Dr Mark Hampton, Reader in Tourism Management at KBS, organised and led a workshop on resilience and coastal tourism in April in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
The expert workshop was fully funded by the University’s GCRF (Global Challenges Research Fund) in association with STUPPA INDONESIA, Partners in Development and the Doctoral Programme, Department of Architecture and Planning at Gadjah Mada University (UGM), Yogyakarta, a long-standing international partner of Kent.
Dr Hampton and his KBS colleague Dr Juliane Thieme worked alongside colleagues from across South-East Asia with participants from Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the UK. This international expert workshop was set up to bring together key stakeholders from the region’s leading universities – in areas of tourism management and planning, human geography and architecture – alongside environmental non-governmental organisations, government and the tourism industry.
The three-day workshop focused on coastal tourism communities and their vulnerability to shock including natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunami) as well as economic and political shocks, and discussed key areas needing further research that would lead to more effective, evidence-based policy.
Dr Hampton said “this was an exciting and stimulating event that brought together experts from across South-East Asia. There was a great appetite to discuss openly the sizeable challenges facing coastal tourism communities in this part of the world, and to begin to see where we need to focus our research and thinking.”
Photo credit: Dr Mark Hampton, 2019
Learn more about the GCRF Workshop 2019 and our MSc Management programme.