Social capital, trust and tourism development

As governments, businesses and communities around the world begin to seriously address a wide range of sustainability issues, tourism has come under increasing criticism. This criticism of tourism highlights its contributions to negative environmental impacts such as climate change (Verbeek and Mommaas, 2008), its continued exploitation of global North-South economic and political inequalities (Klein-Vielhauer, 2009) and its foundation in what is increasingly seen as unnecessary consumption (Lansing and de Vries, 2007). This growing pressure on tourism to justify its existence and to better manage its impacts, both positive and negative, creates a challenge for tourism researchers to better understand the nature of tourism development and its impacts on destinations (Mason, 2008). Despite a long history of literature on tourism impacts, the subject still remains largely descriptive and atheoretical, especially in the social domain (Moscardo et al., 2013; Wall and Mathiesen, 2006). Research in this area continues to focus primarily on resident perceptions of impacts with little detailed analysis of the links among these perceptions and actual features of tourism and its development (Andereck and Nyuapane, 2010). There is a growing consensus that better conceptual models are needed to describe and explain in detail the mechanisms that link tourism processes and characteristics to effects on destination regions, especially effects on the people who live and work in these places (Deely et al., 2012; Moscardo et al., 2013). Such models are necessary to mprove the practice of tourism development