Sustainability: A Barrier to Tourism Development? - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 428

15 Sustainability: A Barrier to

Tourism Development?

Richard Sharpley

Introduction

As has been emphasised throughout this topic, since international tour-
ism first emerged as a major socio-economic phenomenon in the 1960s it has
been almost universally adopted as a vehicle of development. Few, if any,
countries do not now seek to attract tourists and, for most, tourism repre-
sents an integral element of their development policies. In some cases it may
be the dominant economic sector, particularly in less developed countries or
island economies, and is thus depended upon as the primary engine of eco-
nomic growth and potential social development. In other cases, more com-
monly in the modern, industrialised world, tourism principally contributes
to economic diversification and regeneration and, hence, is less fundamental
to the broader development process. Nevertheless, irrespective of its role and
importance, it is difficult to identify any nation that has not, to a greater or
lesser extent, embraced tourism within its development policies. Even the
oil-rich emirate of Abu Dhabi, with more oil reserves per hectare than any-
where else on earth, has for a number of years favoured the development of
tourism as the basis for encouraging economic stability in the face of oil-price
volatility (Camble, 1999; Davidson, 2009; Sharpley, 2002).
However, it is not only for the extent to which it has been positively
adopted as a development policy that tourism is remarkable. The rapid
growth in tourism over the last half century has also been mirrored by an
almost equally rapid increase in the number of commentators drawing atten-
tion to the potentially negative or destructive consequences of tourism devel-
opment. Initially, concerns were voiced by the 'Limits to Growth' school who,
reflecting the then contemporary criticism of unbridled economic growth
(Andersen, 1991; Schumacher, 1974), called for restraint in the development
of tourism (Mishan, 1969; Young, 1973). More specific studies of tourism's
consequences followed in the late 1970s and early 1980s (de Kadt, 1979b;

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