Description
The purpose of this paper is to examine the state of sustainable tourism certification in
developing countries and to present methodological and practical critiques and improvements.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
Sustainable tourism certification and state capacity: keep it local, simple, and fuzzy
Kirk S. Bowman
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To cite this document:
Kirk S. Bowman, (2011),"Sustainable tourism certification and state capacity: keep it local, simple, and fuzzy", International J ournal of
Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 5 Iss 3 pp. 269 - 281
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Sustainable tourism certi?cation and state
capacity: keep it local, simple, and fuzzy
Kirk S. Bowman
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the state of sustainable tourism certi?cation in
developing countries and to present methodological and practical critiques and improvements.
Design/methodology/approach – The study uses methodological re?nements of fuzzy logic and
comparative analysis based on ?eldwork in seven countries.
Findings – Sustainable tourism programs should be locally designed with local logos, largely
performance-based, and aggregation should be based on fuzzy logic concepts of necessary and jointly
suf?cient attributes of sustainable tourism.
Originality/value – The paper uses political science concepts of state capacity and methodological
advances of fuzzy logic to provide keys for successful sustainable tourism certi?cation programs in
developing countries.
Keywords Tourism management, Quali?cation, Ecotourism, Sustainable tourism, State capacity,
Fuzzy logic
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
International tourismincreasingly affects every corner of the globe. By 2007, over 900 million
tourists crossed international borders for their holidays, generating revenues of US $856
billion (www.unwto.org). While growth is signi?cant in Western Europe and other developed
countries, international tourism growth in developing nations is even more impressive with
many countries using their attractive ‘‘sea, sand and sun’’ to climb the development ladder.
Growth in East Asia and the Paci?c, for example, increased from 190,000 international world
tourist arrivals in 1950 to over 70 million in 1993, while international tourism revenues in Latin
America and the Caribbean reached some US $37.3 billion in 2005 (www.unwto.org). For
many, tourism is a magical industry that brings foreign currency and jobs without
smokestacks. However, it is also increasingly apparent that tourists destroy the very things
that they come for (Honey, 1999). Interest in alternate forms of tourismarose as a response to
the exploitative aspects of the new mass tourism whose growth is strongest in developing
countries.
By the late 1980s, the governments of most countries as well as the United Nations noted the
increase in global tourism and the industry’s deleterious effects to the environment and
society of those countries in which it was most rapidly expanding. In 1992 the international
agreement of both the Rio Declaration on the Environment and Development and the
Agenda 21 marked the emergence of a global awareness of new issues arising with tourism
and globalization. In 1995 the ?rst World Conference on Sustainable Tourism was held
further identifying the need of tourism to develop in ways compatible with the tourist states.
By the late 1990s governments and international organizations were clearly interested in
regulating the tourist industry and educating both hosts and participants. Community
DOI 10.1108/17506181111156961 VOL. 5 NO. 3 2011, pp. 269-281, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
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PAGE 269
Kirk S. Bowman is an
Associate Professor at the
Sam Nunn School of
International Affairs,
Georgia Institute of
Technology, Atlanta,
Georgia, USA.
Received: April 2009
Revised: June 2010
Accepted: June 2010
The author would like to thank
Rachel Bankeser for research
as a President’s Undergraduate
Research Assistant at Georgia
Tech. Danny Breznitz, Peter
Brecke, Zachery Taylor, and
Virginia Webber provided
useful comments and
suggestions on an earlier draft.
This project is supported by the
International Conservation
Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) Fiji
Program, with funding from the
National Institutes of Health
(USA) and the National Science
Foundation. Generous support
was provided by the Center for
International Business and
Education Research (CIBER) at
Georgia Tech, the Georgia Tech
Foundation, and the Sam Nunn
School of International Affairs.
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leaders and other local stakeholders also began to exert pressure from below to alter the
tourism product in order to protect the environment, emphasize local culture and products,
and share tourism revenues with local communities. Green, sustainable, and eco-friendly
are now ubiquitous terms in tourism policy papers, regulations, and promotional materials.
