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still unchallenged. However, a number of concerns regarding SPI have been
voiced. The first concern came from Ben Baumberg (2013) regarding the SPI's
association with strong business interests. Porter and a team of economists
developed the SPI as a funded project originating from 'a mixture of busi-
nesses and non-profits interested in the crossover between business strategy
and social goals'. In Baumberg's view, this strong business background dic-
tates what 'social progress' needs to be.
In terms of measurement, despite the criticism of the HDI and the
Better Life Index, the SPI demonstrates that measuring social progress and
environmental progress is not easy because of their abstract nature and
area-specific properties (Harris & Burns, 2004). Michael Green commented
that the SPI lacks 'country measures of the gap between rich and poor'
(Paulson, 2013), which is often considered to be an important indicator for
social progress. Baumberg (2013) concurs, noting the inclusion of variables
that do not measure crucial parts of social progress and the exclusion of
significant variables. Another concern that Baumberg mentions is that the
type of data sets collected from larger organisations limits the measure-
ment of available and comparable data sets; this, in turn, can encourage
researchers to overlook potentially important information when determin-
ing various dimensions.
As seen in the four notable development indices above, how the world
views the 'development' of a nation has changed over time. Each index
attempted to create a better measurement by compensating for the prede-
cessor's shortcomings or weakness in measuring development. Definitions
of 'development' have greatly changed as the world has embraced the con-
cept of sustainable development. The more recent approach of human
rights-based development addresses inequality issues more strongly than
any other development approaches; however, it does not prescribe how to
solve problems. These recent indices indicate that the type and rate of
improvement in basic needs and standard of living can vary from one nation
to another, and countries in different leagues need to be measured sepa-
rately, rather than internationally.
Despite the fact that development paradigms and worldviews are trans-
forming rapidly, in the context of tourism, individuals' mindsets and the
mainstream measurement of development are not changing at the same
speed. Tourism provides the space in which the world's rich and poor meet.
Many nations choose tourism as a means of development for economic pur-
poses, but very few do the same for social improvement or environmental
protection purposes. Moreover, tourism stakeholders prefer reading eco-
nomic success as a development indicator because it is not always possible
to pinpoint how many of the improvements in a society are attributable to
tourism development. The complex nature of the relationship between tour-
ism development and socio-cultural change is explored in the remainder of
this chapter.
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