Chapter 2: 30 Years of Sustainable Tourism Policies: A Reflection on Success and Failure

The term sustainable tourism has been in existence for many years, yet the concept is still lacking universal agreement in terms of definition, a situation reflected in the difficulties encountered in producing, particularly implementing and related policies. The broad range of issues involved with sustainable development makes integrated policy and governance difficult even in the more specific fields such as sustainable tourism. This chapter begins by reviewing the basic elements of sustainable tourism, its links with the parent subject of sustainable development, and the issues involved in applying the ‘triple bottom line’ concept to tourism. It then examines the relationship between policy formulation and application in the context of governance, and the links between governance and power at different levels. While one of the achievements of sustainable tourism has been its widespread acceptance and official adoption of the concept in many countries, regions and communities, this acceptance has not been translated very often into effective action, owing partly to the lack of integration between stakeholders and partly to the multiple viewpoints making up the tourism landscape which rarely achieve unanimity of policy issues. The chapter includes a discussion of case studies at different scales to illustrate the positive and negative results of the implementation of such policies and concludes with a general summation.