Empowering the neglected voices of children in tourism development

The 2030 Agenda is to transform the world and make our society a collaborative partnership that improves lives and improves the world. Tourism is one of the social forces chanted as having the potential to contribute to all sustainable development goals set in the Agenda. Also, children are recognised as its ‘torchbearers’, making them essential partners in global sustainability efforts. Still, very little is known about how children perceive tourism. Children are among the most neglected social groups concerning how their opinions and perceptions are summoned and considered in tourism planning, policymaking, and governance. And excluding ‘the future generation’ from the decisions made for ‘the future generations’ is simply unacceptable.  We wish to empower children’s voices in sustainable tourism development. Hence, the project aims to signal the youth’s needs, problems and expectations regarding tourism and its impacts on the quality of life. Moreover, the project’s outcomes should be a source of information for local and national decision-makers about how to address tourism as a social force for communities from the perspective of its ‘future for future’.  Slovenia represents a unique environment for studying and recognising the importance and value of children in sustainable tourism development. Firstly, it is not an exception in embracing tourism as a community development tool. Second, it is known to have an excellent system of capturing statistical data on the level of municipalities, which provides an opportunity to map tourism impacts and enable micro-level state-of-the-art analysis. Third, it has a long-standing focus on youth research and a long-standing support for the civic empowerment of children via civic organisations joined under the National Youth Council of Slovenia (NYC). There are 5 work packages for the project:  WP1: Develop a roadmap for selecting municipalities with different levels of tourism activity to enable comparative research. The WP will comprise four sets of secondary data analyses on the micro-level of municipalities: demographic profiling, tourism activity analysis, calculating climate change indicators, and tourism working conditions and practices analysis.  WP2: Examine children’s perceptions of economic, environmental, and socio-cultural tourism impacts. This WP is built on a survey-based approach aiming to provide a general overview of children’s perceptions of tourism impacts in selected municipalities to examine whether differences in attitudes are linked to the community’s development stage. We will sample children aged 14-18 enrolled in secondary education.  WP3: Provide an informed, evidence-based understanding of children’s everyday experiences and engagements with the local environment, including tourism. The interpretive paradigm underpins this WP utilises focus groups for the data collection. It will offer a deep insight into children’s sense of spatial attachment, belongings, and discourses, informing their understanding of tourism and hospitality. In this way, we can critically reflect on broader cultural and social processes affecting their everyday practices and discourses.  WP4: Identify children’s tourism-related limits of acceptable change and public issues (i.e., destination management and sense of place, climate change, and working conditions). This WP focuses on deliberative problem-solving as a method of empowering and inclusion of children/young people. This WP will be planned, organised and evaluated in partnership with NYC.  WP5: Propose a new multi-criteria evaluation model focused on tourism impacts on children’s quality of life. The new model will enable evaluating, ranking, and comparing strategies, policies, programmes, and decisions affecting tourism impacts on children’s quality of life. The aim is to support municipalities’ transition towards sustainable development with a formal benchmarking methodology. This WP will also be evaluated in partnership with NYC.