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development'. That is, there is a need to move beyond the rhetoric of sustain-
able tourism development as a dominant and prescriptive 'meta-policy' for
tourism and to explore alternative and potentially more effective means of
addressing the specific developmental needs of individual destinations
through tourism.
The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to consider the extent to which
the concept of sustainable tourism is an overly prescriptive and restrictive
approach to tourism development, in effect acting as a barrier to develop-
ment. In so doing, it does not seek to write off sustainable tourism (or the
broader concept of sustainable development) as unworkable or inappropri-
ate. Indeed, from a variety of viewpoints, such as environmental, business,
ethical and so on, both the production and consumption of tourism can and
does benefit in a general sense from the adoption of the inherent principles
of sustainable development. At the same time, the sustainability of all
human activities, including tourism, requires the maintenance of the 'source
and sink' functions of the global ecosystem and, thus, environmental sus-
tainability remains a prerequisite of tourism development. Nevertheless, as
this chapter argues, the notion of sustainable tourism suffers from a theo-
retical fragility that not only calls into question its universal applicability -
as one commentator has suggested, 'it will be difficult to come up with
useful principles for tourism development which are true for all places and
all times' (Wall, 1997: 47) - but which also has led to a specific focus on
tourism resource conservation and protection. As a result, traditional, large-
scale tourism developments, which for some destinations remain the most
effective means of achieving desired developmental outcomes, have come to
be discredited.
Tourism, Development and Sustainability
As considered in Chapter 2, the concept of sustainable tourism develop-
ment had, by the mid-1990s 'achieved virtual global endorsement as the
new [tourism] industry paradigm' (Godfrey, 1996: 60). Since then, it has
maintained this position. At the international, national, local and industry
sectoral levels, a plethora of policy documents, planning guidelines, state-
ments of 'good practice', case studies, codes of conduct for tourists and other
publications have been and continue to be produced, all broadly concerned
with the issue of sustainable tourism development. Moreover, the concept
of sustainable tourism continues to enjoy recognition and support in global
development policy circles. For example, the World Summit on Sustainable
Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg in 2002 ('Rio
10', following
on from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992), called for the promo-
tion of 'sustainable tourism development . . . in order to increase the benefits
from tourism resources for the population in host communities whilst
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