Griffith University supports the Sustainable Development Goals

Sustainable Tourism Management

Associate Professor Sarah Gardiner

Please note that this is an on-going project.

Project Description

The Sustainable Tourism Management program has been implemented annually since 2015. This course focuses on environment and social communities’ issues. Each program included 20-25 Indonesian tourism professionals from the private sector, central government departments and NGOs.
The learning objectives of the award are participants’ improved skills and ability to:
• Understand the concept of sustainable tourism in global context and understand the importance of responsible consumption in the tourism sector (SDG 12).
• Understand the role of community, province/state and federal level operators in tourism sector development and identify ways for effective collaboration (SDG 17).
• Enhance tourism business planning processes and cooperation between tourism operators, travel agents, associations, local and federal governments (SDGs 9, 11 and 12).
• Improve the governance and sustainable planning of tourism destinations (SDG 16).
• Analyse key drivers (legal, social, political, environmental, economic) that enable and limit tourism sector development and understand their impact on the sector (SDG 9).
• Identify through benchmarking different methods and benefits of running sustainable tourism operations in Indonesia and Australia (SDG 12).
• Develop a tourism strategy for a specific tourism sector (to be confirmed once the participant selection is completed) (SDG 12).
• Develop business and marketing plans (market/competitor/product analyses, strategies, operational plans including productisation and commercialisation of tourism products, monitoring, fiscal management, access to finance) (SDG 12).
• Analyse the role of existing policies and regulations plays in developing the sector (SDG 16).
• Identify key factors in ecotourism and tourism businesses built on natural resources (to be confirmed once the participant selection is completed) (SDGs 12, 14 and 15).
• Understand the role tourism plays in developing economic growth and providing work opportunities (SDG 8).

Project Personnel and Beneficiaries

Indonesian tourism professionals from the private sector, central government departments and NGOs.

Outcomes to Date

Each participant needed to complete an Project on completion of the course to implement and utilise their learnings from the program. Dozens of local projects have been completed as a result, including a projects that developed a crowd funding platform that could be used to raise funds for sustainable tourism projects, collecting authentic local stories that may be of interest to tourists and competency-based training for hotel employees.

Project Significance

This short course helped to improve the enabling environment of the sustainable tourism sector, develop linkages between tourism operators and enhance business planning processes and tourism management, towards contributing to the economic growth of the selected provinces. This course approached the training from a commercial and economic development perspective balanced with the need to preserve the tourism destination’s assets (environmental, social and cultural) in the long term. The program was expected to help develop capacity in a close neighbour and establish strong links for mutual benefit between the tourism sectors in Australia and Indonesia.

Related Link

External link to https://youtu.be/KbtXXAGpV-Q

Co-authors
Professor Noel Scott, Professor Bill Cater
Project start
2015
Project end
Academic area
Griffith Institute For Tourism
Project location
  • Gold Coast
Project geographical impact
  • International
Publication date
October 20, 2022
Last updated
11:54 am, November 27, 2023