Contemporary Issues in Tourism Development

Richard W. Butler,Douglas G. Pearce

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134623594
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Physical Sciences
• Categoria: Geography

This work combines a study of contemporary issues in tourism development with a close examination of approaches to tourism research. Looking beyond the much-studied mass tourism industries, leading international academics who are members of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism, explore new issues raised by emerging tourist destinations such as Ghana, Samoa, Vietnam and India's Bhyundar Valley.

A fascinating work, Contemporary Issues in Tourism Development discusses a wide range of topics such as:

* reasons for development
* tourism development as a strategy for urban revitalization
* tourism's links to heritage conservation and regional development
* sustainability and the adverse impacts of development
* cultural considerations and community participation
* the importance of context for individual tourism projects.

1
INTRODUCTION

Issues and approaches

Douglas G.Pearce

INTRODUCTION

Throughout the world, tourism continues to develop as a significant social and economic activity. World Tourism Organization figures indicate that receipts from international tourism more than doubled in the decade 1988-97, increasing from US$204 billion to US$444 billion (WTO 1998). International arrivals grew at a slower rate but in absolute terms rose from 394 million in 1988 to 613 million in 1997. Less comprehensive figures are available for domestic tourism. Figures for individual Western countries show experience in the late 1980s and early 1990s varied considerably. In some, such as France, domestic holidays continued to increase; elsewhere (for example, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and New Zealand), signs of stagnation or decline were appearing, in part as a consequence of increased outbound tourism (Pearce 1995). In contrast, domestic tourism was becoming more significant in some developing countries as changing standards of living meant domestic travel was becoming more accessible to a wider cross-section of society.

Much tourism remains geographically concentrated: just over half of the international arrivals (52 per cent) and the receipts (54 per cent) in 1997 were recorded in the ten leading destinations. Countries in Europe and North America are still major sources and destinations for international tourism but in recent years have been joined by others, especially in Asia and the Pacific. Varying rates of growth have been recorded in these and in other regions of the world, such as Africa and South America. Resorts in some of the latter regions have a relatively long tradition of tourism, such as Bariloche in Argentina. In other places, for example parts of Africa or some Pacific islands, tourism is still emerging as a form of development. While numbers there may as yet be relatively insignificant on a global scale, they may be of increasing significance locally. As a consequence of these patterns and processes, tourism is either already widely established as a major sector of national, regional and local economies in many parts of the world or being actively considered or fostered as a development option in many others.

The growth of tourism has been accompanied by a significant increase in research and scholarly activities in this field. Tourism programmes, centres and departments have multiplied on campuses worldwide, tourism conferences have proliferated and new publications on tourism mushroomed. Symptomatic of this trend is the proliferation of new and increasingly specialized tourism journals; those that have appeared in the 1990s include: Journal of Tourism Studies (1990), Estudios y Perspectivas en Turismo (1991), Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing (1991), Journal of Sustainable Tourism (1993), Tourism Economics (1995), Progress in Tourism and Hospitality Research (1995), Journal of International Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism Management (1997), Pacific Tourism Review (1997), Tourism Analysis (1997).

Growth in the amount of research on tourism has not necessarily been matched by a concomitant increase in the quality of research being done in this field. While progress has been made over the last decade, many of the criticisms raised by Dann, Nash and Pearce in 1988 in terms of the degree of methodological sophistication and the lack of a strong theoretical base might still be applied today (Mowforth and Munt 1998). Not only is there a growing need to study tourism further as new issues and problems appear and the increasing magnitude of the sector enlarges its significance—socially, economically, environmentally and politically—but there is also a need to understand the phenomenon better by addressing the quality of the research that is being done and how that might be improved.

These interrelated issues constituted the focus of the fifth biennial meeting of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism held in Melaka, Malaysia, in June 1997 in association with the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism, the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and the State Government of Melaka. The theme of the Melaka meeting, from which this book results, was ‘Tourism development: issues for a new agenda’. The Academy was established in 1988 as a limited-membership, multidisciplinary international body to ‘further the scholarly research and professional investigation of tourism, to encourage the application of the findings, and to advance the international diffusion and exchange of tourism knowledge’. In its focus on contemporary issues in tourism development and ways of addressing these, the Melaka conference built on the four previous meetings of the Academy which had examined:

• alternative forms of tourism (Smith and Eadington 1992);
• methodological and conceptual issues in tourism research (Pearce and Butler 1993);
• change in tourism (Butler and Pearce 1995);
• environmental and community issues in tourism development (Cooper and Wanhill 1997).

In particular, this volume combines a focus on contemporary issues in tourism development with consideration of underlying methodological and theoretical matters.

