ABSTRACT
There has been a recent trend to identify tourism as a central component in major global issues. Tourism continues to be used in the prosecution of global terrorism (09/11 Commission 2004), while the potential of travel to inspire peace has been enthusiastically if simplistically championed (WTO 2003). Climate change poses a significant risk to tourism, according to the World Tourism Organisation (WTO 2005), although tourism may not so much be the victim as the perpetrator of global environmental change (Hall and Higham 2005). Where once tourism exposed the gaps between the ‘haves’ from the ‘global north’ and the ‘have nots’ from the ‘south’, to the world’s media tourism has been rehabilitated, cast in a positive light by the WTO (2004), the World Bank (Younis 2004) and the United Nations (UNEP 2002) as a means to tackle global inequalities, to alleviate poverty in even the poorest countries and regions, and to empower local peoples.
