substantial relevance for the nature of the human-place relationship and behavioural intentions and outcomes. Following a review of the place attachment literature in tourism, this article reviews the studies on the conceptualisation of place attachment, its antecedents and influencing outcomes, and explores its potential in the areas of sustainable tourism, destination resilience, and destination competitiveness.

The established mindset underpinning tourism planning, development and research is under attack from many quarters on the grounds that “business as usual” seems impossible to reconcile with sustainability. The paper first highlights key characteristics of the prevailing paradigm associated with tourism industry expansion globally. It then identifies common elements of an alternative “sustainable futures” paradigm, contrasting its features with those of the established paradigm in relation to seven fundamental elements: neo-liberalism, anthropocentrism, shareholder orientation, growth, price, space and promotion. Next, the paper identifies the implications of the alternative paradigm in terms of the underpinning mindset (attitudes and behaviours) of major tourism stakeholders. Pathways to facilitate the transition to the new sustainable futures’ paradigm are identified. The paper concludes with reflections on the power of the new paradigm, and its implications for a global sustainable tourism research and action agenda.

The Beyond GDP approach to development is gaining widespread support from policy makers and researchers worldwide. While not formulated specifically for tourism activity, the approach serves as a guide to measuring the current and future well-being of destination residents associated with tourism development. Inspired by the Beyond GDP approach, a framework comprising the main dimensions of well-being is argued to provide valuable input into an action agenda to achieve sustainable tourism development. The paper discusses some key responsibilities of tourism industry stakeholders structured according to several different senses of ‘beyond’ that characterise the Beyond GDP research agenda. The paper concludes that research on destination tourism development can learn much from the Beyond GDP approach in respect of conceptual advance, industry practice and policy implementation.

Globalization in tourism is an important area of promise and of concern. This paper first highlights the main drivers of globalization, distinguishing between economic, technological, social, demographic, environmental and political drivers. It then addresses several of the important effects of globalization in the context of tourism. These effects include economic development, employment opportunities, the spread of technical knowledge, the development of new markets and products, new consumer values, environmental and socio-cultural changes. The paper concludes that tourism managers need to respond pro-actively to the challenges of globalization, playing an advocacy role if they are to achieve and maintain sustainability in their operations.

Tourism satellite accounts (TSAs) and computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are used increasingly in tourism analysis, though they have distinctly different functions. These are illustrated by means of two examples. The first of these involves developing measures of profitability and productivity of the Australian tourism industry – the national TSA was used to provide the database for this exercise. The second involves measuring the yield of different types of tourists to the tourism industry and the economy as a whole. TSAs provide an appropriate technique to estimate economic yield at the industry level, while the CGE approach is used to estimate the yield to the economy as a whole.