Sustainability and Tourism Growth
- Publisher:
- CABI
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Tourism in Development Reflective Essays, 2021, pp. 45-60
- Issue Date:
- 2021-11-20
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An implicit assumption in much of the tourism planning literature is that the market requires increasing economic growth. According to the prevailing pro-growth mindset, more is better, despite the fact that tourism’s obsessive drive for expansion is destroying the very natural and
socio-cultural environments that attract visitation. Indeed, a focus on economic issues has led to the relative neglect of the costs of tourism growth to the socio-cultural fabric of destinations, as well as to the quality of environmental resources that are important attractors of visitation. Tourism planning typically consists of a SWOT analysis, followed by strategies to build on strengths to promote growth, address weaknesses to growth, counter threats to growth, and capitalize on opportunities for growth. Moreover, in the World Travel and Tourism Council’s Blueprint for New Tourism (WTTC, 2003), which purports to address sustainability issues, tourism growth is lauded as an important goal for all destinations. Similarly, an explicit growth ethic also underpins numerous UN World Tourism Organization publications that promote tourism as a driver of economic growth, inclusive development and environmental sustainability (see: http://www2.unwto.org/), as well as the bulk of the
destination competitiveness literature in which better attractions and better management imply greater demand for tourist industry products and services.
Despite this pervasiveness of the ‘growth ethic’ in policy and practice, its appropriateness remains a largely unexamined issue in the tourism research literature (Dwyer, 2018). This is arguably surprising given that markets are social institutions that typically do not produce optimal economic social or environmental outcomes. More specifically, market failures of various kinds mean that actual market outcomes are not efficient. Hence, while acknowledging that tourism growth is often associated with economic benefits to a destination, it is important to note that it can also generate income inequalities, destroy local industries and create greater dependency of developing economies on developed ones, with adverse effects on small business. Local-level negative effects include increased prices of consumer goods and services, increased price of land and housing beyond local affordability, increasing inequality between rich and poor and increasing demands on public services and facilities. At the same time, however, the mounting evidence that economic growth, measured by growth of GDP, does not measure quality of life, social progress, human development or happiness, continues largely to be ignored (Sharpley, 2009; Kubiszewski et
The question is, then: Can these two contrasting dynamics be reconciled? Or, more precisely, can tourism be developed in a way that contributes to economic development, employment and poverty reduction without destroying culture and damaging the environment? Given that significant increases in global tourism growth in the future are forecast, there is considerable urgency to exploring and implementing new sustainability approaches, not least because there is a growing consensus that sustainable tourism is possible only if stakeholders take serious account of the interactions between economic, environmental, social and cultural factors.
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