Sustainability: A Barrier to Tourism Development? - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 443

specifically, this inherently divisive characteristic of the sustainable tourism
concept implies that:

• the development of traditional, large-scale tourism cannot contribute

successfully (or sustainably) to broader socio-economic development in
destination areas although, in practice, this is quite evidently not the
case. There are numerous examples, from the Spanish 'Costas' and
Balearic Islands, such as Mallorca, to many Caribbean island destina-
tions, where a large-scale dominant tourism sector has underpinned the
longer-term economic vitality of the country or region.

• localised developments, employing local people and utilising local prod-

ucts (and, by implication, reducing dependency-related consequences
such as excessive leakages, expatriate labour, foreign ownership, profit
repatriation, and so on) brings greater economic benefit to destinations.
However, whilst ignoring commercial realities, the economic benefits of
local, small-scale developments tend, of course, to be both localised and
small. For example, although a recipient of British Airways' 'Tourism for
Tomorrow' awards in 1998, one of the greatest challenges subsequently
facing the Central Region Project in Ghana was considered to be the need
to increase and spread the benefits of tourism beyond the vicinity of the
project (Ampadu-Agyei, 1999).

• tourism-related development occurs only in destinations. However, tour-

ism generating regions also benefit significantly from the production of
outgoing tourism through, for example, regional airports acting as devel-
opmental growth poles. At the same time, tourism has been described as
a 'social victory' (Krippendorf, 1986); the ability of large sectors of the
population in tourism generating countries to benefit from tourism expe-
riences - whether 'sustainable' or mass package - is as much a part of the
developmental process as is the contribution of tourism to destinational
development.

• more generally, the path of sustainable development is the 'best' tourism

development route to follow. However, sustainable development itself is
often criticised for being a Western-centric development paradigm which
maintains the existing, unbalanced world order (Mehmet, 1995). That is,
a number of questions with respect to, for example, equity, freedom of
choice, value judgements about acceptable environmental degradation
and who benefits from development, challenge the global applicability of
sustainable development. The same criticism may also be justifiably
directed at sustainable tourism which can be viewed as a manifestation
of Western hegemony or, a Western construct: 'There is a lot to suggest
that, because the origins of ecotourism lie in Western ideology and
values, and its practice is frequently dominated by Western interests, the
advocacy of ecotourism as a universal template arises from Western hege-
mony' (Cater, 2006: 24). Though she focuses specifically on ecotourism,