The Ethics of Tourism Development

Rosaleen Duffy, Mick Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415266864
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134500116
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Drawing upon a variety of important philosophical traditions, this book develops an original perspective on the relations between ethical, economic and aesthetic values in a tourism context. It considers the ethical/political issues arising in many areas of tourism development, including:

• the profound cultural and environmental impacts on tourist destinations
• the reciprocity (or lack of) in host-guest relations
• the (un)fair distribution of benefits and revenues
• the moral implications of issues such as sex tourism, staged authenticity and travel to oppressive regimes.

The book concludes with a detailed investigation of the potential and pitfalls of ecotourism, sustainable tourism and community-based tourism, as examples of what is sometimes termed 'ethical tourism.'

Until now, the ethical issues that surround tourism development have received little academic attention. Explaining philosophical arguments without the use of excessive jargon, this fascinating book interweaves theory and practice, aided by the use of text boxes to explain key terms in ethics, politics, and tourism development, and drawing on contemporary case studies from South Africa, Mexico, Zambia, Honduras, Ethiopia and Madagascar.

1	Ethical values

As we enter the twenty-first century, even the highest and least hospitable spot in the world, the top of Mount Everest, has become something of a tourist destination. Interested parties can pay up to US$65,000 to one of several competing commercial companies in an attempt to get their name in the roll call of those who have reached its summit. In the spring of 1996 no fewer than thirty expeditions jostled for position at the base of the mountain, and on one day alone some forty climbers actually managed to reach the top. Yet as Joe Simpson argues in Dark Shadows Falling, this commercialization of the ultimate mountaineering experience has not removed its dangers and not come without a cost. By 1997 150 had died in the attempt, including fifty sherpas. The upper slopes of Everest have become littered with frozen bodies, old oxygen tanks and the unsightly clutter of numerous expeditions. There are even accounts of how, in their desperation to reach the summit, climbers have simply walked past still-dying members of previous expeditions, making no attempt to help them down or even just to stay with them in their last moments. One such climber was quoted as saying, ‘above eight thousand metres is not a place where people can afford morality’ (Shigekawa in Simpson, 1997: 48). Simpson disagrees:

I find it unforgivable that climbers can treat their fellow mountaineers with such callous disregard. It has nothing to do with whether or not rescue appears to be possible but everything to do with being humane, caring individuals who can see the passing of a life for what it is, and not simply an inconvenient obstacle to realising egoistic ambitions…. If climbers ‘cannot afford morality’, and ethical behaviour becomes too expensive, then has the sport become prostituted?

(1997: 198, 200)

These are extreme examples from an extreme environment, but they raise pertinent points for any account of tourism development. Is tourism all about the egoistic satisfaction of those paying for the privilege or should ethics play a part? What does it mean to say that a certain way of behaving, or a particular kind of tourism development, is wrong? Can the tourism industry ‘afford’ morality?

There are no easy answers to such questions. Yet despite the frequency of our everyday use of ethical terms to describe certain states of affairs as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘evil’, ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, and so on, such evaluations often seem to carry little weight with key decision makers. This ethical ‘deficit’ often seems to be a feature of many areas of modern society such as public policy, scientific research or business developments. Some people even doubt the applicability of ethics to such areas at all. They claim that public policy is purely a matter of political pragmatism, that scientific research is objective and value free and should remain unfettered by ethical considerations, and that the role of business is simply to make bigger profits. Although it is unusual to hear these views expressed quite so strongly, there is certainly a spectrum of opinion about the importance and relevance of ethical values. So before we can even begin to discuss theories of ‘virtue’, ‘rights’, ‘justice’, and so on, and try to understand their implications for tourism development, we need to address those who are sceptical about ethics’ importance, who doubt its claims or deny its relevance. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is by trying to compare and contrast ethical with other kinds of values.

Ethical, economic and aesthetic values

The playwright Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as someone ‘who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. As usual, Wilde’s (cynical) witticism is much more than mere word-play; its humour stems from its accuracy as a form of social commentary. It often seems that the modern world is dominated by economic concerns to the exclusion of all other values. When it comes to deciding a course of action, ‘money talks’, and profit is frequently the ‘bottom line’. Financial matters dominate every aspect of our lives; we must work to earn money and we need money to afford the time off work to ‘play’. Given its central role in our everyday lives, it is easy to forget that ‘money isn’t everything’, that there have been numerous societies that have existed entirely without a cash economy, and that, as Wilde suggests, there may be values in our own society that simply cannot be accounted for monetarily.

Of course, the fact that we can account for economic values, that we can price things, is one of the reasons that economic values have assumed their current importance. Although we recognize that in one sense money is only symbolic – its value depends on a kind of social agreement to treat it as something of value (if you don’t believe this, try spending Albanian leks or Algerian dinars in an Edinburgh supermarket) – money does serve to make economic values tangible. In Simmel’s (1990: 172) words, ‘money is entirely a sociological phenomenon, a form of human interaction’. Every day we grasp the paper, coins and plastic that represent our financial clout in our hands, we exchange quantifiable amounts of cash for items that we can eat, sleep on or drive. Through its function as a means of exchange of diverse forms of goods, from food to furniture, and cleaning services to cars, money becomes that currency which connects together every aspect of the production and consumption of goods in contemporary society. Despite – indeed, because of – the fact that money provides a very abstract measure of something’s economic value, it also seems to provide us with a very concrete way of expressing that thing’s value as hard currency, as being worth so many dollars, yen or pounds.

