Tourism and Sustainable Development: Exploring the Theoretical Divide

Despite the significant attention paid by tourism academics and practitioners to sustainable tourism development in recent years, there has been a consistent failure within the tourism literature to relate the concept to the theory of its parental paradigm, sustainable development. As a result, the applicability of sustainable development to the specific context of tourism is rarely questioned. This paper addresses this omission in the literature. Reviewing development theory and the notion of sustainability, it proposes a model of sustainable development against which the principles of sustainable tourism are compared. It is argued that tourism development remains embedded in early modernisation theory whilst the principles of sustainable tourism over look the characteristics of the production and consumption of tourism. As a result, significant differences between the concepts of sustainable tourism and sustainable development are revealed, suggesting that the principles and objectives of sustainable development cannot be transposed onto the specific context of tourism.