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The number of incoming tourists in the world rises every year (World Bank, 2016), and this has an impact on the goals for the 2030 Agenda especially regarding climate change, sustainability of ecosystems and the availability of water (UN, 2016). Despite the internal and external controversies surrounding tourism scholarship, it is a field that has much potential to contribute to the achievement of the goals of the 2030 Agenda. In tourism research, there are still well-established and strong divisions between quantitative and qualitative research. The quantitative approach usually relies on positivism, while the qualitative approach increasingly commits to phenomenological, hermeneutic, postmodernist and constructivist positions. Furthermore, research underpinned by these assumptions often does not clearly state nor discuss epistemological or ontological issues, taking the previously mentioned positions for granted almost as they were the accepted norm.

In this paper, I review the latest 200 articles that have been published in each of the three top tourism and hospitality journals. I comment specifically on their epistemological and ontological assumptions. I then use this review as the basis for a philosophical discussion in which I argue that critical realism can underlabour for tourism scholarship. That is, it can provide tourism scholarship with an ontology and epistemology that will allow it to effectively discover and tackle the issues that are connected to overcrowding and unsustainable destination development to ensure that the goals of the 2030 Agenda are met.

References:

UN. (2016). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development .:. Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. Retrieved April 5, 2018, from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld

World Bank (2016). International tourism , number of arrivals. Retrieved April 5, 2018, from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ST.INT.ARVL