The meaning of sustainable tourism is highly complex. This is the introduction to the book 'Turismo sostenibile, retorica e pratiche' where we attempt to define all the terms of sustainability as applied to tourism, making clear that all tourist activities must be conceived in terms of sustainability.
The discourse on sustainability and sustainable development has roots that we can describe as decades old, beginning in the 1970s, starting from 1972, the date of the first United Nations World Conference convened in Stockholm on the relationship between the environment and development, through to the 1990s, when the Rio de Janeiro Conference addressed a number of important and still relevant issues such as the abuse of fossil fuels considered responsible for global climate change, the possibility of producing energy through renewable sources, the growing scarcity of water, vehicle emissions, congestion in large cities and the health problems caused by smog.
An important outcome of that conference was precisely the agreement on the framework convention on climate change, which in turn led, some years later, to the drafting of the Kyoto Protocol (cf. IPCC Protocol, COP 3 – 1997).
Alongside the discourse on sustainable development, that on sustainable tourism has also intensified.
As set out in Agenda 21, within the travel sector, sustainable tourism rests on three important pillars:
These three concepts, when integrated with one another, represent the solution to those forms of tourism that embody the major negative impacts that traditional tourism has on the environment.
Subsequently, other important steps forward were taken in the world of tourism; beginning in 1995, when in Lanzarote the Charter for Sustainable Tourism was established, where the basic principles of sustainable development were specified, with priorities and objectives that refined the definition set out in the Brundtland Report (Morandi, Niccolini, Marzo, Sargolini, Tola, 2010).
Today sustainable tourism is discussed at every level — in academic circles, among operators, and also in the context of those who formulate tourism policy — owing to the extraordinary global growth in the number of people on the move, which for the first time around the turn of the first decade of the new century exceeded one billion per year.
The need to practise "sustainable tourism" is expressed clearly even in the final documents of Rio+20, "The Future We Want". Far less clear, however, is the meaning attributed to this concept in the various contexts in which it is used.
The sustainability of tourism-related activities is indeed, in the literature, quite difficult to define (Murphy, 1994; Coccossis, Nijkamp, 1995; Swarbrooke, 1999), and the very meaning of sustainable tourism, even if it appears obvious on the surface, is in substance highly complex. At times, the tendency is to speak of sustainable tourism to refer to tourist practices that stand in opposition to so-called mass tourism (slow tourism, soft tourism, responsible tourism, ecotourism, etc.).
In a broader and substantially more accurate sense, sustainability is instead discussed with reference to the entire tourism sector. Even in this case, however, there is a tendency to emphasise how the expression can be used in differentiated ways — to speak of economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, social and cultural sustainability, or tourism sustainability.
In the last case, tourist practices would be sustainable if they do not prevent, or at any rate do not inhibit or alter, the future tourism potential of the destination.
Under this interpretation, sustainable tourism would not be a type of tourism, but the only way of doing tourism, without destroying the natural, cultural and social premises on which the attractiveness of destinations is founded.
In order to have a clear point of reference, it is worth taking as a guiding parameter the description through which the World Tourism Organisation (Unwto) expresses this concept: "Sustainable tourism development meets the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunities for the future. It is envisaged as leading to management of all resources in such a way that economic, social and aesthetic needs can be fulfilled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity and life support systems."
This essentially entails the implementation of sustainable management and development solutions that carry with them respect for basic principles, such as the precautionary principle, the need to meet the needs of the current generation without compromising those of future generations, and a sense of responsibility for the protection of the environment and natural resources for present and future generations. One must also not forget respect for cultural integrity, and the implementation of the basic conditions — that is, the cultural and social dimensions of sustainability.
Beyond this simple logic, however, the discourse on sustainable tourism becomes entangled within various rhetorical frameworks.
First of all, there is a certain confusion that leads to an overlapping of the idea of sustainability with that of nature, as if a "nature-based" form of tourism, or a tourist activity within a park, were necessarily sustainable. As can be seen in the volume, which presents the data from the IPR-Univerde research on Italians and sustainable tourism, if on the one hand there is a growing awareness of the need to manage tourism in a sustainable way, on the other there remains a degree of uncertainty regarding sustainable practices and the meaning to be attributed to the very idea of sustainability.
