Intervening in academic interventions: framing social marketing's potential for successful sustainable tourism behavioural change

Abstract

Given tourism's growing emissions and contribution to environmental change, the positive potential of behavioural interventions, and especially social marketing, has increasingly become a focus for sustainable tourism and mobility research. This paper uses the lens of social marketing to investigate the capacities of tourism researchers to contribute to sustainable tourist behavioural change. Several key and interrelated issues are identified: the nature of socio-technical systems and regimes, understanding what constitutes a successful behavioural intervention, the role of theory and belief systems in interventions, and the potential role of upstream social marketing in policy learning and system change. In the case of social marketing, the essentially political nature of engaging in communications on sustainability is also highlighted. This has implications for the social marketing knowledge base on which sustainable tourism behaviour research draws, such as the value of political marketing and psychology, as well as the challenge that this provides for notions of “value-free” or “objective” tourism research. The need for behavioural change by tourism researchers, as well as by governments, the industry, and tourists is noted. These issues are critically evaluated and expanded upon to aid academic researchers in understanding and promoting behaviour change in tourism studies.