Charter for Sustainable Tourism (1995)

2016-01-22 Sunney ORCP 5

The World Summit on Sustainable Tourism held in Vitoria on 26 and 27 November was the scene of the unanimous adoption and proclamation by His Excellency Don Iñigo Urkullu, President of the Basque Government, of the World Charter for Sustainable Tourism +20. This document, which is the reformulation of the First World Charter for Sustainable Tourism, incorporates the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted at the United Nations Summit on Sustainable Development held in September 2015, and represents a great opportunity to firmly steer tourism towards an inclusive and sustainable way.

Preface: The Charter for Sustainable Tourism (1995) was adopted at the first World Conference on Sustainable Tourism held on the island of Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain, 27-28 April, 1995.

In 1995 the Charter for Sustainable Tourism was adopted at the first World Conference on Sustainable Tourism, held on the island of Lanzarote (Spain). This historic action took place under the auspices of UNESCO, the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and the leading associated international organisations and related programmes, such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the MAB Programme (Man and the Biosphere), the World Heritage Centre, the European Commission and the United Nations Division for Sustainable Development. The conference saw the birth of the term and the concept of Sustainable Tourism, which, along with the Declaration, was a significant shift in the tourism industry and the carrying out of tourism towards more responsible ways of conducting and conceiving this activity.

The Charter is the result of the World Conference on Sustainable Tourism. It acknowledges that while tourism can be a positive force for socio-economic development and cultural interchange, it can also have negative consequences for communities. It calls for planning and management of tourism that conserves and protects the natural and cultural heritage. The Charter also calls for tourism to be ecologically bearable, economically viable, socially equitable for local communities, and sustainable for the future. With regard to the cultural heritage, the Charter calls for tourism to consider its effect on both the cultural heritage and the traditions of the local community. The Charter recommends special assistance for environmentally and culturally vulnerable areas and for areas that have been degraded as a result of high impact tourism.

Twenty years later, major changes have occurred in today’s world and in the travel and tourism industry, obliging us to rethink and update the terms and objectives of the initial declaration in order to give new drive and meaning to the commitment to sustainability in this key sector.

The World Summit on Sustainable Tourism (ST+20) is therefore the major event of 2015 to bring together the key actors in sustainable tourism in the search for a new drive to work towards its goals.

What’s Delphi Method / Delphi Technique?

The Delphi method (/ˈdɛlfaɪ/ DEL-fy) is a structured communication technique or method, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts. The experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator or change agent provides an anonymous summary of the experts’ forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the “correct” answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a predefined stop criterion (e.g. number of rounds, achievement of consensus, stability of results) and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results.

The Delphi Method communication structure.
The Delphi Method communication structure.

Delphi is based on the principle that forecasts (or decisions) from a structured group of individuals are more accurate than those from unstructured groups. The technique can also be adapted for use in face-to-face meetings, and is then called mini-Delphi or Estimate-Talk-Estimate (ETE). Delphi has been widely used for business forecasting and has certain advantages over another structured forecasting approach, prediction markets.

A web-based communication structure (Hyperdelphi).
A web-based communication structure (Hyperdelphi).

Use in policy-making

From the 1970s, the use of the Delphi technique in public policy-making introduces a number of methodological innovations. In particular:

  • the need to examine several types of items (not only forecasting items but, typically, issue items, goal items, and option items) leads to introducing different evaluation scales which are not used in the standard Delphi. These often include desirability, feasibility (technical and political) and probability, which the analysts can use to outline different scenarios: the desired scenario (from desirability), the potential scenario (from feasibility) and the expected scenario (from probability);
  • the complexity of the issues posed in public policy-making leads to give more importance to the arguments supporting the evaluations of the panelists; so these are often invited to list arguments for and against each option item, and sometimes they are given the possibility to suggest new items to be submitted to the panel;
  • for the same reason, the scaling methods, which are used to measure panel evaluations, often include more sophisticated approaches such as multi-dimensional scaling.

Further innovations come from the use of computer-based (and later web-based) Delphi conferences. According to Turoff and Hiltz, in computer-based Delphis:

  • the iteration structure used in the paper Delphis, which is divided into three or more discrete rounds, can be replaced by a process of continuous (roundless) interaction, enabling panelists to change their evaluations at any time;
  • the statistical group response can be updated in real-time, and shown whenever a panelist provides a new evaluation.

According to Bolognini, web-based Delphis offer two further possibilities, relevant in the context of interactive policy-making and e-democracy. These are:

  • the involvement of a large number of participants,
  • the use of two or more panels representing different groups (such as policy-makers, experts, citizens), which the administrator can give tasks reflecting their diverse roles and expertise, and make them to interact within ad hoc communication structures. For example, the policy community members (policy-makers and experts) may interact as part of the main conference panel, while they receive inputs from a virtual community (citizens, associations etc.) involved in a side conference. These web-based variable communication structures, which he calls Hyperdelphi (HD), are designed to make Delphi conferences “more fluid and adapted to the hypertextual and interactive nature of digital communication”.

One successful example of a (partially) web-based policy Delphi is the five-round Delphi exercise (with 1,454 contributions) for the creation of the eLAC Action Plans in Latin America. It is believed to be the most extensive online participatory policy-making foresight exercise in the history of intergovernmental processes in the developing world at this time.

In addition to the specific policy guidance provided, the authors list the following lessons learned include “:

  • the potential of Policy Delphi methods to introduce transparency and accountability into public decision-making, especially in developing countries;
  • the utility of foresight exercises to foster multi-agency networking in the development community;
  • the usefulness of embedding foresight exercises into established mechanisms of representative democracy and international multilateralism, such as the United Nations;
  • the potential of online tools to facilitate participation in resource-scarce developing countries;
  • the resource-efficiency stemming from the scale of international foresight exercises, and therefore its adequacy for resource-scarce regions.

Variations

Traditionally the Delphi method has aimed at a consensus of the most probable future by iteration. Other versions, such as the Policy Delphi, is instead a decision support method aiming at structuring and discussing the diverse views of the preferred future. In Europe, more recent web-based experiments have used the Delphi method as a communication technique for interactive decision-making and e-democracy. The Argument Delphi, was developed by Osmo Kuusi, focuses on ongoing discussion and finding relevant arguments rather than focusing on the output. The Disaggregative Policy Delphi, developed by Petri Tapio, uses cluster analysis as a systematic tool to construct various scenarios of the future in the latest Delphi round. The respondent’s view on the probable and the preferable future are dealt with as separate cases. The computerization of Argument Delphi is relatively difficult because of several problems like argument resolution, argument aggregation and argument evaluation. The computerization of Argument Delphi, was developed by Sadi Evren Seker, proposes solutions to such problems (see section further reading).

Further Reading:

Category
Charter

Date

1995

Promulgation

The World Conference on Sustainable Tourism, Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain, 27-28 April, 1995.

Descriptions

  • It acknowledges that while tourism can be a positive force for socio-economic development and cultural interchange, it can also have negative consequences for communities. It calls for planning and management of tourism that conserves and protects the natural and cultural heritage.
  • It calls for tourism to be ecologically bearable, economically viable, socially equitable for local communities, and sustainable for the future.
  • It calls for tourism to consider its effect on both the cultural heritage and the traditions of the local community.
  • It recommends special assistance for environmentally and culturally vulnerable areas and for areas that have been degraded as a result of high impact tourism.

Source

http://www.gdrc.org/uem/eco-tour/charter.html

Download

 http://sustainabletourismcharter2015.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/CharterForSustainableTourism.pdf

References

Intellectual Property

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About Sunney 116 Articles
I am currently a Professor of Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China.

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