Wouter Schalken

Senior Sustainable Tourism Specialist, Asian Development Bank

Wouter Schalken is ADB’s Senior Sustainable Tourism Specialist. Enhancing resilient and sustainable tourism is at the heart of his 30 years’ experience in tourism development across Asia, Africa and the Middle-East. This experience covers the complete scope of tourism ranging from individual enterprise development to national policy and strategy formulation with sustainable resource utilization as a core theme.

Wouter has extensive experience in recovery, redevelopment, and repositioning of tourism destinations at local, national and trans-boundary level. As project manager and chief technical advisor for tourism he has guided advisory teams in inclusive growth strategies, product development, spatial planning, revenue optimization and regulatory & institutional strengthening. 

He worked for a wide variety of multi-lateral and bilateral development organizations since 1995. In his current position as senior sustainable tourism specialist for the Asian Development Bank, Wouter supports tourism project design and implementation across all ADB operational regions, knowledge creation in resilient & sustainable tourism and guides ADB’s strategic approach to tourism development in close cooperation with the bank’s staff in urban, environmental, rural, social and private sector departments.