Given money’s flexibility and its apparently unlimited ability to encapsulate the value of so many different things, it is understandable that modern society tends to put a price on everything, to turn everything into the form of a commodity that, at least potentially, might be bought or sold. By comparison, the kind of values to which Wilde refers, the values that he claims are excluded from or beyond price, seem extremely intangible. They are not easily quantifiable – if indeed they are quantifiable at all. How do we go about measuring the amount of love we feel for someone or how much we care for our parents or our pets? How can we quantify the beauty of a sunset? These kind of ethical and aesthetic values seem to be quite different from economic values; they have little to do with exchanging (consumer) goods but concern themselves with ‘goods’ of a different kind, such as with living an ‘ethically’ good life or painting an ‘aesthetically’ good painting.

In other words, we seem to have at least three different ways of valuing things, and each form of evaluation uses quite different criteria. Roughly speaking, economics (from the ancient Greek word oikos, meaning pertaining to the household) concerns itself with valuing those material things we produce and consume in everyday life. Aesthetics (again from an ancient Greek word, aestheta, meaning pertaining to the senses or matters of taste) concerns itself with appreciating and passing judgement about a thing’s beauty. Ethics (from the Greek ethika) concerns itself with evaluating the moral worth of a thing, an action or a person. The point that Wilde’s remark makes so forcibly is that merely knowing something’s economic value tells us nothing about, and may even detract from knowledge about, what he regards as these other, far more fundamental forms of evaluation.

We hope that the examples of tourism, many in the developing world (or the ‘South’), that we look at in this book will assist us in examining the complex interrelationship between ethical, aesthetic and economic values. Later chapters will examine debates about how economics and material values affect tourism policies from the perspective of the various interest groups involved. We will return to the role that aesthetics plays in determining the ways that tourists view the landscapes, cultures and histories that they gaze upon. Most importantly, we will analyze the moral values that are a central focus of some of the locally organized and managed sustainable tourism projects in the developing world.

We could, of course, differentiate many more than these three kinds of value, and these different forms of value are not always entirely separate or separable. For example, there are ‘religious values’ which in some cases can overlap with and even underpin certain ethical values. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand the moral values espoused within, say, a catholic community or those embodied in the classical Hindu caste system without some knowledge of their respective religious beliefs. Knowledge and respect for such values is a vital part of any responsible tourism. For example, Gehrels (1997) recounts the case of tourists’ negative impacts on the nomadic Himba group of north-western Namibia. ‘In the past many tourists carelessly or unwittingly violated the Himba’s sacred sites, crossing “spirit lines” and driving across old Himba encampments for example.’ Such problems created severe tensions that have only been averted as the Himba have regained some control over tourism on their lands. We might also recognize what could be termed ‘epistemic’ values, those concerned with the quality and value of the knowledge we have. We do, after all, usually value the truth quite highly. But for our present purposes we will avoid these complications and suggest that we might picture economics, ethics and aesthetics in terms of three distinct but overlapping value spheres (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Spheres of values

This model obviously oversimplifies matters, but it is useful to begin by teasing these different kinds of values apart, not least because this book primarily concerns itself with only one of these value spheres, that of ethics. As we shall see, this does not mean that we will treat ethics in isolation from economic, aesthetic or indeed any other aspects of society. To do so would in any case be impossible in the context of tourism development since economic and aesthetic values interact with ethical values in very complex ways. But it is precisely for this reason that we need to establish an understanding about the scope and nature of the differences between ethical, aesthetic and economic values.

Perhaps we can best illustrate these issues in relation to a particular example of a specific case of tourism development. In the 1950s many of those regions of the Spanish Mediterranean coast now so familiar as package holiday resorts were relatively undeveloped. Life in the more remote villages that dotted the coast went on much as it had for generations. The travel writer Norman Lewis (1984), who returned to one such village he called Farol over a period of several years, described how traditional village life revolved around seasonal fishing for sardines and tunny, the calendar of church festivals, and respect for the authority of the village alcalde, or mayor. But the arrival of tourists, primarily from Northern Europe, began a process of development that was to completely change such villages in a matter of a few short years.

It is worth examining Lewis’s account of the changes he witnessed taking place, because they exemplify what Young (1983) refers to as the ‘touristization’ of the traditional Mediterranean fishing village and are typical of many of the value issues raised by tourism development in general. Lewis describes how a local ‘entrepreneur’ whom he calls Muga first bought up the decaying local mansions, one of which he converted into a hotel, covering it with imported tiles and festooning it with fairy lights. He then rapidly began preparing the way for tourism, building an incongruous Moorish-style café, removing all the messy apparel of the fishermen’s daily activities from the waterfront so as to sanitize the tourists’ view, and building a new road made of concrete and covered with ‘sackloads of imitation marble chippings of many clashing colours’ (Lewis, 1984: 153). Thus Farol, Lewis says,

began its slow loss of identity, Muga went from strength to strength, busied with his plans for the coming of the tourists, determined to create for them here a Spanish dreamland, a gimcrack Carmen setting in which the realities of poverty and work were tolerable so long as they remained picturesque.

