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Setting Standards for Sustainable Tourism: An analysis of US tourism certification programs
Abstract
As one of the biggest industries in the world, tourism has huge positive and negative
socioeconomic, cultural and environmental impacts. Over the past fifteen years, a
plethora of tourism certification programs have sprung up worldwide in an effort to
recognize tourism businesses who truly work to reduce negative impacts by using sustainable
practices. This worldwide proliferation of tourism certification programs, however,
has led to consumer confusion, lack of brand recognition and widely varying standards.
With a global accreditation body looming on the horizon that aims to create a single
recognizable sustainable tourism brand, tourism certification programs will soon have
the opportunity to become accredited by complying with minimum standards that will
be determined by the Sustainable Tourism Stewardship Council. Accreditation will provide
certification programs with the legitimacy and credibility they need to differentiate
their programs, and thus the certified tourism businesses, from others with weaker
standards, and may eventually lead to a shift of the tourism industry towards more
sustainable practices. Here I use the best practice standards for tourism certification
programs as laid out in the Mohonk Agreement, and the recently released Global Sustainable
Tourism Criteria, envisioned to serve as the common set of baseline criteria by which
to accredit certification programs, to evaluate four state-level tourism certification
programs as case studies in the United States. In assuming that these standards and
criteria are the minimum requirements that need to be met for a certification program
to become accredited, I find that none of these four programs, and presumably none
of the US state-level programs as they currently stand, will meet accreditation requirements.
I discuss the challenges these programs have in complying with best practice standards
and in fulfilling the triple bottom line principles of environmental, socioeconomic,
and cultural sustainability as specified by the Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria.
I also conjecture what the future may look like for these programs and US tourism
certification in general.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/997Citation
Poser, Elizabeth (2009). Setting Standards for Sustainable Tourism: An analysis of US tourism certification
programs. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/997.Collections
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