Human Development Tourism: Utilizing Cultural Heritage to Create a Universal Culture

Sustainable tourism aims to maximize the benefits of tourism and minimize its negative impact, especially on the host countries, mainly by complying with the standards required for the achievement of the sustainable development goals. However, tourism, due to its great scope and impact, has a significant potential to foster and expand its contribution to humanity, by becoming a pivotal leader of Human Development. The present paper suggests the development of a specific type of tourism, the Human Development Tourism, which aims to utilize the world’s material and intangible cultural heritage to cultivate a universal culture of HD values and principles. Human Development Tourism maximizes tourism’s great potential to overall promote the development of humanity by directly developing peoples’ awareness of Human Development, its value for them, and their role in it, hence, enabling them to better serve it. The pilot HD Tourism Program presented here is attached to the CAVE (Classical Aristotelian Virtues of Ethics) Approach© for Human Development, which aims to provide people with the fundamental capabilities for HD through the development of 14 Aristotelian virtues. Hence, it provides an example of how intangible heritage, specifically the Aristotelian Ethical Theory, reflects the HD’s values and principles, and provides people useful guidelines they can use in order to apply these values and principles in their life. The pilot program, also, shows how nature and the material and intangible elements of cultural heritage can be combined in a meaningful and structured way in the context of Human Development Tourism Program.