How Consumerist Values Challenge Sustainable Tourism
Freya Higgins-Desbiolles’s 2010 conceptual article examines sustainable tourism through Leslie Sklair's culture-ideology of consumerism. It argues that neoliberal consumerism is structurally incompatible with meaningful sustainability and calls for a shift toward less damaging values; this archive record places that argument in later debates on tourism growth, commodification and degrowth.
What the study did and found
The elusiveness of sustainability in tourism: the culture-ideology of consumerism and its implications was published in 2010 in Tourism and Hospitality Research. It is a conceptual article rather than an experiment or observational study. Higgins-Desbiolles applies Leslie Sklair's concept of the culture-ideology of consumerism to the problem of sustainable tourism and argues that neoliberalism and its associated consumerist value system are inherently unsustainable. The article therefore asks what meaningful sustainable tourism would require at the level of values and political economy, rather than testing a destination intervention or measuring a treatment effect. The journal publication appears in volume 10, issue 2, pages 116-129.
Why it is cited
Later scholarship uses the paper for a structural critique of tourism growth and commodification rather than for a measured treatment effect. A 2016 Journal of Sustainable Tourism article on capital accumulation and structural violence cites Higgins-Desbiolles when discussing the culture-ideology of consumerism that underpins the commodification of tourism. A 2019 critical framework for the UN Sustainable Development Goals in tourism also draws on the 2010 article while questioning conventional sustainability approaches.
Because the 2010 publication presents a conceptual argument, its central proposition is not a single empirical finding that can be replicated in the same way as an experiment. Later research has continued to examine whether a growth-oriented tourism system can meet ecological and social sustainability goals. A 2023 state-of-the-art review described tourism degrowth as an emerging response to the consequences of continued tourism growth, while a 2026 systematic review grouped tourism-degrowth research around biophysical limits, overtourism, post-pandemic change, and social and environmental justice. These later reviews show that the structural questions raised in 2010 remain active, but they do not prove consumerism as a sole causal explanation. The evidence is therefore best read as an expanding critical literature rather than a replicated experimental result.
The topic today
Current research places sustainable tourism alongside degrowth, post-growth, overtourism, distribution, governance and justice. Recent reviews examine policy responses ranging from regulation and market instruments to broader changes in how tourism demand, resources and benefits are organized. This shifts part of the debate from making individual trips or businesses marginally greener toward questions about aggregate growth, material and energy use, power and distribution. The 2010 article remains relevant to this conversation because it framed sustainability as a problem of values and political economy, not only as a technical management challenge.