Agents in Sustainable Tourism Development Understanding their Involvement and Engagement

Tourism of today is not only concerned with economic aspects of development, but there is a growing interest in the studies of environmental and socio-cultural impacts. Such impacts are mostly studied as part of sustainability in the tourist destinations. The concept of sustainable tourism is a theoretical framework that aims to address such issues. However sustainability is debated to be a mere theory having far less practical solution. Planners and policy makers often blame the existing public private partnership (PPP) model is like a cow which is though fed by the public sector benefits the private sector alone that eats out the major share of profit. The present paper in the pursuance of practical solutions emphasized on defining the stakeholders and agents of tourism and hospitality sector with their underlining interest. Various approaches and levels of participation in the continuum of passive participation to active self mobilisation is explained about stakeholders' participation. The feature, aim and scope of various stakeholders' engagement and multi-stakeholders collaboration were defined conceptually. The emergence of Multi-Stakeholder process and role of private and public sector discussed to make public and private participation a success.