Ecotourism and commodification: protecting people and places

Abstract

The ability of ecotourism to protect both people and places is an unresolved, and growing, concern. Commodification of host culture and environment is a widely reported social impact of tourism and spawns an array of implications regarding indigenous people's view of their places and themselves. The degree of impact from ecotourism development is related to the degree of market development within the indigenous community and their state of decline regarding natural resource scarcity. Pre-existing power differentials between local people and other groups may be exacerbated by ecotourism development. To protect both people and their places, native people's claim to control should be legitimized by conservation and government authorities, particularly indigenous people's role in technical management of the protected area. Regional and national government controls are relevant at the inception of ecotourism development, but ultimately should be reduced to one of infrastructure planning and coordination.

The role of ecotourism in conservation: panacea or Pandora’s box?

“…It generates much needed foreign currency, both locally and nationally, while at the same time providing a strong incentive to manage nature's strongholds in a way that would conserve them. Consequently, ecotourism is seen almost as a panacea for the protection of nature by some authors (e.g., Stiles and Clark 1989;Place 1991;Ruschmann 1992;Burnie 1994;Gurung and De Coursey 1994;Gossling 1999), whereas other authors argue that tourism of any kind is always a threat to protected areas (Wheeller 1992;Cater 1994a,b;King and Stewart 1996;Wall 1997), or that the revenues created by ecotourism are too small to support conservation on a larger scale (Durbin and Ratrimoarisaona 1996), or that ecotourism and conservation can only be antagonistic (Boyle and Sampson 1985;Isaacs 2000). This debate is exacerbated by the fact that the term ecotourism still lacks an agreed definition (Boo 1990;Goodwin 1996;Wearing and Neil 1999), that sustainability is also an ambiguous term which is very difficult to measure objectively (Wearing and Neil 1999), and that sometimes ideology alters the perception of facts (e.g., Vivanco 2001).…”

Environmental Responsibility and Business Regulation: The Case of Sustainable Tourism

“…For example, work on ecotourism or the 'othering' and commodification or remote landscapes and people has been claimed to lead to the stereotypical presentation of such places according to the wishes of tourists rather than what may create equitable development (Silver, 1993;Hughes, 1995;King and Steward, 1996). As such, this indicates that allowing market interest to define business responses to sustainable tourism may not result in the development or environmental management defined by campaigning organisations like Tourism Concern.…”

Role of Ecotourism in Sustainable Development

“…Ecotourism is rooted in the concept of sustainable development, as defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development's Brundtland report (1987) (Place, 1995;King & Stewart, 1992;McMinn, 1997;Stem et al, 2003). According to the emergence of sustainable tourism development it is proven that the milestone for its emergence was the Brundtland Report by the WCED in the year 1987.…”