Sustainable Tourism Development and Peace: A Local Community Approach

Abstract

Tourism and travel industry is the world’s largest industry which helps in bridging the gap amongst communities, religions and different cultures. People throughout the world along with their customs play a significant role to foster peace. Tourism provides an effective tool for promoting peace which in turn leads to cross-cultural interaction resulting in tolerance, national integration, compassion, goodwill, educational standards, justice and mutual respect for each other. The relationship between peace and tourism is very interesting because both are complimentary to each other; tourism can be essential force for peace and alternatively tourism needs peace for its expansion and prosperity. The tourism could further bring desired level of closeness among the people and may go a long way in creating peaceful environment. Tourism doesn’t involve any borders or hatred and offers positive experiences to the tourists. The purpose of the study is to explore the community’s participation regarding tourism development across the countries which could play significant role in destination development along with inducing peace perspectives across the nations. The growth of tourism industry can have significant impact on the overall growth of a region, reason being, its capability to generate employment and trade. Tourists are conflict sensitive and response positively to peace. This paper will study the local community participation towards sustainable tourism development in India in general and Jammu in particular for building peace in region.

Keywords: Tourism, Peace, Community Participation

View PDF