Of all “adjectival” Tourisms, Sustainable Tourism is indisputably the oldest, broadest, most researched, and most comprehensively defined in law and in detail through ecolabels around the world. In this short blog post, we will discuss what it has in common with Roots Tourism and how it may define a better form of this new, rapidly emerging segment, as Sustainable Roots Tourism.
Sustainable Tourism and Roots Tourism
The official, concise definition of Sustainable Tourism, established jointly by UN Tourism (formerly the United Nations World Tourism Organization or UNWTO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), is:
“Tourism that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities.”
Roots Tourism (RT) has no single, codified legal definition at the international level, but a standard working definition used in European policy circles is the one coined by De Marchi and Mingotto in 2016:
“Tourism generated by migrants who go on vacation in their country of origin or by their descendants who wish to visit and learn about their family’s homeland.”
[De Marchi, D., & Mingotto, E. (2016). Turismo delle origini. Quadro preliminare delle potenzialità in Italia. In IRSS (Ed.), XX Rapporto sul Turismo Italiano (pp. 589–596)]
RT is usually categorized under Cultural Tourism by UN Tourism, whereas the EU associates it with Heritage Tourism and Rural Development and funds it to avoid both rural depopulation and the loss or dilution of cultural heritage. Italy was the first country to declare a Year of Roots Tourism (Turismo delle radici) in 2024 and invested substantially in rural municipalities to develop infrastructure, genealogy services, and itineraries for the estimated 80m people of Italian descent globally.
It is therefore easy to understand why Roots Tourism is fully compatible with the goals of Sustainable Tourism, compared, for example, with Luxury Tourism or Space Tourism. It is interesting, however, to pinpoint how it can be made more sustainable-environmentally, socially, and economically-in itself.
Roots Tourism is not automatically sustainable
While it is often assumed that RT is inherently sustainable, mainly because it disperses tourists to many rural areas and throughout the year, if poorly managed, it can have a negative impact for the same reasons!
Imagine the sudden, unannounced arrival of a huge group in a tiny, or nearly deserted, village. The terms “paralysis” and “loved to death” come to mind. Or, perhaps worse, the arrival of a billionaire emigrant who summarily buys his ancestral village and the surrounding countryside to turn them into an exclusive retreat.
Unlike Sustainable Tourism, which has a general focus, RT is a specific niche in terms of geography, motivation, and marketing, as it involves emigrants who seek their identity, ancestry, and reconnection with specific villages and rural communities.
To become sustainable, RT has to evolve from a niche market to a model that also meets the real needs of the local community in a sustainable way and strengthens the residents’ ability to remain, work, transmit heritage, and shape their communities.
Applying Sustainable Tourism tools to Roots Tourism
Sustainable Tourism’s key tools and policies can also be applied in the case of RT:
- Measurement: Monitoring and Indicators, Life Cycle Assessments, Carbon Calculators, ESG Reporting, Zero-waste supply chain audits, Carbon offsets, Certification, Leakage analysis.
- Visitor Management: Destination Management Plan, Limits of Acceptable Change/Carrying Capacity, Spatial Zoning & Smart Dispersal, Demarketing, Tourist Taxes, Maximum Entry Numbers, Resident Satisfaction surveys.
- Frameworks & Integration: Participatory Governance, Stakeholder Mapping, Green Taxes, Community-based Tourism Frameworks, Circular Economy Frameworks, Vocational Education & Training.
While there is no need to reinvent the wheel, some adjustments and customizations are necessary.
For example, standard measurements like hotel water usage are less interesting in a small mountain village with abundant water supplies. It is more useful to measure if the local dialect is being preserved, if the local calendar and sensitivities are respected, or if traditional crafts are benefiting from RT.
On the other hand, as Roots Tourists fly long haul, from the Americas and Australia to Europe, their transport-related carbon footprint is higher than that of the average mainstream tourist. This is a great opportunity, however, to encourage them to offset their flight by directly funding an environmental project in their ancestral village, for example:
- reforestation;
- seasonal fire-prevention work;
- insulation or solar panel installation in local public buildings.
Managing visitors and local resources
In terms of visitor management and overtourism pressures, we have to think along the lines of what constitutes the main attraction for the tourists—is it the village square with the single cafe/taverna, or rather the local registry that holds the genealogical records? Probably both.