Often not only citizens but operators themselves conflate the concept with that of ecotourism or even with that of "nature based tourism" (roughly translatable as naturalistic tourism or nature tourism). It is, however, evident that "nature based" tourism — that is, tourism based on the attractiveness of natural and protected areas — may also not be sustainable (one need only think of the intrusive presence in sensitive areas or fragile environments, where a subjective passion for nature could nonetheless cause even irreversible damage).
A genuine ecotourism, if consistent with the Quebec City Declaration, should instead be sustainable in any case, even if it can hardly be, like all human activities, zero-impact.
Here too, then, one must look beyond appearances and the obvious.
If not all alternative tourism is necessarily sustainable — indeed, even if it is difficult to find forms of tourism that present themselves as genuinely alternative (Rabbiosi and Pecorelli) — not all luxury tourism is unsustainable. As Marco Luppis demonstrates in his chapter of the book, quite the opposite is true. The offering of "exclusive" products and destinations not only makes it possible to apply sustainable tourism management practices, but also to trial approaches that can subsequently be put to use in higher-impact contexts as well.
In the volume I edited, Turismo sostenibile. Retoriche e pratiche (Aracne, Rome 2016), it is made clear — for instance by the contribution of Jarkko Saarinen — that in reality the various approaches to tourism sustainability are not in conflict with one another.
No form of tourism can indeed be sustainable in a tourist sense unless it is first and foremost sustainable from an environmental point of view (who would ever want to visit a degraded place, a barren park, a concrete-covered coastline?), but also from a social point of view (poverty and exploitation should not constitute factors of tourist attraction, nor should gender inequality), and from a cultural point of view (the sense of place and the distinctiveness of traditions — whether local or hybrid matters little — are in fact an indispensable characteristic of different destinations).
Built on the sale of experiences and tied to the quality of the place in which it develops, the tourism sector rests essentially on the beauty of landscapes, on cultural heritage, on services and commercial activities, and it is hard to imagine a destination maintaining high quality, and therefore appeal.
Those in the most delicate and fragile areas must meet even more stringent criteria. For this reason, it is appropriate to consider promotional approaches that foster, beyond simple marketing, knowledge of the territory, including through the web, as Mirko Etzi demonstrates in his chapter — even though, as with all green actions, one must be able to distinguish genuine practices aimed at increasing sustainability from those greenwashing actions that often hide behind easy marketing moves and labels that wink at the "green" sensibility of the consumer (Hall).
For tourism to remain a valid economic opportunity — and therefore to remain sustainable as a tourist practice that does not erase the attractive potential of destinations — tourism must be sustainable in every sense: environmental, cultural and social, even if among the practices for sustainability, different governance models are triggered (Corinto).
For this reason, it is necessary to manage destinations in a sustainable way, to see their potential and their traditions. We must learn to recognise the specificities of our own context, to recognise, if we operate in Italy, that Italy is a single "diffuse museum", as Ottavia Ricci emphasises in her chapter, that every Italian park is made up of nature and traditions, of different productive and settlement models, of borghi and small towns.
We must learn to look at our own landscape and, through the landscape, at our own territory, which will thus be enhanced and made more beautiful even in the eyes of the visitor who comes from outside, in the eyes of the "tourist", as suggested by Elena dell'Agnese in her contribution on ecomuseums.
Faced with a phenomenon that is much discussed yet where there is little correspondence between words and the effectiveness of actions — or, to put it better, between rhetoric and practices — the need arose to edit this volume, where, alongside the more theoretical chapters already mentioned, a number of case studies are also presented that touch on the theme of sustainability (Bagnoli and Capurro, Moralli and Vietti) within different practices such as religious tourism and intercultural tourism.
I would like to thank Elena dell'Agnese and Mirko Etzi for the advice and support they provided me during the making of this work.