A volume such as this cannot hope to be comprehensive in its coverage and exhaustive in its treatment; nor does it pretend to be. However, the international and multidisciplinary background of the Academy and of the contributors to this volume enables a range of issues to be addressed from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (geography, sociology, economics, political science, tourism studies) and illustrated with research in a range of geographical settings from Las Vegas and Leuven in the developed world to Vietnam and Ghana in the developing. It is hoped readers will appreciate both the diversity and eclecticism of the collection, which draws attention to a variety of new development and research issues, and also the underlying direction and coherence sought by the conference organizers and editors as a means of enabling broader themes and concerns to emerge from the selected revised papers.

The focus here is not on more familiar, well-established, mass tourism destinations such as the coastal resorts of the Mediterranean or the alpine resorts of Europe (see Montanari and Williams (1995) for a recent review of these). Rather, a feature of this volume is the inclusion of material from parts of the world where tourism is just developing and little research has previously been carried out (e.g. Ghana, Samoa, Vietnam, and India’s Bhyundar Valley) and other regions such as Patagonia which have a longer tradition of tourism but where hitherto there has been little material available in English. Gartner (Chapter 10), for example, demonstrates quite clearly in his analysis of Small Scale Enterprises (SSEs) in Ghana’s Central Region how new issues may arise, both in terms of development and the research which supports it, when attempts are made to develop tourism in a new destination. He finds that classical theories do not deal adequately with SSEs and that to understand local development issues cultural conditions must be injected into the equation. Conversely, Schlüter (Chapter 11) argues that much of what is portrayed in the literature as new in terms of ecotourism has its parallels in much more established forms of tourism in Patagonia. Other contributors adopt a much more explicit methodological or philosophical stance by directly considering the ways in which tourism research is done, how it might be done better and how new, more theoretically based, approaches might be pursued. Dann (Chapter 2), for example, advocates the development of a stronger theoretical base for the study of tourism and outlines ways this might be accomplished while Pearce and Moscardo (Chapter 3), in their analysis of work on tourism community relations, emphasize the need to sharpen up the research focus and to ask the right questions. Jenkins (Chapter 4) directly addresses a range of methodological issues associated with the implementation of tourism development plans and Jansen-Verbeke and Lievois (Chapter 6) outline some of the methodological issues associated with the development of heritage tourism.

To place the individual chapters in context and make more explicit the broader themes which they contain, the next two sections outline two interrelated sets of concerns: contemporary tourism development issues and approaches to research in this field.

ISSUES

A key issue in any discussion of tourism development, one which underlies the patterns outlined in the increase in the WTO figures cited above and one which runs in a variety of ways through the chapters which follow, is why is tourism growing, and why is its development being encouraged? This issue can essentially be addressed from either a demand or a supply-side perspective. Demand or origin studies stress changes in market conditions which affect people’s motivation to travel and the factors which influence their ability to do so, for example increased leisure time and disposable income, improved technology and travel organization (Pearce 1995). Supply-side or destination research, the focus of the contributions in this book, tends to address the benefits that the development of tourism brings or is perceived to bring, to consider what leads both the public and private sectors to foster its growth and how this might best be achieved. The benefits of tourism development have largely been seen in economic terms, as in tourism’s ability to generate income, jobs and corporate profits, bring in foreign exchange, boost tax revenues, diversify the economy and aid regional development. Social and environmental benefits have also been recognized (Pearce 1989). As more traditional sectors of the economy, first agriculture and then manufacturing, have come under pressure regarding their ability to deliver in these terms, so tourism has been increasingly targeted as a potential alternative or complement in an increasingly wide range of settings from the urban to the rural, from developed to developing countries. The different ways in which this occurs is well illustrated by the contributions in this volume.

Increasingly, the development of tourism is being linked to other processes. Jansen-Verbeke and Lievois (Chapter 6) show how tourism development has been identified within the European Union as a strategy for urban revitalization, a strategy which is tied in to other policies promoting heritage conservation in the historic cities of Europe. However, as the authors note, such supply-side policies are only made feasible by the growing interest in such features as a consequence of a broader cultural revival. A similar growth in heritage tourism and in the number of registered historical sites in the United States is recorded by Richter (Chapter 7). This rapidly increasing demand is attributed to a variety of factors including alienation and nostalgia while the development of ever more sites is seen to be a community response to tourism pressure, that is controlling growth in one place by opening alternative sites elsewhere. In a completely different context, Eadington (Chapter 8) outlines how tourism development has been used as one of the key rationales behind the spread of casino gambling over the past decade. Casino gambling, he argues,

has been legalized primarily as a means to achieve other ‘higher purposes’ such as tourism development, partly because the activity itself is considered —especially by policy makers—to be of questionable merit. Justifications are not found in the demand for gambling from the general public, but rather in the economic spinoffs that are thought to occur when gambling is authorized.

Whether or not such spin-offs actually materialize, especially when casinos are opened in urban areas, is more debatable, but the extent to which the tourism growth argument has held perhaps illustrates just how far tourism has come in being recognized as a development strategy. What is clear is that where these links are being made between tourism development and other processes, be they heritage and nature conservation, the legalization of gambling or regional development, sound research is needed to explore the claims being made and where appropriate to contribute to the implementation of the policies in question.

