CATS will hold the Tourism Online Forum Series (TOFS) vol.65 on Friday, October 30. Anyone is welcome to attend. We look forward to your participation.

World Heritage, tourism, and the SDGs: A metagovernance approach

• Abstract:
  While sustainable development and tourism have long been elements of the UNESCO World Heritage system, tourism has only been an official part of policy since 2009, whereas the inclusion of sustainable development is more recent, with an explicit emphasis on the need to align World Heritage management with the UN SDGs. However, global aspirations often downplay the various governance clashes that occur at regional, local, and site levels. To this end, this talk will present a conceptual model of sustainable tourism metagovernance within the context of World Heritage. Given the clashes visible across governance scales, the metagovernance framework aids in the discussion of the implementation of sustainable development within the World Heritage system. It also provides an alternative approach in the understanding of complex governance systems and their ability to self-regulate in novel forms of decision-making that put local communities and socio-ecological sustainability at the center of the policy discourse.
• Keywords: World Heritage; governance; sustainable tourism; SDGs; metagovernance
• Hosted by: Center for Advanced Tourism Studies (CATS), Hokkaido University
• Date/Time: Friday 30 October 2026  |  16:30-18:00 (JST)
• Venue: Online (Zoom Webinar)
• Language: English
• Capacity: 50 persons
• Participation fee: Free to join (pre-registration system)
• Speaker: Dr. Bailey Ashton Adie
  Bio:
  Dr. Bailey Ashton Adie is a tourism geographer based in the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu, Finland, where she is part of the Frontiers of Arctic and Global Resilience Research program, and a Docent in Tourism at the University of Lapland, Finland. She is also co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Heritage Tourism and Chair of the Leisure Studies Association, and she sits on the editorial boards of Tourism Geographies, Tourism Planning & Development, Tourism Management Perspectives, and El Periplo Sustentable. Her research interests include World Heritage, heritage tourism, community resilience, community-based tourism, natural hazards and tourism, tourism and development, second homes, and dark tourism. She is the author of World Heritage and Tourism: Marketing and Management (2019) and is currently editing a book with Akbar Keshodkar on The Politics of World Heritage Tourism: Contesting and Negotiating Power, Memory, and Belonging in the 21st Century, contracted by Routledge. 
• Moderator: Dr. Meng Qu (Guest Associate Professor, CATS, Hokkaido University)
• Registration:
  Please register at the URL below.
  https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0qOXUcJ4TZW1ahpSAhcSpg
• Contact:
  Hokkaido University, Center for Advanced Tourism Studies (CATS)
  online-forum(at)cats.hokudai.ac.jp
  *Please replace the (at) part with @.