sustainable tourism
SUSTAINABLE TOURISM ~ ELIMINATING POVERTY (ST~EP)
INTRODUCTION :
At the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa in August 2002, the World Tourism Organization (WTO), supported by UNCTAD, took a global lead in this field, launching the concept of ‘Sustainable Tourism as an effective tool for Eliminating Poverty’ (ST~EP), and beginning the process of putting a program in place to implement the concept. This initiative linked the longstanding WTO pursuit of Sustainable Tourism with the United Nations leadership on Poverty Alleviation that was the focus of the WSSD in Johannesburg. ST~EP may be seen as a response by the global tourism industry under the leadership of WTO to the United Nations Millennium Development Goal to halve extreme poverty by 2015.
PPT/ST~EP is not a new form of tourism. It is not a new kind of tourism product. It is an approach to tourism in which the tourism cake is tilted so that benefits are specifically directed towards the poor. As a new field of endeavour for development assistance bureaux and international funding agencies there is no established track record on which they can draw to consider implementing their own policies. Hence a major component of the WTO program on ST~EP is to facilitate research and identification of best practice models.
Because tourism is often seen in narrow terms as purely a private sector undertaking, its constellation of backward and forward linkages into all other areas of economic activity, into society and culture, into the environment and into Government, are often ignored. However, once tourism is understood as a complex system its capacity to work as a positive tool for poverty reduction is enhanced. In this context, the role of Government is crucial because without pro-active Government intervention empowerment of impoverished and disadvantaged segments of populations will be difficult to achieve. It is argued that for empowerment to succeed, measures to
INTRODUCTION :
At the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa in August 2002, the World Tourism Organization (WTO), supported by UNCTAD, took a global lead in this field, launching the concept of ‘Sustainable Tourism as an effective tool for Eliminating Poverty’ (ST~EP), and beginning the process of putting a program in place to implement the concept. This initiative linked the longstanding WTO pursuit of Sustainable Tourism with the United Nations leadership on Poverty Alleviation that was the focus of the WSSD in Johannesburg. ST~EP may be seen as a response by the global tourism industry under the leadership of WTO to the United Nations Millennium Development Goal to halve extreme poverty by 2015.
PPT/ST~EP is not a new form of tourism. It is not a new kind of tourism product. It is an approach to tourism in which the tourism cake is tilted so that benefits are specifically directed towards the poor. As a new field of endeavour for development assistance bureaux and international funding agencies there is no established track record on which they can draw to consider implementing their own policies. Hence a major component of the WTO program on ST~EP is to facilitate research and identification of best practice models.
Because tourism is often seen in narrow terms as purely a private sector undertaking, its constellation of backward and forward linkages into all other areas of economic activity, into society and culture, into the environment and into Government, are often ignored. However, once tourism is understood as a complex system its capacity to work as a positive tool for poverty reduction is enhanced. In this context, the role of Government is crucial because without pro-active Government intervention empowerment of impoverished and disadvantaged segments of populations will be difficult to achieve. It is argued that for empowerment to succeed, measures to