Networking Toward Sustainability — Value Added?

Abstract

Since the World Commission gave prominence to the concept of sustainable development in 1987, a variety of interpretations and attempts to implement `sustainability’ have emerged within different sectors of society, tourism among others’. The concept of `sustainable tourism’ has not escaped the fate of being modified and reinterpreted. The term sustainable tourism has come to encompass a set of principles and management methods that chart a path for tourism development such that, within the limits of local economic viability, a destination’s environmental and socio-cultural base are protected for the future (Welford et al., 1999). In general, there has been more rhetoric associated with the concept of sustainable tourism than attempts to make it operational. In order to provide evidence of how the rhetoric gets interpreted and implemented in practice, the present study looks at how actors in the field of tourism see it. To that end, instead of pursuing strict definitions of sustainable tourism, we consider the elements of sustainable development: environment, economy, and social and cultural issues in the context of tourism.