Measuring tourism and environmental sciences students’ attitudes towards sustainable tourism

Tourism is recognized for its positive effects on the economy (Balaguer & Cantavella-Jord´a, 2002; Min, Roh, & Bak, 2016). It contributes to the trade balance and tax revenues, drives employment and boosts entrepreneurship (Williams & Lew, 2015). Notwithstanding, the continued acceleration of tourism in recent years led more scholars to underline the drawbacks of tourism growth (Gibson, 2019; G¨ossling, 2002; G¨ossling & Scott, 2018; Saarinen, 2018; Satta, Spinelli, & Parola, 2019). The current debate about tourism is raising new questions on the sustainability of tourism and the limits to its growth, stressing the compelling need to balance its economic, social and environmental impacts (Blazquez-Salom, Blanco-Romero, Vera-Rebollo, & Ivars-Baidal, 2019; Capocchi, Vallone, Amaduzzi & Pierotti, 2019; Panzer-Krause, 2019). A clearer perception of the need to move away from “growth fetishism” and to evolve into a ‘strong’ sustainability paradigm in tourism is emerging (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2018; Higgins-Desbiolles, Carnicelli, Krolikowski, Wijesinghe, & Boluk, 2019). Education for sustainability is considered critical in this change (Boyle, Wilson, & Dimmock, 2015; G¨ossling & Scott, 2018). As students will become leaders and decision makers in the future, they need to acquire specific skills and competences. Therefore, callings for the creation of tailored training programmes are being geared towards this goal. However, despite sustainability having been deemed a critical topic in tourism studies for decades (Butler, 1999; Hardy, Beeton, & Pearson, 2002), there are still inconsistent views on sustainable tourism which are reflected across the education system and in curricula (Bramwell, Higham, Lane, & Miller, 2017; Thomas, 2009; Wang, Huyton, Gao, & Ayres, 2010). Several recent studies have sought to explore these issues by investigating the extent to which sustainability is embedded in tourism higher education (Wilson & von der Heidt, 2013; Boyle et al., 2015; Cotterell, Hales, Arcodia, & Ferreira, 2019). These studies focused primarily on education, examining tourism curricula and the views of teaching staff. In this paper, the other side of the teaching-learning binomial is explored, based on students’ views on sustainability. The purpose is to ascertain whether different attitudes towards sustainability are found among tourism and environmental sciences students. Academic environmental sciences programmes are keen to develop awareness of sustainable development (Silverman & Silverman, 2003). Hence, environmental sciences students serve as appropriate comparison groups as further explained in section 3. Our intention is to unveil whether both groups of students share the same paradigm of sustainability or, on the contrary, due to their specific training, tourism students are more driven towards tourism economic benefits and environmental sciences students more concerned with environmental issues. To this end, a sustainable attitude questionnaire was applied to students from both courses in the Minho region, Portugal. Based on the results obtained, strategic decisions can be made, precisely on what specific topics should be further addressed during their academic programmes. The methodology advanced in this paper may be replicated at a later stage for different regions.