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Abstract

Tourism accounts for approximately eight per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and faces increasing pressure to transition toward low-carbon, regenerative development pathways. However, evidence from recent studies across Ireland, the United Kingdom and five European countries reveals a persistent sustainability competency gap within tourism higher education, where graduates often lack the systems thinking, ethical reasoning, digital literacy and applied decarbonisation skills required to support Net-Zero transitions.

This paper examines how tourism education can respond to this challenge by integrating transformative learning and systems change approaches into curriculum design. Drawing on a conceptual analytic synthesis informed by three complementary empirical studies of tourism programmes across Europe, the research develops a Transformative Systems Change Framework for curriculum reform. The framework conceptualises educational transformation as a multi-level process operating across four interconnected spheres: individual reflexivity, pedagogical innovation, institutional integration and systemic collaboration.

The study argues that incremental curriculum adjustments are insufficient to address the sustainability competency gap. Instead, tourism education must shift from transmissive, management-oriented models toward experiential, digitally enabled and co-creative pedagogies that embed sustainability competencies throughout programme structures. The framework highlights the importance of authentic assessment, industry–university partnerships and institutional alignment with sustainability strategies to accelerate this transition.

By positioning tourism education as a leverage point for systemic transformation, the paper contributes a practical and theoretically grounded model for fast-tracking curriculum reform. It demonstrates how higher education can move beyond producing skilled workers to developing reflective, ethically grounded professionals capable of supporting a just and regenerative tourism future.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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