The left/right approaches to tourism planning was an allegory in the late 20th and early 21st century. The bipolar view of tourism planning views matters through recurring patterns of binary separations depending on whether the approach is primarily concerned with an industry focus (rightist) or whether its main aim is addressing social development (leftist). This paper takes Peter M. Burns tourism planning a third way’s bipolar view of tourism planning approaches (2004) and applies them to the context of island tourism. This paper further elaborates this view of planning with examples from the Maldives Islands
