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The links between art events and sustainable development in rural contexts where revitalisation is pressing is becoming increasingly obvious. The village of Mitarai is an example of a small peripheral community in Japan faced with the impacts of depopulation, ageing and socio-economic decline. The urgency to stem further regression has seen art emerge as an antidote for community strengthening. Since 2017, Shiosai, a week-long community art festival has taken place with the underlying aim to rejuvenate the area's diminishing fortunes. It exhibits artworks paying homage to local islandscapes (Cheer, Cole, Reeves & Kato, 2017) and employs local cultural heritage as key elements. The extent to which bottom-up art events in small rural communities can serve as a vehicle for sustainable development is examined. Findings suggest that the Shiosai drives visitation to the area and has reinvigorated latent cultural heritage. The festival stimulates inward migration and enhances community resilience and vital social capital. However, as the festival is driven from the bottom-up without external support, the extent of future local-level involvement remains a critical success factor. The implications suggest that community engagement is a vital ingredient in the mobilisation of festivals in rural contexts, as well as in ensuring that sustainable development outcomes can be optimised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourists put their trust in maps and guidebooks and they expect information within to be accurate. Unfortunately, vital information can often be incorrect such as the accuracy of altitude above sea level. Cartographic misrepresentations and the impact on tourism is the focus of this study. Altitude data from maps, guidebooks and summit signs were compared with professional measurements made by precise Global Navigation Satellite Systems receivers. Findings revealed significant discrepancies in reported peak altitudes ranging from a few and up to several hundred metres. Evidently, some of the highest summits of the mountain ranges are subject to degradation and/or change over time and this underlines cartographic misrepresentations. There are possibly other inaccuracies in scores of popular peaks around the globe and rectifying erroneous information is vital for peak-bagging visitors. The results of this exploratory stud have significant implications for the management and marketing of destinations when a mountain's popularity is based around being the highest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The magnitude in which global crises and the ongoing societal challenges affects our life has called for attentions to be more socially responsible, environmentally friendly and caring for the wider community. A lot has been said recently about tourism restart or recovery as a consequence of COVID-19, highlighting the need for greater pragmatism and responsibility in the midst of turbulence, further emphasising the relevance for responsible tourism practice and scholarship. The present editorial serves as a foundation that provides an overview of the development of responsible tourism, offering a synthesis of key literature and sources regarding responsible tourism that can help guide future investigations. A bibliometric analysis of responsible tourism was conducted in Web of Science (WOS) database and subsequently 94 articles were used in the final review. While the results show the relevance of sustainable practices, behavioural factors and value creation by multiple stakeholders, they underscore the need for more and better efforts to delve into and realise responsible tourism in the contemporary environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If, as according to Robin (2015: online), “islands are idealised ecological worlds, the Edens of a fallen planet’”, the rationale underpinning tourism expansion should acknowledge MacLeod’s (2013) notion of “cultural realignment” that calls for optimal and resilient encounters. This introductory article to the subsequent theme section of the journal on sustainable tourism acts as a bridge toward the development of emergent themes that describe how island peoples adapt and respond in localised cultural islandscapes as a consequence of tourism expansion. The links between cultural alignment and social-ecological resilience are clear and the principal and overarching question posed in this introductory article is: To what extent are islandscapes resilient to rapidly changing utilities, significances and ways of life wrought by tourism expansion? The vulnerability-resilience duality remains firmly entrenched in the discourse on islands where tourism has become prominent, and although tourism provides some resiliency, overall, islandscapes remain subject to externally driven fast and slow change that exercises an overwhelming influence. Islander agency will likely remain subject to the fluctuations in the demands of the tourism supply chain. Therefore, tourism as a standalone focus of islands is a high-risk proposition, especially in contexts where externally driven change is likely to intensify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demarketing is generally recognized as that aspect of marketing that aims at discouraging customers in general or a certain class of customers in particular on either a temporary or permanent basis and has been increasingly posited as a potential tool to degrow tourism and improve its overall sustainability, particularly as a result of so-called overtourism. The paper provides an overview of the various ways in which demarketing has been applied in a tourism context and assesses the relative value of demarketing as a means of contributing to sustainability and degrowing tourism. It is argued that demarketing can make a substantial contribution to degrowing tourism at a local or even regional scale, but that the capacity to shift visitation in space and time also highlights a core weakness with respect to its contribution at other scales. The paper concludes by noting that the concept of degrowth also needs to be best understood as a continuum of which demarketing is only one aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]