(1984: 152–153)

Having first employed villagers to work as cleaners and cooks in his hotel, Muga next tried to persuade the fishermen to work for him, running tourist boat-trips. The fishermen, Muga argued, usually made only thirty-five pesetas for a day’s work.

‘For this’, Muga said, ‘you put in eight hours’ hard work, two hours to put the nets down, two hours to take them up, and four to get the fish out of the nets and box them up. I don’t want to talk about all of the time that goes into mending the nets, especially when the dolphins have been at them. At Palamos they take tourists for a two-or three-hour boat trip, and they’re paid 1,000 pesetas. Quite a difference isn’t there? … This is your chance,’ he said. ‘You can charge 1,000 pesetas for taking a party to one of the beaches. Why bother about sardines? Why bother about tunny?’ The fishermen’s expressions made it clear they were horrified, that Muga’s proposal seemed to them immoral, almost indecent…. What Muga now suggested, they complained, was an affront not only to them, but to the sea. They were gente honrada [honorable people], not tourist touts or pimps.

(Lewis, 1984: 155)

Although Lewis’s account may be somewhat embellished for dramatic effect, innumerable academic studies from many parts of the world have highlighted exactly the same kind of issues in relation to tourism development in traditional societies (Mansperger, 1995; see also Abbink 2000; Butler and Hinch, 1996; Price, 1996). The changes that occurred in Farol raise matters that relate directly to differences in aesthetic, ethical and economic values between those proposing the tourism development and those wishing to retain at least something of their more traditional ways of life. Lewis cites numerous examples of differences in aesthetic values between Muga, who is trying to make the village conform to tourists’ expectations, and the villagers themselves. These include the cafés’ and hotels’ design, which confounds local tastes by introducing new and quite alien architectural elements; the ‘prettification’ of the seafront; and the new road covered in multicolour chippings that Lewis’s neighbour says makes him ‘have the feeling of having eaten something I cannot digest’ (Lewis, 1984: 153).

The economic values Muga espouses could not be expressed more clearly. There are tangible economic advantages for the fishermen and their families to abandon traditional working practices in favour of work servicing the tourist industry. A thousand pesetas a day is clearly far more than the thirty-five they previously earned. The development also has other material advantages, including massive improvements in transport infrastructure and bringing piped water and telecommunications to the village for the first time.

Yet these economic advantages also depend upon the villagers accepting drastic changes to their way of life, their culture and even their personal identities. In making such direct financial comparisons Muga explicitly turns the fishermen’s time and labour into a ‘commodity’, something to be bought or sold.¹ The fishermen are, in effect, being asked to decide whether to become (relatively) well-paid wage-labourers within a global economic system or to retain their relatively autonomous existence and current social status as much poorer participants in a traditional subsistence economy. We use the word ‘decide’ here advisedly, since, because of the financial and political clout of developers like Muga, there may not actually be much choice involved. Developers can (and often do) force changes through whether or not the majority of the local population actually support them (as Chapter 7 clearly shows; see also Burns, 1999; Duffy, 2002: 98–126; ESTAP, 2000).

Even this very simple example raises a series of complex ethical questions that are inextricably interwoven with the social and political fabric of local cultures and, where tourism development is concerned, global systems. What Muga proposes as a matter of simple and straightforward economics actually has wide-ranging social repercussions that clearly conflict with the fishermen’s traditional cultural practices and deeply held beliefs. They are horrified that anyone should suggest that they should sell themselves (their labour) or their heritage in this ‘immoral’ way, like ‘touts or pimps’. They employ moral language to show that they regard the suggestion as an offence to their dignity and even an affront to the sea itself. The idea of affronting the sea is interesting because it suggests that what the fishermen deem to be wrong here is not just the commodification of their own labour but the treating of the sea as a commodity, as a resource that can be bought and then sold to tourists. This point is emphasized from an anthropological point of view by Greenwood (1989: 174), who argues that the ‘commoditization of local culture in the tourism industry is … fundamentally destructive and … the sale of “culture by the pound”, as it were, needs to be examined by everyone involved in tourism’ (see also Philip and Mercer, 1999; Watson and Kopachevsky, 1998). Interestingly, this process of commodification eventually affects everyone concerned; even the tourists themselves eventually come to be seen by locals as nothing more than a resource (Pi-Sunyer, 1989: 197).

In expressing these moral qualms the villagers voice what they regard as ethical limits on the way in which economic values should be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Ethical values
• 2 The virtues of travel and the virtuous traveller
• 3 The greatest happiness is to travel?
• 4 Rights and codes of practice
• 5 From social justice to an ethics of care
• 6 Authenticity and the ethics of tourism
• 7 Ethics and sustainable tourism
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index