The Ethics of Tourism

Critical and Applied Perspectives

Brent Lovelock, Kirsten Lovelock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136991233
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

There are increasingly strident calls from many sectors of society for the tourism industry, the world's largest industry, to adopt a more ethical approach to the way it does business. In particular there has been an emphasis placed on the need for a more ethical approach to the way the tourism industry interacts with consumers, the environment, with indigenous peoples, those in poverty, and those in destinations suffering human rights abuses.

This book introduces students to the important topic of tourism ethics and illustrates how ethical principles and theory can be applied to address contemporary tourism industry issues. A critical role of the book is to highlight the ethical challenges in the tourism industry and to situate tourism ethics within wider contemporary discussions of ethics in general. Integrating theory and practice the book analyses a broad range of topical and relevant tourism ethical issues from the urgent 'big-picture' problems facing the industry as a whole (e.g. air travel and global warming) to more micro-scale everyday issues that may face individual tourism operators, or indeed, individual tourists. The book applies relevant ethical frameworks to each issue, addressing a range of ethical approaches to provide the reader with a firm grounding of applied ethics, from first principles. International case studies with reflective questions at the end are integrated throughout to provide readers with valuable insight into real world ethical dilemmas, encouraging critical analysis of tourism ethical issues as well as ethically determined decisions. Discussion questions and annotated further reading are included to aid further understanding.

The Ethics of Tourism: Critical and Applied Perspectives is essential reading for all Tourism students globally.

1

Introduction

‘On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.’

George Orwell^a

‘A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.’

Albert Camus^b

‘To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace in society.’

Theodore Roosevelt^c

‘Ethics is a skill.’

Marianne Jennings^d

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter you will be able to:

• Understand the rationale for an ‘ethics’ focus on tourism.
• Define the term ‘ethical tourism’.
• Understand the relationship between ethical tourism and sustainable tourism.
• Discuss the role of ethical consumption in ethical tourism.

1.1 Introduction

As recently as five years ago, one would seldom have heard the words ‘ethics’ and ‘tourism’ used together in a sentence. As recently as 10 years ago, one would seldom have heard the words ‘business’ and ‘ethics’ together – at least outside of the specific world of moral philosophy and the field of business ethics research. The Enron, WorldCom and other corporate scandals of the first decade of the twenty-first century have changed all this. The issues raised and lessons learned from these and numerous other business outrages have permeated into many aspects of our lives – to influence not only our financial concerns but also our leisure activities. Now, some researchers and industry practitioners are starting to think, talk and write about the ethics of tourism, or, rather, about the ‘ethical deficit’ (Moufakkir 2012) or ‘immense void’ in ethics in the tourism field (Fennell 2006). Why this recent interest in ethics? What has changed about tourism? Well, of course tourism as an industry has grown, but this growth has been steady, to the point now where total global arrivals are estimated to be in the vicinity of 5 billion, with about 1 billion of these being international arrivals. ¹ We acknowledge that tourism is a large industry and perhaps even the world’s largest, but it is not on these grounds alone that there is a need for a text on tourism ethics. Billions of people participate in comparable leisure activities: they go to the movies, play sport, go shopping – yet there is no equivalent call for these to be placed under the same ‘ethics-scope’. So what is it about tourism that would demand such consideration?

Tourism is a social practice or phenomenon that reaches into many people’s lives, into communities, economies, and takes place across an incredibly diverse range of settings. It is almost ubiquitous. Despite early and optimistic hopes that tourism would be the ‘smokeless’ industry that could benefit communities around the world, contributing to social and economic wellbeing, it is clearly acknowledged now that tourism is linked to a range of social, economic and environmental impacts or ‘tourism-related changes’ as Hall and Lew (2009) describe them. These have been clearly debated and discussed in the tourism literature and by the industry for four or more decades (for a detailed coverage of tourism impacts we recommend Hall and Lew (2009) Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts). Indeed, managing the impacts of tourism continues to remain a strong focus for researchers, planners and practitioners in the field today. Broadly, tourism impacts may be categorised as social–cultural, economic or environmental; however, there may be considerable overlap between these categories.

