Director of the International Centre for Responsible Tourism, Leeds Metropolitan University
Professor Harold Goodwin is a Director of the International Centre for Responsible Tourism, and Co-Chairs the annual International Responsible Tourism in Destinations conferences. He publishes, teaches and advises on Responsible Tourism, and tourism and local economic development. Harold is Professor of Responsible Tourism at Leeds Metropolitan University, where he teaches on the MSc in Responsible Tourism Management and undertakes, and supervises, research.
For the last decade he has been at the forefront of efforts to make tourism more responsible, working with tour operators in the UK ,as an originating market, and with communities and governments in destinations around the world; and pioneered work on tourism and poverty reduction. He drafted the Cape Town Declaration and co-chaired the conference in 2002. He advises ABTA, the International Tourism Partnership and UNEP. His book on ‘Taking Responsibility for Tourism’ was published by Goodfellow in May 2011.
The International Centre for Responsible Tourism (ICRT) brings together all those who support the ‘Principles of the Cape Town Declaration’. There are sister organisations in a number of countries, and others pursuing the idea of using tourism to make better places for people to live in and better places for people to visit. The ICRT seeks to encourage and enable people to take responsibility for making the changes necessary to make tourism more sustainable, by researching the issues around the sustainability of tourism and advocating solutions based on research and scholarly activity.
