Journal of Sustainable Tourism
Editors: Bill Bramwell (Sheffield Hallam University) and Bernard Lane (Visiting Research Fellow, Sheffield Hallam University)
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Volume: 8 Number: 1 Page: 1–19
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Tourism and Sustainable Development: Exploring the Theoretical Divide
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Richard Sharpley
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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.
© Channel View Publications 2000
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