Editorial: Culture, Heritage and Tourism in Southeast Asia

This editorial brings together several issues on which I have been working during the past two decades. Studies of tourism development in Southeast Asia were still in their infancy in the early 1990s when I became involved in a multidisciplinary programme of research to investigate various dimensions of tourism in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. But the importance which governments in the region from the 1980s onwards gave to the promotion of the tourism industry in their national plans was a major factor in the expansion of academic research in this field of studies. Tourism studies have acquired scholarly respectability and my recent interests have since moved into an examination of the relationships between culture, identity, heritage and tourism in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the comparison of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the region.