Abstract
This chapter deals with cultural tourism as the author ponders the following questions: Who benefits from the money that tourism generates? What are the effects of industry on the environment and the local cultures? What are the effects of industry on the environment and the local cultures? Are children and women exploited on the fringes of affluent resorts?
Engelhardt suggests that sustainable tourism can bring improved income and living standards for local people as it revitalises local culture, traditional crafts and customs. He posits two case studies, one from Vietnam and one from Laos, where he argues that all development issues are management issues embedded in a matrix of power at the family, village, tribal, national, regional and global levels.
In closing, Engelhardt suggests three general areas of action to sustain tourism development: the elaboration of guidelines; the undertaking of national inventories; and the development of instructional modules within the formal school system.
Table of Contents
The question of how traditional cultures, in whole or in part, may be mobilised for economic and social development, without culture itself being destroyed in the process continues to be a major concern. After ten years of grappling with this issue during the World Decade for Culture and Development, and four successful years implementing projects to this end within the framework of the Vaka Moana program, our specific task now is to recommend to UNESCO not only how to continue the Vaka Moana program, but how to use experiences here in the Pacific to move the debate on culture and development to the next higher plane of policy, and to expand its application into action which penetrates deeply into our societies and sets an example throughout the world.
As the Director-General of UNESCO frequently reminds us, the twin pillars of UNESCO’s mission—like that of all of the agencies of the United Nations system—are peace-building and development. Tourism is a factor in both. The spectacular rise in travel and tourism is one of the most significant changes in world trade in the second half of the twentieth century, generating more than US$3.5 trillion in gross output a year and providing employment for well over 150 million people. Travel and tourism now account for 10 per cent of all world commerce. And nowhere in the world is tourism bigger business than in Asia and the Pacific. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimates that regional revenues which amounted to US$805 billion in 1995 will grow at an annual rate of nearly 8 per cent over the next decade to reach US$2 trillion by the year 2005.
If UNESCO’s ethical values are to be heard in the debate on sustainable development in the twenty-first century, tourism is one of the key industries where we must take an informed stance. To do so we must analyse the effects of tourism on society critically and evaluate its potential to contribute positively to the development of the cultural life of the world’s communities. The Pacific island nations must find a place at the forefront of this debate, for the small and environmentally fragile countries in this region are some of the most susceptible in the world to both the negative—and positive—effects of tourism.
Tourism is a demand-driven industry inspired by the need of people to experience something different from their daily lives. Tourists travel to new places to see something cultural, historically significant or naturally beautiful, to experience new and alternative ways of perceiving the beauty and the richness of the world, through the eyes of other cultures. In short, they travel to seek, learn and experience the world’s heritage.
On the supply side, the major stimulus for the development of tourism is economic. Tourism is often praised by economic planners as a labour-intensive, undifferentiated-service industry, requiring marginal start-up capital investment. Thus tourism ranks as a favourite development tool in less developed areas of the world with a large, unskilled labour pool. One also often hears that tourism is both ‘environmentally-clean’ and ‘culturally-benign’, fostering communication and understanding among peoples of different cultures, but what is the reality? Can unskilled, uneducated labour really be absorbed into the tourist industry? Who actually profits from the money tourism generates? And, as the numbers of tourists increase exponentially every year, what exactly is their impact on local cultures and the environment? These are questions to which we do not yet have clear-cut answers for the region and which need to be carefully researched.
Tourism has brought a measure—sometimes a great measure—of wealth and economic development, at least to certain areas and to certain individual and business concerns. However, experience in Asia has shown that the rapid and unregulated growth of tourism in recent years has also been responsible for massive environmental destruction; for ruthless land expropriation; and for the exploitation of society’s most vulnerable groups: ethnic minorities and young children who have the misfortune to become embroiled in the sex trade or forced to work as beggars on the fringes of affluent tourist resorts.
Not least among a nation’s assets endangered by indiscriminate tourism are the historic monuments and ancient landscapes of the region’s cultural heritage. These are fragile old structures which have a limited tolerance to the stress caused by visitors, their tour buses and their garbage. A heritage site has zero tolerance for thieves who wish to take home with them a piece of the monument as a souvenir.