Both the local taverna and the local registry should ideally have some sort of notice, booking system, timed access, and group-size limit in place, rather than 50 people descending unannounced.
Imagine if the single clerk is away that week because it’s olive harvest time, if a tourist monopolizes his time for hours, or if the taverna is closed as it is the slow season and the owner is spending time with his daughter in the city. A local RT council should devise alternatives to avoid concentrating demand.
Rather than encouraging new hotel construction, a scattered hotel model (Albergo Diffuso in Italy) may be more suitable so that empty or abandoned village homes are used as a decentralized hotel or as short-term rentals.
Keeping the benefits within the community
In relation to frameworks, we have to ensure that most revenue is captured by local businesses and the local community, rather than the international tour operator, agent, or intermediary.
This involves training the local youth to act as:
- RT hosts;
- guides;
- translators;
- genealogists;
- historians;
and encouraging big tour operators to use them rather than bringing in people from the city.
A targeted Roots Tourist tax, or a voluntary contribution, could be relatively easy to collect and could fund specific RT-related projects – for example, digitizing fragile genealogical records or establishing an annual roots-themed cultural festival – along with meeting other real local needs.
RT-related gentrification may occur if wealthy descendants start buying local houses, inflating local prices for everyone else. Although it is not easy to block such transactions, a destination could perhaps tax them differently and create some disincentives, for example, for homes that are bought by foreigners but then remain vacant or are used as short-term rentals.
Local employment, procurement, and ownership have to be prioritized or even enforced in some cases.
Protecting communities, heritage and privacy
More subtle risks and pressures include:
- intrusive visits to families;
- the commodification of intimate stories;
- the commodification of cultural and religious spaces and customs;
- unequal access to RT income causing divisions.
A sustainable RT framework thus should somehow – via participatory democracy or whatever else suits the local culture – ensure that the community defines what can be accessed by roots tourists and when, what must be kept off-limits or private, what constitutes local history and authentic, living tradition, and what is gossip, romanticized poverty, or a frozen past.
Living practices – music, cuisine, farming – however diluted, must also be supported, not just ancient buildings and archives.
In the era of GDPR, data in local registries, living relatives, and stories of adoption, conflict, or minorities of all types must be treated sensitively and responsibly. All local RT operators should receive fair pay, and pay must also be seen to be fairly distributed.
This could necessitate some sort of local RT association or cooperative. Excessive volunteering and voluntourism by roots tourists may also have to be curtailed – imagine roots tourists doing all the olive picking, displacing local workers.
A sustainable RT framework must also specify what happens when limits are reached and red lines crossed: what should become limited, what paused, what redirected, who is relieved of their duties, and so on.
A Sustainable RT Dashboard, maintained by the local RT council, would include transparent, regularly reviewed indicators and planned or taken corrective action.
VET for Sustainable Roots Tourism
In relation to VET for Sustainable RT, on the one hand, the curriculum should include a sustainability element or module, and on the other hand, the “production” of RT operators should also be sustainable in terms of graduate numbers.
This should involve local students and stakeholders, including the diaspora, with a fully localized curriculum, and be both affordable and economically sustainable, perhaps also decentralized so that the local community can make, or at least participate in taking, relevant decisions and changes.
Final thoughts
All that said, Sustainable Roots Tourism is not a panacea. Beyond definitions, good intentions, successful case studies, and deeper discussions of the true and full meaning of sustainability, roots, and tourism-and their combination (Sustainable Roots Tourism)-in the end, it is more appropriate for each local community to decide whether and how to engage or disengage with Roots Tourism.
Because the ultimate, magic ingredients of Sustainable Roots Tourism cannot be a government’s desire for more, sprawling tourism development and revenue streams, political influence and diaspora votes, but local ownership, participatory democracy and sustainable prosperity.
Whether Sustainable Tourism has existed, or can exist, on a global scale, is of course, another story-tourism does not operate in a vacuum, and the world we currently live in has infinite problems. But it can certainly exist in a specific destination and Sustainable Roots Tourism is a very practical and appealing proposition!
by Antonis Petropoulos, ECOCLUB
