Quality of Life-cantered Tourism Sustainability Paradigm

Sustainability paradigm has become the dominant paradigm as we see tourism development. In its still-evolving form, it calls for future values and human-centred development that focuses on progress and well-being and on the quality of life of people and the environment. This book section starts with the state of the art discussion on what is quality of life and what is sustainable tourism and presents the quality of life in terms of the sustainable tourism paradigm. It then traces the evolution of the understanding of quality of life in the academic literature on sustainable tourism, addressing two questions necessary for a paradigm: “What needs to be sustained in the context of the economic, natural, and sociocultural world we are leaving?” and “How can we achieve tourism sustainability while considering the destination’s stakeholders and political capacity?” The results show that the paradigm has evolved and that quality of life has been clearly communicated as an important but fuzzy part of the definition and understanding of sustainability. The term has different conceptual meanings for tourism researchers, which then provide different and incommensurable solutions to the same problem. For an effective paradigm, further research and commensurable knowledge of shared definitions, unified terminology and corresponding performance indicators is needed. For an effective paradigm oriented toward quality of life, we need academic collaboration and agreement on “what” we mean by the term quality of life and tourism and “how” we take responsibility for incorporating it into sustainable development agendas and actions to make “better tourism”, “better places” and “better life”.