Tourism and Sustainable Community Development

Derek Hall, Greg Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134591046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

As the tourist industry becomes increasingly important to communities around the world, the need to develop tourism in a sustainable manner has also become a primary concern. This impressive collection of international case studies addresses this crucial issue by asking what local communities can contribute to sustainable tourism, and what sustainability can offer these local communities in return. The role of the community in environmental, cultural and economic sustainability is highlighted in an extraordinary variety of contexts, ranging from inner-city Edinburgh to rural northern Portugal and the beaches of Indonesia.

Individually, the investigations in this text present a wealth of original research and source material, while collectively, they illuminate and clarify the term 'community' - the meaning of which, it is argued, is vital to understanding how sustainable tourism development can be implemented in practice.

1 The community: a sustainable
concept in tourism development?

Greg Richards and Derek Hall

Introduction

As tourism becomes increasingly important to communities around the world, the need to develop tourism sustainably also becomes a primary concern. Human communities represent both a primary resource upon which tourism depends, and their existence in a particular place at a particular time may be used to justify the development of tourism itself. Communities are a basic reason for tourists to travel, to experience the way of life and material products of different communities. Communities also shape the ‘natural’ landscapes which many tourists consume. Communities are, of course, also the source of tourists; tourists are drawn from particular places and social contexts which in themselves will help shape the context of the tourist’s experience in the host community.

Sustaining the community/particular communities has therefore become an essential element of sustainable tourism. The rationale of sustainable tourism development usually rests on the assurance of renewable economic, social and cultural benefits to the community and its environment. An holistic approach to sustainability requires that the continuing/improved social, cultural and economic well-being of human communities is an integral component of environmental renewal. This is equally applicable within notions of sustainable tourism; without community sustainability, tourism development cannot be expected to be sustainable. For this reason, as Taylor (1995:487) argues, ‘the concept of community involvement in tourism development has moved nearer to the centre of the sustainability debate’.

The concept of developing tourism sustainably for the community is not without its problems, however. While most models of sustainable development include the community as a cornerstone of the development process, the concept of community itself is not unproblematic. Whose community? How defined: in spatial/social/economic terms? Who in the community should benefit from tourism? How should the community be presented to the tourist? The nature of the community itself is also changing. Globalisation and localisation, increasing geographic and social mobility are questioning widely held beliefs about the composition and structure of ‘community’. Who are the ‘locals’ in the local community? Where should one place the spatial or temporal boundaries of the ‘local’ community? The emergence of a ‘global community’ also problematises the concept of a local community. Further, aspatial communities, linked by bonds of common interest not place, exist within and across spatial communities.

The growing complexity of communities and the relationships between them pose significant challenges for the sustainable development of tourism. Local community structures can provide the source of both problems and potential solutions in the sphere of sustainable development. This is the major issue examined from different perspectives in this book.

This introductory chapter addresses the development of the two key concepts dealt with in the book: community and sustainability. The origins and applications of these concepts are analysed to illustrate how their application in tourism development and in the tourism literature has tended to converge in recent years. This is followed by a review of the tensions which have been revealed in local communities as a result of tourism development (or more often unsustainable tourism development), and of the growing literature focusing on the community impacts of tourism.

The changing concept of community

Even in the 1950s, dozens of different interpretations of ‘community’ could be identified (Hillery 1955). John Urry (1995) extended the Bell and Newby (1976) analysis of the concept to include four different uses of the term. First, the idea of community as belonging to a specific topographical location. Second, as defining a particular local social system. Third, in terms of a feeling of ‘communitas’ or togetherness; and fourth as an ideology, often hiding the power relations which inevitably underlie communities. Community as an ideology has certainly permeated the sustainability literature, and there are few sustainable tourism policies which do not refer to the importance of long-term benefits for the ‘community’.

This renewed interest in the community as a basic unit of tourism development, management, planning and marketing can be traced to the changing meaning of the concept of community. Lash and Urry (1994) argue from a postmodernist perspective that having been initially threatened with extinction through modernist rationalisation and disembedding, through the increasing mobility of society and the ‘end of geography’ through global communications, the place-based notion of ‘community’ has actually reemerged as a vehicle for rooting individuals and societies in a climate of economic restructuring and growing social, cultural and political uncertainty. As political, social and economic structures based on the nation state begin to be questioned, so local communities have come to be seen as essential building blocks in the ‘new sociations’ and political alliances of the emerging ‘third sector’.

