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Food heritage-based networks (based on food heritage and food communities of practice) are at the core of gastronomic tourism. This paper examines the complex process of networking between 15 farmers and nine hotel managers in the Italian Dolomites area of the Valle del Primiero and Vanoi. Research undertaken over 20 months included focus groups exploring the development of a collaboration between these two sets of actors and the emergence of a food heritage-based network (cheesescape). Considering the implications for gastronomic tourism, the study found that this collaborative process represents a fundamental step in developing an internal awareness (“heritage realisation”) for food communities of practice. This subsequently empowers local communities in relation to their role within the gastronomic offerings of the territory and supports emerging new food heritage-based networks between different actors of the destination (“rural recomposition”). Gastronomic tourism thus becomes an opportunity to valorize local heritage, and members of the local communities become protagonists in promoting their culture, heritage, traditions and place identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored how academic departments, university teachers and students in one research-led university in New Zealand identified and addressed challenges in achieving three particular graduate attributes. These attributes (global perspective, environmental literacy and those aspect of ethics that involve personal social responsibility) are distinctive in that they may encompass values, attitudes and future behaviours, in addition to knowledge and skills. We documented formal processes in each participating department; interviewed university teachers to understand how they conceptualised these attributes and the processes of teaching them; explored student perspectives via individual and group interviews and written responses to verbal questions in groups; held project-based and departmental discussions to help us understand how the diversity of perspectives and processes extant in this institution were understood; and developed resources to explore and support future academic engagement with the issues that have arisen in this research. We discuss a potential mismatch between what this institution's strategic documentation aspires to and how departments and their teachers are managing these expectations, and we link this concern to the academic discourse on roles, responsibilities and capabilities of higher education. Our research has implications for all higher education institutions that express their aspirations or intentions for the values that their students will learn and we propose a research agenda to address our concerns.

This study aims to conceptually diversify loyalty programme designs for a richer consumer experience in airlines and hotels by framing loyalty programme rewards into four categories: social-comparison, self-expression, community, and companionship in terms of psychological values by amalgamating theories of agency, communion, and self-construal. The results of a two-stage quantitative study reveal that: (1) the ubiquitous social-comparison loyalty programme (i.e. loyalty programme with multi-tier structures) is not the most desired consumer choice; (2) factors driving loyalty programme choice are different between airline and hotel sectors; (3) consumer personality and individual values are important determinants of their loyalty programme choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the important questions that higher education institutions ask concerning their impact on their students' sustainability-related attributes "How do our students" worldviews change as they experience higher education with us?" The process of monitoring such a dynamic entity is fraught with statistical complexity but may not be impossible for an institution willing to ask whether or not its educational efforts in "education for sustainability", "education for sustainable development" or "environmental education", and campus sustainability developments, are paralleled by changes in the attitudes of its students. We describe here a longitudinal survey process based on the revised New Ecological Paradigm scale, with two cohorts of students, in three programmes of study, operating over four years, with multiple survey inputs by each student. We implemented the longitudinal analysis using a linear mixed-effects model and describe here the development and testing of this model. We conclude that higher education institutions can benchmark the sustainability attributes of their students and monitor changes, if they are minded to. We invite higher education practitioners worldwide to join us in further developing suitable research instruments, processes and statistical models, and in further analysing the assumptions that link higher education to sustainability and to global citizenship.

This article shares and extends research-based developments at the University of Otago, New Zealand, that seek to explore how students' worldviews change as they experience higher education with us. We emphasise that sustainability attributes may be described in terms of knowledge, skills and competencies but that these are underpinned by affective attributes such as values, attitudes and dispositions; so that "education for sustainable development" is substantially a quest for affective change. We describe approaches to categorise affective outcomes and conclude that "education for sustainable development" objectives comprise higher order affective outcomes (leading to behavioural change) that are challenging for higher education to address. Our own work emphasises the need for student anonymity as these higher order outcomes are assessed, evaluated, monitored, researched or otherwise measured using research instruments that focus on worldview. A longitudinal mixed-effects repeat-measures statistical model is described that enables higher education institutions to answer the question of whether or not "education for sustainable development" objectives are being achieved. Discussion links affect to critical reasoning and addresses the possibility of documenting and assessing the development of lower and mid-order affective outcomes. We conclude that "education for sustainable development" objectives need to be clearly articulated if higher education is to be able to assess, or evaluate, their achievement.

Higher education is increasingly interested in its impact on the sustainability attributes of its students, so we wanted to explore how our students' environmental concern changed during their higher education experiences. We used the Revised New Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP) with 505 students and developed and tested a multinomial regression model to help us to understand what can be measured and how to interpret changes. Our results demonstrate that even small differences, not apparent when only mean NEP scores are reported for cohorts of students, can be modeled to reveal statistically significant trends. We advise further exploration of this instrument and its applicability to higher education's quest for sustainability-credibility.

We report the development and piloting of an evaluative instrument and process for monitoring the environmental literacy (EL) of undergraduate students in one large research-led university in New Zealand. The instrument addresses knowledge, affect and competencies in the general area of EL in line with this institution's adoption of EL as a graduate attribute (or in a US context, a general-education learning outcome, and something to be fostered throughout a student's education). The instrument and associated processes were designed to fit within conventional institutional mechanisms that manage student feedback on the quality of teaching. The instrument was tested with more than 600 students from more than eight programmes over the course of a year and its use stressed that students were anonymous within the survey. We conclude that evaluating (or in a US context, assessing) the extent to which students acquire EL is an achievable objective and is a reasonable expectation for any higher education institution that claims to foster this attribute.

The paper examines emotions generated in potential visitors through the promotional imagery used in fright tourism, a form of dark heritage tourism. In fright tourism, an unusual combination of human emotions of fun and fear are experienced by tourists through activities such as haunted house visits and ghost tours. A modified model, based on Russell's [1980. A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161–1178] Circumplex Model of Affect, was developed to measure emotions in fright tourism advertising. The model was constructed with empirical data from the United States and New Zealand. The data were obtained through interviews with business owners of fright tourism attractions, focus groups, and a questionnaire of potential visitors. Findings indicated statistically significant correlations exist between human emotions in different quadrants of the model (positive/pleasant and negative/unpleasant). The findings suggest, contrary to the application of the Circumplex Model in more conventional tourism settings, that fright tourism business' advertisements induce contradictory emotions. The study challenges current understandings of visitor experiences and contributes to knowledge about how fright tourism heritage experiences may best be promoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cases of donor-funded community-based tourism (CBT) initiatives, sustainability indicators are often developed and used by donors or NGOs for progress reporting purposes, and the voice of the local community is often ignored. In cases where bottom-up participatory approaches have been employed, local communities may be involved in the process of indicator development as participants but are usually not given the opportunity to operate the indicator system independently. This study describes a methodological procedure for developing and implementing a local community-operated grassroots level CBT sustainability indicator system in Boga Lake, Bangladesh. The sixteen-step methodological process to formulate CBT sustainability indicators involved in-depth interviews, workshops, working group meetings, and an empirical examination of the indicator system in practice. The local community were able to form a community research team, develop survey questionnaires and observation checklists, collect and analyse data, and write a report. The community believed that their research-based sustainability reports could serve as strong evidence to negotiate with local authorities and other stakeholders, while also helping them learn and adapt their tourism-related initiatives. Further, there is evidence the community considered it as a matter of pride to operate their own indicator system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]