Economic impacts encompass the monetary benefits and costs that result from the development and use of tourism facilities and services. Environmental impacts include alterations to the natural environment, including air, water, soils, vegetation and wildlife, as well as changes to the built environment.

(Wall and Wright 1977 in Wall and Mathieson 2006: 38)

Social and cultural impacts of tourism include the way that tourism may ‘effect changes in collective and individual value systems, behaviour patterns, community structures, lifestyle and the quality of life’ (Hall and Lew 2009: 57). As Higgins-Desbiolles (2006) notes, tourism is ‘more than an industry’, it is a social force.

There are a number of defining characteristics of tourism as a social and physical phenomenon that, together with the sheer scale and scope of the tourism industry, require us to consider alternative approaches to ‘the tourism question’:

• Tourism involves (often complex) social, cultural, economic and ecological interactions.
• These interactions take place en route to and in a ‘destination’ which is also someone’s ‘place’ (house, village, town, city, nation, mountain, jungle, beach, backyard).
• The visitor (and industry providers) may value this ‘place’ and their ‘host’ less than they do their own place and community.
• These interactions often involve power differentials – often with the visitor and tourism industry expressing power in a number of ways over the host.
• These interactions may result in harms or benefits – to the host (and possibly the visitor too), to their communities, their economies and their ecologies.
• Tourists (and other stakeholders in the tourism ‘exchange’) are inherently selfish – each seeking to maximise their personal (or group or corporate) value.

Increasingly since the 1970s, the degree of concern about the scope and scale of tourism impacts has led to the development and promotion of approaches through which we can minimise tourism’s negative impacts while still allowing the benefits of tourism to flow to communities. At the forefront of such approaches has been sustainable tourism development. But can sustainable approaches address ethical concerns and ensure ethical practice? Modelled on sustainable development, which emerged from the work of the World Commission for the Environment and Development (1987) (the ‘Brundtland Report’ (see United Nations 2012)), sustainable tourism development involves taking ‘full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities’ (UNWTO 2012a). Sustainable tourism has been the guiding principle of the tourism industry since the late 1980s. However, critics point to the ongoing impacts of tourism, and argue that sustainable tourism is simply rhetoric, adopted by destination planners and industry practitioners to appease the travelling public, host communities and environmentalists. Referred to variously as a ‘significant policy problem’, a ‘policy failure’ (Hall 2011) and a ‘myth’ (Sharpley 2010), sustainable tourism is decried as being both meaningless and meaning everything – to the extent that its operationalisation is near impossible (see Chapter 9 for a full discussion of sustainable tourism development in relation to nature).

On a more profound level, sustainable tourism emerged from a neoliberal discourse on meeting pressing global problems. ² Subsequently, sustainable development (at least in its current forms) is largely predicated upon economic growth, and thus faces challenges not only in credibility, but in creating truly (in a holistic sense) sustainable outcomes (e.g. Duffy 2008; Higgins-Desbiolles 2008; Fletcher 2011). Sustainable tourism, then, could be seen as a neoliberal sop to the real problems faced by tourism. Within the existing political frameworks and ideologies of many destinations, it is difficult to see ‘true’ sustainability becoming the dominant paradigm. In summary, a broader, ethics approach to tourism would go beyond the ‘three pillars’ (environmental, economic, social–cultural) of sustainability (Weeden 2002).

As the full range of externalities and opportunities from tourism has become more apparent over recent years, a number of other approaches to tourism have emerged – arguably most (if not all) emerging from the ‘mother-ship’ of sustainable tourism. Notably ecotourism, a form of tourism that encompasses respect for nature, learning and the positive involvement of local communities, has become widely established. Initially ecotourism was seen predominantly as a niche form of tourism, characterised by small-scale, environmentally sensitive tourism activities. Detractors, however, raise concern about the co-option of the concept by mass tourism, corporate interests, resulting in the dilution and betrayal of the initial goals of ecotourism (e.g. Wight 1993; Honey 1999), and potentially just another example of so-called ‘green-washing’ in the tourism industry.

