The Political Economy of Tourism: Introduction to the Special Collection

Tourism is one of the fastest-growing internationally traded service industries. The articles in this special collection examine the circumstances under which it can act as a driver of sustainable, equitably shared growth. The introduction argues that tourism offers a promising path to regional development—not only in southern Europe and the Global South, but also in the UK—as long as the economic rents that it generates are distributed broadly within local communities, rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few investors and siphoned out of the local economy. However, the shift from having too few tourists to having too many can happen swiftly, with serious negative consequences for social, environmental and economic sustainability. Addressing this challenge requires autonomous political leadership, a robust civil society and out-of-the-box thinking across policy areas and scales of governance.