Sustainable Destinations

About

Sustainable Destinations recognises that sustainable tourism development is ultimately a holistic concept and that tourism impacts are manifest in specific destinations. Environmental, infrastructural, economic, and social aspects of tourism development must all be examined simultaneously as the neglect of any single facet may undermine the achievement of sustainability objectives. Moreover, a destination management focus helps organise research activities and provides a vehicle for delivering a coherent and useful package of outputs to core partners. A key output for users will be the development of a suite of predictive destination modelling tools as well as evaluative frameworks, designs, technologies, systems and benchmarks.

Mission

To provide global leadership in strategic R&D to improve the sustainability of tourism in order to maximise the economic, environmental and social benefits it delivers to Australia. This involves development of tools and techniques for estimating tourism’s contribution to destinations. This includes analytical research to support wider policy decision-making and planning by national, state and local/regional governments through exploring the economic, social and environmental consequences of alternative government policies, plans or actions.

Key users - tourism commissions (local, state and national), tourism operators and tourism industry associations, government agencies, communities.

Scope

Development of tools, evaluation methods and analytical frameworks for analysing the competitiveness of tourism destinations at the local, regional, state and national levels.

Development of strategies to enhance the competitive advantages of tourism destinations.

Development of tools for forecasting and planning for sustainable tourism development.

Development of tools for measurement of tourism and its impacts that will have strong credibility with political and economic decision-makers, including Tourism Satellite Accounts and Computable General Equilibrium models.

Evaluation of government policies affecting destination competitiveness.

To build research capacity within the Australian tourism sector in all states and territories to develop innovative and sustainable responses to emerging opportunities and threats associated with an increasingly volatile and competitive global environment.

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee's role is to:

• Provide input into determination of research topics - through advising on priorities of their own organisations and direct involvement in the research topic development process (in practice, the steering committee has been the primary driver of the research agenda)
• Provide input into development of research projects – through commenting on project briefs and draft proposals.
• Coordinate the designation of industry reference group members for each project in which the agency is to be directly involved.
• Provide feedback to the program leader regarding any common issues of interest and any concerns regarding CRC operation.
• Work with program leader and project leaders to coordinate appropriate dissemination and uptake of research outcomes.