Tourism stakeholders attitudes toward sustainable developments: A case in Shahat city

Nowadays the tourism has become one of the most important resources in supporting and stimulating the economy in many countries. It stimulates massive investment in infrastructure and helps improve the balance of payments, which will help create jobs, improve people's living standards and equal economic opportunities (WTO, 2010). The Libyan economy is still dependent on its revenues mainly on petroleum resources, knowing that there are other sectors that would help diversify the sources of income but did not give it importance by the successive Governments ( tourism sector as an example). and to be a long-term tourism development must be Sustainability. Berlin Declaration of 1997 suggested that ''achieving sustainable forms of tourism is the responsibility of all stakeholders involved, where it is critical that planners and decision-makers understand the attitudes of stakeholders towards sustainable actions in tourism development". This study aimed to find out the possibility of creating a sustainable tourism development in the future in the Shahat City (SC), By identify the extent of support that may acquire from stakeholders for tourism, according to their opinions and attitudes toward tourism development. The City of Shahat was chosen for this study because it represents many cities which are severe need for projects of development to find solutions to some of the social, environmental and economic problems. Four major groups of tourism stakeholders were chosen to take part in this study(tourists, local residents, private sector, and the public sector). In this study, the researcher used mixed methods to a key tool in data collection such as Interviews were used to identify the attitudes of the private and public sectors and questionnaire used as a key method to explore the attitudes of tourists and residents. This study concluded several important results which confirmed the abundance of good tourism components and resources in the City in terms of quality and quantity of the tourist product and determent the possibility of competitiveness at the regional and international levels.