Rethinking impacts of tourism.

Current work on impacts of tourism has deficiencies which hamper the development of cumulative knowledge and the practical application of that knowledge. While much is known about the consequences of tourism for destination areas in a general sense, much less is known about the types of tourism which stimulate these changes and the contexts in which these changes occur. As a minimum, more comprehensive typologies of tourism are required, incorporating types of tourists, community characteristics, the nature of visitor-resident interactions and the role of culture brokers. More radically, it may be advisable to develop a research paradigm which acknowledges explicitly that tourism is usually only one among a number of agents of change impacting upon communities and that it is artificial to abstract tourism from this broader context.