Introduction

The conference is organised on behalf of the International Geographical Union's (IGU) Commission of Tourism, Leisure and Global Change. The conference will be held at the University of Stellenbosch's Institute for Advanced Studies, in Stellenbosch, South Africa (60km from Cape Town).

Tourism is a global scale industry with increasing impacts on the environment, as well as regional and local development. In many developed and developing world countries tourism provides new opportunities, employment and economic benefits to local communities, and currently many counties see tourism promotion as a good and relatively inexpensive strategy that can be used to attract foreign direct investment through, for example, show-casing natural areas and local indigenous cultures. As a result of growing tourism activities many places in the world are increasingly tied to the industry and related cultural, social, economic and political networks. At the same time tourism is deeply influenced by its changing physical and social environments and larger processes such as global climate change. The current global economic credit crisis has, in addition, underlined the impact of shifting economic fortunes on the global tourism system.

Tourism has become an important policy tool for community and regional development in many developed and developing counties, not least of which in Africa. Tourism has also a significant potential to influence and change the use of natural and cultural resources in a number of regions. This has highlighted the role of sustainability, management and governance in tourism development and turned tourism not only into an economic but also social and political activity that influences the wider environment in various ways. At policy level, tourism is increasingly viewed as an essential sector of regional and national reconstruction and development. In this sense the rationale for tourism development has evolved towards the idea of tourism as a tool for regional and sustainable development and recently to a relatively new kind of idea of tourism as an instrument of social and economic empowerment and poverty reduction. In this respect there are many regional and local development programmes that are highlighting the role of tourism in regional and sustainable development and empowerment. In recent experiences, the decline in global economic output and growth has pointed towards the potential vulnerability of various regions' tourism systems to economic shocks. This has come to challenge the general conviction that tourism-led development is a sustainable and necessarily solid platform from which to develop local, national and regional economies.