Promoting Gender Sensitivity and Environment Protection through Sustainable Tourism Development : A Review

Over the past few decades, the concerns relating to the social and environmental impacts of tourism have intensified significantly giving birth to an array of path-breaking forms of tourism such as community-based tourism, ecotourism, rural tourism, and sustainable tourism. Notwithstanding the divergence in the operational definitions associated with these types, gender equality and environmental sustainability are the common underpinning aspects across the genres. It is estimated that 60-70% of the jobs generated by tourism are taken up by women highlighting the potential of tourism to promote gender equity. Further, there is huge consensus across the various disciplines regarding the relations between gender and environment, which in contemporary research dialect is referred to as “Ecofeminism”. Finally, the environment is one of the most important resources for tourism development because tourism depends on the environment for a lot of resources required for its development. In this backdrop, the current work attempts to unveil the endearing relationship that can be sketched in a cyclic format between tourism development, gender, and the environment. Throughout academia, these relations have been mostly studied in isolation, yet integrative studies combining all these three spheres are scarce. This paper strives to bridge the above-said gap in the existing literature and contextualize theoretical constructs by assimilating the leads from reviewing academic works, journals, periodicals, and archives of media reports. The extent to which the linkages between the above-mentioned factors can complement sustainable development ventures is examined in the work