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Agenda 21 is an important international achievement on how the precious resources of our planet should be equitably shared and protected. It is a means of aiming towards the harmonisation of the three main pillars of sustainable development and trying to meet the needs and aspirations of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. After the Rio Summit in 1992, the two pillars within sustainable development, environment and development, made a noteworthy progress to meet the objectives of Agenda 21. Such progress, particularly on regulation settings and law making, created an active environment for the interaction of international environmental and developmental instruments on the wide range of issues raised in more than 40 chapters of Agenda 21. Thereafter, the international community has been dealing with such issues including biodiversity, agriculture, energy, transport, human settlement, freshwater, natural resources, forest, oceans andseas, together with many other issues such as sustainable tourism. Nature Based Tourism as a more sustainable form of tourism is an interesting issue to be studied in order to evaluate how the international community reacts to the interaction of developmental and environmental pillars of sustainable development on this form of tourism. Nature Based Tourism has its roots, on the one hand in the tourism industry with more than 11% contribution to the world's GDP and proves to be one of the most appropriate means of generating income and creating jobs for many developing countries while providing nearly 8% of the total global workforce. On the other hand its roots are in the conservation and sustainable use of environment features including its biodiversity and aesthetic values. Therefore, Nature Based Tourism is a major issue on the interaction of developmental and environmental issues. It should be properly governed to maximise its benefit to local communities and minimise its adverse effects on nature. At the international level several organisations, instruments, agreements and codes of conducthave made significant efforts to address Nature Based Tourism in different forms and anifestations. As a result, the international community has gained many successful achievements and valuable experience while facing various gaps and overlaps. There is a need of an internationally accepted instrument to address the existing gaps and overlaps appropriately. Such an instrument could deal with the current vacuum in the international environmental and developmental law and practice. The proposed draft covenant is a result of careful study in major international environmental and developmental achievements related to Nature Based Tourism, particularly after the Rio Summit. This provides the international community with a legal framework that can be considered as an appropriate approach towards such an environmentally fragile, economically viable, and a culturally sensitive issue.

The central aim of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledge of restructuring processes in the tourism production system and to analyse the implications of socio-spatial practices and strategies of transnational, integrated tourism corporations in light of the ‘new’ economic geography. It is based on the cultural turn in the discipline of geography and thus recognises that cultural and social processes are an integral part of economic systems and contribute to shaping the economic landscape. The thesis specifically investigates the corporate geographies of tourism corporations and their relationship with territorial spaces. Restructuring processes are examined demonstrating that the European tourism production system has experienced significant structural changes during a wave of large- and small-scale mergers and acquisitions resulting in the emergence of tourism corporations with a wide and uneven geographical expansion. An analysis of shareholdings of individual tourism corporations also highlights significant variation in the level of internationalisation and expansion. Socio-economic approaches to the firm form the theoretical foundations for analysing the relationship between tourism corporations and place via the concept of embeddedness within networks of social relations using examples from Mallorca, Spain. A combination of questionnaire survey and semistructured interviews was employed in order to map the structural and qualitative attributes of intra-, inter- and extra-firm networks. Encountered difficulties, however, resulted in a more exploratory approach to the application of theoretical concepts and required added reliance on secondary sources and informal discussion with experts. Historical connection between tour operators and Mallorcan hotel companies has provided a firm basis for close cooperation with mutual benefit and has allowed Mallorcan hotel companies to internationalise in conjunction with the internationalisation of tourist flows. The examination of regulatory networks has revealed a complex and dynamic mosaic of scales at subnational, national and supranational levels, which govern and shape the activities of tourism corporations.

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Assessing the economic, ecological and social impacts of tourism development has become a major activity within the tourism and sustainable development research communities. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the unique contributions of systems thinking and feedback control, which system dynamics can offer, in analysing policies for promoting sustainable tourism development. In this thesis, after a background of sustainable development and policy analysis issues and planning technologies, three main research results are achieved. Firstly, a generic model of a tourism system is created to capture the dynamic forces. A set of tests is carried out in order to improve confidence in the model. Those tests include model boundary test, a dimensional consistency test, a physical consistency test, parameter calibration against historical data, reality check, and sensitivity check. Secondly, a series of generic scenario simulation models targeting the most critical strategic issues or questions that a particular region, especially in an island tour destination, faces are developed and analysed. Finally, a micro world or management flight simulator is developed in order to better support collaborative tourism policy making. The generic model and the modelling process developed in this dissertation will have some applications to other sustainable development policy making projects.