Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
renewable resource industry, based on local capacities and community decision making',
with an increased emphasis being given to the interrelated and evolutionary nature of
tourist development.
Since the late 1990s, geographers have become concerned with the development of
sustainable approaches towards tourism (Hall and Lew 1998). Sustainable tourism
planning is therefore an integrative form of tourism planning, which bears much
similarity to the many traditionally applied concerns of the geographer as resource
manager (L.S.Mitchell 1979). Sustainable tourism planning seeks to provide lasting and
secure livelihoods with minimal resource depletion, environmental degradation, cultural
disruption and social instability. The approach therefore tends to integrate features of the
economic, physical/spatial and community traditions.
The concern for equity, in terms of both intra- and intergenerational equity, in
sustainable development means that we should be concerned with not only the
maintenance of 'environmental capital' (M.Jacobs 1991) but also the maintenance and
enhancement of social capital (Healey 1997), in terms of the rich set of social networks
and relationships that exist in places, through appropriate policies and programmes of
social equality and political participation (Blowers 1997). Such an approach has
considerable implications for the structure of tourism planning and policy-making. To
fulfil the sustainable goal of equity, decision-making processes will need to be more
inclusive of the full range of values, opinions and interests that surround tourism
developments and tourism's overall contribution to development, and provide a clearer
space for public argument and debate (Smyth 1994). As B.Evans (1997:8) argued, 'if
environmental planning for sustainability…is to be anywhere near effective, the political
processes of public debate and controversy, both formal and informal, will need to play a
much more significant role than has hitherto been the case'.
Dutton and Hall (1989) identified five key elements of sustainable tourism planning:
co-operative and integrated control systems, development of industry co-ordination
mechanisms, raising consumer awareness, raising producer awareness, and strategic
planning to supersede conventional approaches.
Plate 9.1/9.2:
Cairndow/Loch Fyne,
Scotland. Community based and
owned tourism developments.
