Approaches to sustainable tourism planning and community participation

Today there is wide acceptance that sustainability is one of the most important issues faced by the tourism industry. This acceptance is reflected in the proliferation of publications attempting to define the principles and practice of ‘sustainable tourism’ and to relate them to the concerns of ‘sustainable development’. The term ‘sustainable tourism’ usually denotes the application of the more general concept of sustainable development to tourism as a specific economic sector. The sustainable development concept was popularised in the late 1980s with the publication of Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987). Given the importance and complexity of the issues, it is inevitable that there are now many different interpretations of what sustainable development is and what it means in the context of tourism.