Extract

Tourism is the sum of all travel away from home for more than 24 hours and less than one year, motivated by any purpose (e.g. leisure, business, education, health, shopping, religious pilgrimage, or visiting friends and relatives). It includes all services and attractions that facilitate travel at the tourist’s place of origin (e.g. shops, travel agencies, passport agencies), in transit (e.g., petrol stations, airports), and within the destination (e.g., tour companies, hotels, restaurants, car rentals). It entails people traveling within their own countries (domestic tourism) and crossing international borders (international tourism). Tourism is a global phenomenon that involves a wide range of sectors, such as lodging, transportation, and food services, and other industries, including agriculture, construction, petroleum, and fishing and has significant impacts on the social, ecological and economic environments. These impacts include, among others, cultural misappropriation, discontent among destination residents, economic leakage, and physical wear and tear. Tourism also involves many different stakeholders in the public, private and non-profit sectors.

As a result, tourism scholars have long argued for the need to collaborate across borders, because collaboration can help uphold the principles of sustainable development and provide more equitable relationships between border communities. Transboundary cooperation in tourism aims to address mutual issues on both sides of a border and includes different scales, including global, regional, binational, and inter-local ones. Each of these cooperation scales has its own purposes. At the global level, cooperation usually takes place in areas such as data collection and policy consultations....