But it is not only the environmental impacts of tourism that have attracted attention. The social and cultural outcomes of tourism have also led to the promulgation of community and culture-friendly forms of tourism. Among these is ‘responsible tourism’, which is defined in the Cape Town Declaration on Responsible Tourism as having the following characteristics:

• Minimises negative economic, environmental, and social impacts;
• Generates greater economic benefits for local people and enhances the well-being of host communities, improves working conditions and access to the industry;
• Involves local people in decisions that affect their lives and life chances;
• Makes positive contributions to the conservation of natural and cultural heritage, to the maintenance of the world’s diversity;
• Provides more enjoyable experiences for tourists through more meaningful connections with local people, and a greater understanding of local cultural, social and environmental issues;
• Provides access for physically challenged people; and
• Is culturally sensitive, engenders respect between tourists and hosts, and builds local pride and confidence (International Centre for Responsible Tourism 2012; see also Goodwin2011).

Responsible tourism is strongly linked to sustainable tourism (with a similar threefold focus on environmental, economic and social outcomes). However, responsible tourism is said to have broader outcomes, importantly, to assign responsibility for action to various stakeholders. For example, responsible tourism has also shaped Corporate Social Responsibility which emphasises the importance of corporate citizenship and corporate sustainability. Broadly, it is a company’s commitment to operating in an ethical way that takes into account society and the environment. Fair Trade Tourism is also another example, which emerged in response to the problems evident with sustainable tourism – here principles of fair trade are introduced to address the social inequity and sustainability issues within the industry. Some countries have adopted responsible tourism rather than sustainable tourism in their tourism planning processes (e.g. South Africa), and there is now a ‘World Responsible Tourism Day’, while mega-travel agent Virgin Holidays sponsors annual Responsible Tourism Awards. Yet the sad fact is that only 2 per cent of tourism businesses globally are participating in responsible tourism or related initiatives (Frey and George 2010).

Ecotourism and responsible tourism are just two of a broad array of alternative tourism approaches that have proliferated in response to a growing awareness of the fragility of our planetary environment, and tourism’s contribution to damaging (or preserving) our world. Other driving forces have been a growing awareness of social justice issues (arguably brought about through a combination of greater global connectivity and media pervasiveness, an enhanced sense of global citizenship, and (optimistically) incremental moral development). As a consequence, we now know a lot more about how tourism either exacerbates or ameliorates social problems. Such problems range from those of local wellbeing where tourism competes with host communities for access to critical resources such as land or water, to broader political issues, for example human rights repression, or dispossession of indigenous peoples.

Collectively the range of ‘alternative tourisms’ that offers solutions to the problems of unmitigated mass tourism now includes:

• sustainable tourism
• ecotourism
• green tourism
• soft tourism
• responsible tourism
• just tourism
• justice tourism
• pro-poor tourism
• new tourism
• voluntourism
• fair trade tourism.

1.2 Defining Ethical Tourism

So how exactly does ‘ethical tourism’ fit in with the range of alternative tourisms and how do we define it? Strangely, writers in the field have tended to avoid defining ethical tourism, and perhaps this gives us an inkling of the difficulties of providing a useful description. Ethical tourism is not so different from the alternatives listed above, and in simple terms could be considered as an amalgam of the ‘best features’ of these alternative tourisms.

Industry and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), however, have not been deterred from describing the term:

Ethical tourism has evolved as a term when one considers travelling to, or developing tourism in a destination where e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of case studies
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Tourism: ethical concepts and principles
• 3. Mobility, borders and security
• 4. Human rights
• 5. Medical tourism
• 6. Sex tourism
• 7. Tourism and indigenous peoples
• 8. Tourism and disability
• 9. Nature-based tourism
• 10. Animals and tourism
• 11. Climate change
• 12. Hospitality and marketing ethics
• 13. Labour
• 14. Codes of ethics
• 15. Conclusion: ethical futures?
• Index