Sustainable Tourism in Global Perspective: Part 3

Sustainable Development and Tourism: Different Place, Different Challenge

by Johan Hattingh, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University

IN 1987, THE United Nations defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This is a powerful definition that challenges us in the present to think beyond our own needs and ensure that future generations can also live and thrive. But framed this way, it is also a vague definition that can ultimately mean anything to anyone, from a national government to a business to a lone individual.

When a concept becomes so broad and vague that everyone can appropriate it for themselves, and it becomes difficult to find anyone or any institution that isn’t "sustainably developing," the question arises of what we must do to make "sustainable development" the critical concept it was in the 1980s.

Part of the answer lies in asking a few simple questions that can help us distinguish between development we genuinely want to sustain and "development" we should rather stop or phase out.

The first question is surely: What is so important that we would want to continue it into the future? Second: Why is this "something" so important? Third: For whose or what’s sake are we doing this "something"? Fourth: What kind of knowledge do we rely on to do it? Do we only use science and technology as unlocked by experts and specialists? Or do we also make use of experiential knowledge, inherited knowledge, local knowledge, and indigenous knowledge? And how do we combine these different forms of knowledge? And fifth: How do we know over time whether we have moved closer to sustainable development and tourism or regressed?

If we answer these questions honestly, we will surely provide different answers depending on the place and circumstances in which we stand. We will likely find that beyond the broad and general definitions of sustainable development and tourism, we arrive at different concrete practices.

This is exactly what emerged from last year’s survey: sustainable development and tourism are not just one big thing that is the same everywhere. In the Franschhoek Valley, it involves something different in its specifics than in the Cederberg, or what can be done on a residential plot in Sandbaai along the coast.

In one place, sustainable development means respecting, continuing, and building upon the inherited knowledge of our immediate ancestors. In another place, we must do the exact opposite by unlearning or even reversing what our immediate ancestors did.

In one place, it means bringing in new workers to start doing new things with new requirements. In another place, it means creating new job opportunities for experts in indigenous knowledge and practices to share their traditions, culture, stories, and language, developed over generations, with other cultures, thus fostering new interactions and understandings of life.

Generally speaking, we know we are dealing with sustainable development when we don’t just focus on our own need satisfaction in the present but start looking further and ensuring that our descendants in human culture and in nature can meet their needs.

But beyond this broad definition, we must arrive at the hard realities of what sustainable development and tourism mean in concrete terms in the Franschhoek Valley, the Cederberg, or Sandbaai.

This opens us up to the question of whether we truly know what Ecological Wisdom is in the Franschhoek Valley, the Cederberg, or Sandbaai, respectively. And whether we have truly gathered and brought together all the types of knowledge to know it.

Perhaps we have already made a start and begun to unlearn things, learn anew, and do things differently as we find out more from each other about what makes meaningful life possible and sustains it in our mountains, valleys, towns, and coastlines, and how it differs from what undermines or destroys meaningful life in these different places.

In all likelihood, a long road still lies ahead for us to truly do sustainable development and tourism, but it is reassuring to know that quite a few people and institutions have already begun walking this path.