Precisely what sustainable tourism actually means is debatable. Economically advanced
countries portray sustainability as dealing with the environment, while developing countries
view it to include signi?cant economic and political components.
As governments, environmental groups, tourism organizations, tourists, and others focused
on sustainability, efforts began to conceptualize, measure, and standardize sustainable
tourism practices and to create certi?cation programs. From 2000-2004, at least 48
countries created or de?ned national eco-tourismstrategies (Higgins, 2006), though in many
countries the efforts are still insuf?cient (Medina, 2005; Mycoo, 2006). In North America
alone there are over 50 certi?cation schemes. While a general consensus exists for some
standardization, important debates about conceptualization and measurement endure
(Buckley, 2002; Font, 2002; Font and Harris, 2004; Honey, 2002, 2003). To explore these
debates, research for this paper includes dozens of interviews with stakeholders and
of?cials and sustained observation of attempted implementation and practice of sustainable
tourism certi?cation in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Fiji, and Honduras.
Political science brings a perspective that highlights two important issues of sustainable
certi?cation. First, that the principal positive bene?ts of sustainable tourism indices and
measures in the poorest countries are not the establishment of internationally recognized
and technically rigorous measurement. Rather, development and implementation of
sustainable tourism certi?cation in poor countries is a process that can result in an important
dialogue and policy-making process about the type of tourism development that a country
wishes to pursue, greater awareness in the business community of the needs and
contributions of the local communities, and a shift in attitudes across sectors and
generations. Previous survey work in Costa Rica suggests that a sustained effort in
promoting sustainable tourism leads to greener attitude shifts in the general population and
most strongly in the youth (Bowman and Jennings, 2005). Indeed, a strategy based on
international standards could have a net negative effect for sustainable practices in
developing countries. In a survey of existing studies and literature, Adams et al. (2004) ?nd
that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is a negative relationship between conservation
efforts and social development of local communities. And Silva (2003) demonstrates howthe
selling of environmental sustainability can actually undermine the fabric of social equity in
places like Costa Rica. Poverty eradication and conservation of the environment, unless
carefully planned, are often at cross-purposes. Local stakeholder support can quickly erode
if the local bene?ts are not emphasized.
The second perspective that a political science perspective brings to the certi?cation
debate is an awareness of the importance of state capacity. State capacity is the ability of a
government to develop and successfully implement effective policies. A distinguished
group of political scientists and political economists including Hirschman (1958),
Gerschenkron (1962), Evans (1979), North (1990), Schneider and Heredia (2003), and
Breznitz (2007) argue that state capacity is a crucial element in political and economic
development. Huber (1995, p. 167) assesses state capacity by conceptualizing state
strength broadly as the ability to achieve four goals:
1. enforcement of the rule of law throughout the state’s entire territory and population (legal
order);
2. promotion of economic growth (accumulation);
3. elicitation of voluntary compliance fromthe population over which the state claims control
(legitimation); and
4. shaping of the allocation of societal resources (distribution).
The developing world requires greater state capacity and must avoid actions that reduce
state strength. The announcement of new policies or programs that are subsequently
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discarded, unmet or obvious failures not only represent opportunity costs and failures for the
particular program, but contribute to a weakening of state capacity as they undermine
voluntary compliance (legitimation). For example, if government, stakeholders, and NGOs
adopt a dif?cult and stringent international certi?cation program, spend resources and
energies in the implementation, and get buy-in from local stakeholders through meetings
and regulations, any subsequent abandonment or failure of the program not only reveals a
lack of state capacity, but also makes it harder to implement voluntary compliance for future
programs. This can initiate a vicious downward cycle of state failure where government
announcements of new policies and programs are met with skepticism and policy fatigue. A
modest certi?cation program, successfully implemented and maintained, is far superior to a
more robust certi?cation program that is unlikely to survive. The technically best certi?cation
program might not result in the best outcome without suf?cient existing state capacity, and
that capacity is insuf?cient in much of the developing world.
