CIFAL Jeju holds a workshop on Sustainable Tourism Development

From 17 to 20 November 2015, CIFAL Jeju ran a three day workshop on “Sustainable Tourism Development: Policies for Delivering Social, Environmental and Economic Benefits in the Asia-Pacific Region”, in Jeju, Republic of Korea.

The workshop was organized in response to the need for a capacity building programme throughout the Asia-Pacific region,introducing tourism as a way of delivering not only economic benefits but also social and environmental benefits to the local people.

Fifteen (15) participants from eight Asian countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mongolia, and the Philippines attended the event and five observers from Seoul National University and the Philippines visited CIFAL Jeju to give feedback on this newly launched programme.

The programme was structured around the following three modules:

Sustainable development overview,
Management and strategies of tourism policies,
Investment and finance of sustainable tourism.

Nine sessions were organized and successfully delivered by the nine experts from UNWTO, UNEP, ADB, GSTC, UCLG and other organizations in Korea such as Seoul National University and Jeju Olle Trail.

The discussion and Q&A time were animated, showing that participants were interested in learning about various funding sources and the procedures of how to operate and implement sustainable tourism policies. In this respect, Mr. Rieder Ludwig, Senior Advisor at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) presented monetary sources and the selection criteria, whilst Ms. Shurland Deirdre, Senior Consultant at UNEP suggested a checklist for designing an action plan, through group work.

CIFAL Jeju and the Jeju Tourism Organization signed an MOU to operate the field visit programmes of the workshop. Participants visited some tourist-attraction sites where they could see the natural beauty of Jeju such as the UNESCO GeoPark and Olle Trekking course. At the end of the course, participants learnt about a type of community business model through the example of a coffeehouse that involves community and the local people in its distribution of benefits. Moreover, in cooperation with Jeju Special Self-governing Province and UCLG, the workshop added "culture" as a special theme to the programme in relation to sustainable tourism.

Overall, the participants provided positive feedback on this workshop and said they were inspired to apply some ideas to their cities. Ninty-five per cent (95%) of participants said they would recommend this workshop to their colleagues.

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