Tourism, Development and the Environment - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 262

for securing a sustainable course of development in the 21st century, hence
the name of the most important product of the event, Agenda 21. One sig-
nificant contribution made by Agenda 21 is its rationalisation of environ-
mentalist and developmentalist perspectives on sustainability, transcending
the ideological and practical discord. Agenda 21 incorporates the philosophy
of community empowerment and proactive 'grass-roots' development, while
articulating the formal structures of planning, legislation and governance in
which it should take place. Agenda 21 has been described as the 'sustainable
development bible' (Doyle, 1998) and has indeed gone some way to bridging
the gulf between green ideology and politically viable environmental policy.
Yet many question whether the fundamental constraints to genuine environ-
mental sustainability have been addressed simply by reformulating the
means by which development should be pursued. As Hunter (1995: 54)
claims, 'sustainability has been seized upon by the political mainstream as a
convenient concept for ensuring “sustainable” material growth' (Hunter,
1995: 54).
Since the early 1990s, sustainable development has remained high on the
international political agenda, manifested not least in subsequent global sus-
tainable development summits (Rio

20
in 2012). To some, these have been successful in maintaining awareness of
the need for global action to balance environmental and developmental chal-
lenges within a global green economy; to others, the lack of agreed actions and
policies has been a massive failure, the promise of Agenda 21 being increas-
ingly diluted by few if any positive or tangible outcomes from these subseq-
uent summits. Moreover, the failure of other international conferences, such
as the 2012 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, is further evidence of
the difficulty in achieving the apparently increasingly elusive goal of interna-
tional consensus on actions to achieve sustainable development.
Indeed, it is evident that despite the competing interpretations of sus-
tainable development that, over time, have become amalgamated in succes-
sive reports that have accepted, and responded to, the need for global social,
economic and political equity, no satisfactory solution has yet been found
to the fundamental paradox of sustainable development - that is, how
can continued global economic growth and development be achieved with-
out the degradation or destruction of the planet's natural resources upon
which such development and growth depends ? As the next section suggests,
this paradox remains a primary challenge to the notion of sustainable tour-
ism development.

+ 10 in 2002 and, most recently, Rio +

Sustainable Development and Tourism

As already noted, the nascent environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s
was reflected in specific concerns about the environmental consequences of