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reflecting, to a great extent, the ambiguity of both its inherent processes
and its objectives. This may, of course, represent one of the strengths of
the concept. As one commentator notes, the parental paradigm of sustain-
able development:
struck a middle ground between more radical approaches which
denounced all development, and the idea of development conceived as
business as usual. The idea of Sustainable Development, although broad,
loose and tinged with lots of ambiguity around its edges, turned out to
be palatable to everybody. This may have been its greatest virtue: it is
radical yet not offensive. (Skolimowski, 1995)
The same may be said about its tourism offspring, sustainable tourism devel-
opment. Its vague, ambiguous yet politically attractive principles and aims
can be variously interpreted and appropriated to suit the needs of different
organisations or interest groups and, as a result, it has become a catch-all
phrase; 'to some . . . [it is] all about new products or market segments, to
others, it is a process of development, while still to others it represents a
guiding principle to which all tourism should aspire' (Godfrey, 1996: 61). On
the one hand, this universality may be considered beneficial in that it encour-
ages environmental awareness, in some form or another, throughout the
tourism system. On the other hand, however, it also enables the misappro-
priation of the concept, hence the argument that sustainable tourism devel-
opment represents little more than a convenient, attractive 'green' mantle
behind which the tourism industry has been able to hide.
What is certain is the fact that, as a consequence of its ambiguity, sus-
tainable tourism development defies precise definition. Nevertheless, much
of the literature remains concerned with definitional, as opposed to opera-
tional, issues, to the extent that 'defining sustainable development in the
context of tourism has become something of a cottage industry' (Garrod &
Fyall, 1998). Such definitions fall primarily into two broad categories, namely
'tourism-centric' definitions (Hunter, 1995), which focus upon the envir-
onmental sustainability of tourism as a specific economic activity, and those
which view tourism as an integral element of wider sustainable development
policies. At the same time, sustainable tourism development has also been
referred to as an 'adaptive paradigm', or a set of meta-principles within which
'several different development pathways may be legitimised according to cir-
cumstance' (Hunter, 1997). Whilst this particular conceptualisation is
undoubtedly attractive, however, it also neatly sidesteps the need for a con-
cise definition, thereby failing to provide a yardstick against which the via-
bility of the concept may be measured.
It is not the purpose here to review the extensive literature on the 'sus-
tainable tourism debate' (see, for example Butler, 1999a; France, 1997;
Murphy & Price, 2005; Priestly
et al.
, 1996; Ruhanen, 2008; Stabler, 1997),
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