Like rainforest, mangroves and coral reefs, the cultural heritage of Asia and the Pacific may be exotic and seductive attractions for both foreign and domestic tourists, but their carrying capacity does have its limits. Unless this limit is respected and visitors to these sites managed carefully, the sites will quickly deteriorate. Their demise will mean not only the loss of some of the most sacred, spectacular, historic and scientifically important places on earth, it will also mean the end of the tourist industry based on these cultural and natural treasures.
It is painfully obvious that the exponential tourism growth of the past four decades cannot continue indefinitely. There are limits to this growth imposed by the absolute carrying capacity of a tourism site. When this limit is reached, the site must either be closed to the public or will be degraded beyond repair. In either case, the site is lost to tourism. In the rush to provide expanded facilities for the rapid increase of mass-marketed tourism, the authenticity and integrity of indigenous traditional culture is all-too-frequently sacrificed. Ironically, it is precisely the authentic traditional culture and customs that tourists, both domestic and foreign, expect to experience when they visit a heritage site.
When there is an attempt by the tourism industry to expand the carrying capacity of the cultural or environmental resources of an area, these efforts typically take the form, not of conservation, but of promotional activities where complex cultural heritage is simplified, homogenised, packaged, and, in the end, trivialised for the quick and easy consumption of the tourist.
I will present two possibly successful models of culturally sustainable tourism development. However, mine is nevertheless a cautionary tale. Tourism presents a viable option for Pacific island states to participate in the global economy, but only if this option is carefully considered and, if taken up, even more carefully regulated.
Discussions on the growth of tourism are always lively, and because they draw points of view from different sectors—archaeological, commercial, anthropological, architectural, even political—these debates have not always resulted in clear or harmonious points of convergence. The battle line is drawn between those who wish for the economic opportunity and development of the area at whatever cost, and those who would preserve or conserve culture and environments in a pristine state.
Tourism and preservation may appear to be strange bedfellows, but with proper management a synergy can be developed. Sustainable tourism can bring improved income and living standards for local people. Tourism can revitalise local culture, especially traditional crafts and customs. It can stimulate the rural economy by creating demand for agricultural produce and, through infrastructure development projects, it can inject capital into rural areas.
Informed and expert tourism also has the potential to play a vital role in the preservation of the cultural heritage of a nation. Maintenance and preservation of cultural heritage can lead to increased awareness of, and pride in, history and civilisation. Tourism can also help preserve and develop national culture by providing a wider patronage for handicrafts and traditional performing arts. UNESCO’s concern therefore is to promote the development of cultural tourism, not as an end unto itself, but as a tool for the preservation and enhancement of a society’s culture, its physical and intangible heritage, and its environment.
This reassessment of the purpose of tourism development may seem to be a radical approach, but it gives an invigorating sense of purpose and direction to sustainable tourism development and to the tourism industry as a whole. It makes good economic sense. If the cultural and environmental resources on which tourism is based are not conserved, the industry cannot be sustained. It is also good public relations strategy for the tourism industry to be seen as pro-culture and pro-environment, which, indeed, it surely must be if it is to survive.
The specific role of UNESCO in this realignment of the tourism industry is to encourage linkages between community development and heritage preservation, through local effort, public-private partnerships and by strengthening, through training, local-level endogenous capacity in heritage preservation and management. In this way we attempt to promote the essential role of culture in development, recognising that cultural traditions and practices provide the most stable basis for sustainable social and economic development.
To make tourism a viable tool for cultural and environmental conservation, several issues will have to be addressed and improved
information for the potential tourist (promotion)
quality (authenticity) of tourism products and sites (interpretation)
conservation and management of sites with respect for a site’s carrying capacity. This will require that the tourism industry cooperate with and work under the guidance of professional conservators
financing, so that the increased needs of the sites in terms of maintenance and presentation which tourism demands are able to be met from the profit revenues of the tourism industry, not from dwindling public funds
endogenous planning, indigenous management, and profit-sharing by the affected local community.