As well as providing the essential social ‘glue’ between locality and inhabitants, communities are increasingly being seen as providing the essential link between the local and the global. As Saskia Sassen (1991) points out, the global only becomes manifest where it is rooted in the local, because this is where the power relationships and integrations of globalisation are seen and felt, even though they may be formulated elsewhere—in the boardrooms of multinational corporations or at meetings of supranational unions. In this view, local communities are seen as the essential receivers and transmitters of the forces of globalisation. At the same time, however, local communities are the seat of resistance against the threatened homogenisation of globalisation.

As noted above, communities can be aspatial. The concept of ‘community’ has become explicitly disembedded from the local in its application to social, cultural or ethnic groups which may be spread throughout a nation or country, or even across the entire globe. This is a further effect of the detraditionalisation processes of modernity. Pre-modern societies were relatively sedentary, and often rigidly hierarchical, yet multiplex social relationships tended to be contained in a limited geographic area. When given political meaning, ethnic groups, as the accretions of spatialised communities, provided the building blocks for the development of a sense of nationhood. Nations arose often before the imposition of political boundaries, and particularly those of a colonial or imperial nature. With the rise of the nation state, however, out of the ashes of fragmented empires and alliances, there arose a need to reinforce a sense of nationhood which corresponded to the spatial boundaries of the state, essentially consolidating a wider feeling of community which extended beyond the physical boundaries of the local. This gave rise to what Andersson (1987) has termed ‘imagined communities’. The nation state relied on its citizens being able to imagine themselves as members of a single nation, even though their social interaction with other citizens was limited. However, mobility and emigration, going back to at least the Jewish Diaspora, and later colonising activities of powerful states acted to spatially diffuse these imagined communities beyond those of the nation state itself. English, Scots, Irish, Italian, Indian and Chinese Diaspora ‘communities’ were established or transplanted in far-flung corners of the globe. The interaction between these communities and indigenous peoples, with local environments and with each other, evolved a global patchwork of communities which can be viewed as internalising the global—local dialectic.

Such communities thus created have often become prime tourist attractions—distinctive cultures spanning the gulf between the extended imagined community and the local. The Amish in North America or the Chinatowns found in many major cities are examples of such communities which have become tourist attractions in their own right. The mixing of different ethnic cultures which has occurred in the major metropolitan centres has also created a major source of tourist fascination, enabling tourists to encounter the smelting of the primitive, the modern and the postmodern (MacCannell 1993). Some communities are now beginning deliberately to exploit their multicultural nature for tourism, such as the ‘world city Den Haag’ campaign or the ‘Citta del Duomo’ promotion in Utrecht (Burgers 1992).

The fact that tourists may travel to experience such communities—if only at arm’s length, interpreted through a guide or by dint of an evening’s ‘staged authenticity’—has placed renewed emphasis on the relationship between community and locality. Tourists travel partly to consume difference, to see how other societies live. They can also be repulsed from districts regarded as dangerous or hostile because of the nature of the ‘community’ within. There is, however, an assumption that differences can be experienced by travelling to specific locations which are associated with specific communities. The realisation that the community itself has become an object of tourism consumption has in turn encouraged some communities to reproduce themselves specifically for tourists. Through the process of site sacralisation, whole communities can begin to identify themselves with the way in which they are ‘named’ and ‘framed’ as tourist attractions. This in turn creates backstage and frontstage areas in the community, with the tourist gaze being carefully restricted to the ‘staged’ authenticity of the frontstage regions. This staging process is stimulated by tourists demanding ‘authentic’ local cultures which they may associate with a specific location. The whole community has to be reproduced to conform to the image that the tourist has of it. In the process, community relations themselves become commodified. Further, questions of land access and land rights in particular places relating to the residential pre/ proscriptions of, for example, native Americans or Australian aboriginals, raise deeper questions concerning the extent to which tourism can actually assist equitable resource distribution and the upholding of human rights for communities of indigenous peoples who may have been marginalised by an explicitly different colonising society.