A common theme in the developing country chapters is that while the question of sustainability is recognized and the need to mitigate any adverse social, economic and environmental impacts is acknowledged, ‘the emphasis is laid on development’ (Schlüter, Chapter 11) and ‘that development must and will occur’ (Simpson and Wall, Chapter 14). Issues here thus relate to ways of achieving development while mitigating potential adverse impacts. Son, Pigram and Rugendyke (Chapter 13), for example, discuss the use of national parks as a way of developing nature-based tourism, often advanced as a ‘less predatory and more benign form of tourism’, but note that nature conservation and the encouragement of tourism within national parks do not necessarily or readily go hand in hand and particular attention is needed to balance one function against the other. Schlüter also points out in the case of Patagonia that political and territorial motives may underlie the creation of national parks and the fostering of tourism in frontier regions. Other contributors stress the need to take into account cultural considerations, whether in terms of the organization of public sector involvement in the case of Samoa (Pearce, Chapter 9), encouraging private sector initiatives in Ghana (Gartner, Chapter 10) or community participation in the Bhyundar Valley in the Himalayas (Singh and Singh, Chapter 12).

In stressing that cultural and environmental considerations should be taken into account, the developing country chapters also draw attention to the need to consider processes of tourism development and the way in which different forms of tourism generate different levels and types of impact (Pearce 1989, 1992a). This point is addressed in general terms by Simpson and Wall in Chapter 14 and elaborated on by other contributors in the context of their study areas. Schlüter discusses how many development models in South America have frequently been imported and imposed and makes a case for more localized responses. Increasing local participation is generally seen as being desirable and ways of analysing and fostering this are outlined in various developing world settings in the chapters dealing with Samoa, Ghana, Vietnam and the Bhyundar Valley.

As noted above, knowledge of the potential or actual impacts generated is a key factor in decisions as to what forms of development are appropriate and how much tourism is desirable. Pearce and Moscardo demonstrate in Chapter 3 that although the assessment of tourism impacts is a large and well-established mainstream component of the literature there is still considerable scope to refine assessment techniques, and they argue that this might best be achieved by developing a sounder theoretical approach to the problem. In their complementary examination of actual practice in Indonesia, Simpson and Wall highlight not only the need for appropriate Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedures for tourism development projects to be formulated but also that these should be subsequently implemented in a timely and effective manner if they are to have any influence on subsequent outcomes. Their case study in North Sulawesi reveals a considerable gap between theory and practice. Kim (Chapter 15) tackles a novel issue by assessing the impacts of Korean tourists on Korean nationals engaged in tourism operations in two international destinations, Hawaii and Queensland, thereby adding a new dimension to the analysis of the globalization of tourism development.

Finally, many of the contributors point to the need to take more account of the context of tourism development. While common features may be identified in terms of processes and impacts, crucial differences are also to be found from one place to another. Successful tourism development, it is argued, will depend on a full appreciation of contextual factors and the way in which these are incorporated into the development process. This general point is well made by Butler (Chapter 5) in his systematic overview of the problems and issues of integrating tourism development. Butler adopts a broad meaning of integration, namely:

We can regard integrated planning and development as meaning the process of introducing tourism into an area in a manner in which it mixes with existing elements. It is implicit in such an understand ing that this introduction and mixing is done in an appropriate and harmonious way, such that the end result is an acceptable and functionally successful community, in both ecological and human terms.

Desirable as such a development process may be, it is not one which is without its difficulties, as he then goes on to discuss.

Eadington too underlines the importance of contextual factors, observing that while Las Vegas is frequently portrayed as the exemplar of tourism and gambling in the United States, because of its unique circumstances it ‘has set a somewhat unattainable ideal’ for other jurisdictions. He also shows how the ratio of benefits to costs steadily declines as one moves across a continuum for casinos or casino-style gaming from resorts to neighbourhood locations or even the home.

Pearce and Singh and Singh caution against the use of a single or narrow range of development models. Pearce reiterates an earlier finding (Pearce 1992b:200) that ‘There is no single best type of [tourist] organization nor int...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical Issues for Tourism’s Future Development
• 3 Tourism Community Analysis
• 4 Tourism Academics and Tourism Practitioners
• 5 Problems and Issues of Integrating Tourism Development
• 6 Analysing Heritage Resources for Urban Tourism in European Cities
• 7 The Politics of Heritage Tourism Development
• 8 The Spread of Casinos and Their Role in Tourism Development
• 9 Tourism Development and National Tourist Organizations in Small Developing Countries
• 10 Small Scale Enterprises in the Tourism Industry in Ghana’s Central Region
• 11 Sustainable Tourism Development in South America
• 12 Tourism and the Himalayan Tribes
• 13 Tourism Development and National Parks in the Developing World
• 14 Environmental Impact Assessment for Tourism
• 15 Impact of Korean Tourists on Korean Residents in Hawaii and Queensland, Australia