Tourism and Sustainability? Toward a new socio-legal research agenda

Tourism is a world-wide burgeoning economic sector with major implications for sustainability. However, legal scholarship has paid little attention to its impacts on social institutions, processes and practices across scales and time. The proposed workshop aims at addressing this gap, exploring the effects of different types of tourism on host societies. It will take critical, comparative, and socio-legal approaches, and explore a collaborative research agenda on sustainable tourism from the perspective of legal sociology.

The workshop follows a roundtable methodology. In each panel, a discussion paper (circulated in advance) opens the debate and paves the way for discussions with invited experts, which feature geographers, legal anthropologists, socio-legal academics, and international law experts. The workshop is also open to the participation of stakeholders, decision-makers, and members of the Basque civil society. This format will provide inclusive, multidisciplinary deliberations, thematising issues of equity and sustainability across modalities of tourism, in settings such as the Basque Country, Scotland, France, and Namibia.

Panel 1 will thematise how competing visions of tourism and sustainability shape conflicts between hegemonic and subaltern societal projects across the world. It will outline a tentative framework for critical, comparative, and socio-legal studies of the tensions between tourism and the sustainable reproduction of societies.
Thereafter, discussions will shift towards legal strategies for the sustainability of tourism. These range from the enhancement of human rights (right to the environment, social rights or right to rest), to participatory frameworks that consider local populations’ needs and wills for sustainable tourism. Papers will address intersections between normative orders, ranging from the local to the global levels, taking critical and comparative perspectives. Panel 2 will propose a framework of socio-legal analysis for compared models of regulation in domestic and European jurisdictions. Panel 3 will discuss public-private partnerships and systemic integration across international regimes.
Panel 4 finally turns towards pluralistic, socio-legal frameworks for the appraisal of tourism and sustainable societies. It will navigate human and posthuman ontologies of tourism and the role of rights-based approaches in promoting the sustainable operation of related activities. It will garner preliminary lessons for the regulation and governance of tourism across spatial and temporal scales, laying additional foundations for future socio-legal research.

The organisers aim to conclude with a roundtable, open to civil society, stakeholders and administrations involved in the promotion of sustainable tourism in Oñati, as a member of the UN-WTO promoted network of ‘Best Tourism Villages’.