Communities are not simply victims of the globalisation process and commodification, however. Communities also become centres of resistance to the processes of modernisation. The homogenised global economic, social and cultural landscape emphasises local differences even more strongly, amid calls for devolution and political autonomy. Regions on the periphery of the global economy are asserting their identity as a means of preserving their cultural identity and developing their socio-economic potential (Ray 1998). This trend towards regionalism is strengthened by the tendency towards ‘neotribalism’ (Maffesoli 1996), which is related to the inherent need for group identity. The resurgence of local identities, perhaps reinforced by political structural change, creates the potential for tourism development, as evidenced by the presentation of Gaelic heritage in Scotland (MacDonald 1997).

The recognition that communities can have some influence over the development of tourism has created a growing stream of literature on community-based tourism and community development in tourism in recent years. Murphy’s (1985) classic review of community tourism formed the basis for many later studies. As Telfer points out in Chapter 16 of this volume, Murphy emphasised the necessity for each community to relate tourism development to local needs. Building on this basic principle, later studies of community-based tourism have gradually broadened the scope of the term to include a wide range of issues, including ecological factors and local participation and democracy.

Although the concept of community has shifted in meaning and application in the tourism field over the years, the recent rediscovery of the ‘local’ and the growing importance of identity have placed ‘community’ at the forefront of discussions about tourism development. In particular, ‘the local community’ has become for many the appropriate context level for the development of sustainable tourism.

Sustainability

The detraditionalisation associated with modernity is also marked by a growing reflexivity both at individual and institutional levels. As Urry (1995) points out, one of the most important consequences of this reflexivity is an increased concern for the environment, and a growing awareness of the links between the local and the global environment. In the shift from an ‘industrial’ to a ‘risk’ society (Beck 1992), the need for development to be ‘sustainable’ becomes paramount. Local communities become not only important in terms of actions taken to preserve their own immediate environment, but also form part of wider alliances to preserve the environment globally (act local, think global). These involve the NGOs and pressure groups which, representing a membership of like-minded environmentally aware people, can themselves be viewed as communities of interest.

Sustainability is important because communities need to support themselves on the basis of available resources. As Jan van der Straaten points out in his study of sustainable tourism development in the Alpine region (Chapter 14), economic necessity is usually the driving force behind the growth of tourism. Without tourists, spatially marginal communities that find it increasingly hard to compete in other spheres with the major metropolitan centres may cease to exist. In this sense, environmental Sustainability is inexorably bound up with concepts of economic, social, cultural and political Sustainability. The ‘principles of sustainable tourism management’ (see Figure 1.1) outlined by Bramwell et al. (1998) indicate the need to involve local communities in the process of sustainable tourism management and development.

Place-based communities have become central to a holistic concept of Sustainability, which embraces and integrates environmental, economic, political, cultural and social considerations. In this way there is an implicit recognition that to be truly sustainable, the preservation of the ‘natural’ environment must be grounded in the communities and societies which exploit and depend upon it. Most natural environments are culturally constructed (Richards 2000), and local communities and economic systems may hold the key to their survival or destruction.

1. The approach sees policy, planning and management as appropriate and, indeed, essential responses to the problems of natural and human resource misuse in tourism.
2. The approach is generally not anti-growth, but it emphasises that there are limitations to growth and that tourism must be managed within these limits.
3. Long-term rather than short-term thinking is necessary.
4. The concerns of sustainable tourism management are not just environmental, but are also economic, social, cultural, political and managerial.
5. The approach emphasises the importance of satisfying human needs and aspirations, which entails a prominent concern for equity and fairness.
6. All stakeholders need to be consulted and empowered in tourism decision-making, and they also need to be informed about sustainable development issues.
7. While sustainable development should be a goal for all policies and actions, putting the ideas of sustainable tourism into practice means recognising that in reality there are often limits to what will be achieved in the short and medium term.
8. An understanding of how market economies operate, of the cultures and management procedures of private-sector businesses and of public- and voluntary-sector organisations, and of the values and attitudes of the public is necessary in order to turn good intentions into practical measures.
9. There are frequently conflicts of interest over the use of resources, which means that in practice trade-offs and compromises may be necessary.
10. The balancing of costs and benefits in decisions on different courses of action must extend to considering how much dif...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• 1. The Community: A Sustainable Concept In Tourism Development?
• Part 1: Community Participation and Identity
• Part 2: Sustainable Tourism and the Community
• Part 3: Developing Community Enterprise
• Part 4: Rural Communities and Tourism Development