Call for Papers ASEAS
Focus: Tourism and Development in Southeast Asia

The upcoming issue of the Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies (ASEAS) 8(2) puts its focus around critical discussions on the topic of tourism and development in Southeast Asia. Tourism in Southeast Asia is without doubt an ever-growing economic sector and income generator for millions of people directly or indirectly involved in the industry. At the same time it constitutes a social phenomenon connecting people – not only the Western tourist and their ‘hosts’, but also those local to the region, based on a rise in domestic and intra-regional travel. However, tourism has also caused increasing socioeconomic inequality and vast disruptions to local ecosystems, societies, and cultures, above all through the expansion of an industry that often exceeds local carrying capacity limits, supported through injections of capital by external funding bodies with little local initiative. Nevertheless, although tourism’s repercussions are well known, it constitutes a widely used tool for poverty alleviation and development in Southeast Asia.
A growing awareness exists particularly of the value of grassroots tourism projects that are led by local communities. These grassroots initiatives assist in uplifting the livelihoods of a number of Southeast Asians for whom opportunities are created to use their skills as well as the available social, cultural, and environmental assets to diversify local incomes. Politicians, activists, academics, local decision makers, and community members themselves appear to have learned a great deal of how to ‘do development correctly’ in terms of increasing local capacity, creating linkages to other sectors, or ‘empowering’ those that are affected most by tourism: locals themselves. While this special issue welcomes contributions on best-practice examples of tourism for development in Southeast Asia, it equally discusses local challenges, such as issues of ownership and unequal power relations between communities, governments, NGOs, and tourists.

Therefore, this issue welcomes critical contributions on the broader topic of tourism and development from a variety of disciplines, such as geography, tourism studies, development studies, anthropology, political science, or environmental studies. Topics include but are not limited to the following aspects:
• tourism for sustainable development
• eco- or community-based tourism initiatives
• community empowerment through tourism
• international, local, and regional cooperation in tourism for development
• the social, environmental, and political processes and challenges of tourism as development tool
• best-practice examples in tourism for development
• approaches to development through tourism

Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2015

Further Details:
• If you intend to submit a paper, please contact: aseas@seas.at, claudia.dolezal@seas.at, and alexander.trupp@univie.ac.at
• Please note that we also accept contributions outside the focus; in this case please get in touch via email (see above).
• You can find the ASEAS Guidelines for Submissions and the link to our Editorial Platform (to submit your paper) here.
• Find this Call for Papers 8(2) on our website (http://www.seas.at/our-journal-aseas/our-journal-aseascall-for-papers-aseas-82-tourism-development/)