The work done by Buckley (2002), Font (2002), Honey (1999, 2002) and others to green
tourismand to certify sustainable practices is laudable. However, the current discussion fails
to resolve two key issues and ignores a third issue, all of which are crucial for successful
sustainable tourism certi?cation in the poorest countries of the developing world.
The ?rst unresolved issue that is addressed in the literature is the tradeoff between
process-based and performance-based certi?cation measures. Performance-based
measurements are much more likely to be successfully implemented in developing
countries than are process-based measures. Process-based measures are technical and
expensive. Resources are limited in poor countries and state capacity and institutions
necessary to monitor, assess, and enforce compliance for process-based indicators are far
different in Bolivia and New Zealand.
The second contested issue deals with universality and whether programs should be global
with a universally recognized logo, or whether the programs should be largely based on
local conditions, with locally designed logos. The components of sustainable tourism
development in places like Fiji, Belize, Australia, Singapore, and Sweden are not the same.
The sustainable tourism certi?cation process must provide governments and stakeholders
with an opportunity to carefully consider such factors as the type of tourism that they want,
the amount of local cultural and economic participation involved, and the products and
activities to be encouraged (Brinkerhoff, 1996; Medina, 2005). These local conditions and
goals cannot be window-dressing to satisfy local concerns, but must be a major component
of the sustainable index conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation. The evidence is
quite clear that local actors should design local instruments with locally recognized logos.
Sustainable tourism certi?cation is long-term process in the developing world, and locally
developed performance measures are the most likely to generate the necessary and
voluntary buy-in from a large range of local stakeholders for long-term success. In
developing countries, certi?cation conceptualization must be organic and local and the
process should be relatively simple to implement. In addition, the national dialogue and
development of sustainable tourism certi?cation can play an important role in national
branding as a tourism destination.
One key reason for the organic necessity of tourism logo and the components of greenness
is power. Marsano and Scott (2009) convincingly employ the theories on power from the
social sciences to reveal how power is used in destination branding in a fairly sophisticated
and resource-rich region – Australia’s Gold Coast. Issues of power are even more relevant in
developing countries with lower levels of education and resources.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the current discussion fails to systematically consider
one of the most crucial aspects of the certi?cation instrument, aggregation of indicators or
attributes to a ?nal score or sustainable ranking. Sustainable tourism, as with concepts such
as democracy and human development (Smithson and Verkuilen, 2006, p. 21), is a concept
that is comprised of multiple dimensions. It is theoretically dif?cult, if not impossible, to add
or aggregate multiple dimensions to a ?nal gradated or dichotomous score while retaining
theoretical ?delity. One way to satisfactorily aggregate a multidimensional concept such as
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sustainable tourism is with fuzzy sets. Without the theoretical ?delity that can only be
achieved through the use of fuzzy sets, local stakeholders may abandon sustainable tourism
programs.
Sustainable tourism certi?cation programs in the developing world must meet four criteria to
be most successful. First, the program must favor cultural and social concerns in order to
gain support of local stakeholders and must be based on cooperative or voluntary
compliance from businesses and other stakeholders in the developing world; therefore, the
program must be suitable for success in an environment of limited state capacity and
performance should outweigh process. Second, the conceptualization of green or
sustainable must be organic and conceptualized by local actors. Efforts to create a single
instrument that can be used in multiple dissimilar countries are not practical. Third, the
likelihood of long-term success of any program must be suf?ciently high to limit the
possibility of a failed program weakening existing state capacity. Fourth, the instrument and
design must maintain theoretical ?delity. If these four conditions are met, the chances of a
successful program are much greater, leading to a potential virtuous circle of capacity
building in the state and in the local communities.
This paper will proceed as follows: The ?rst section presents the importance of ecotourism
certi?cation in destination branding and marketing for small economies (cities, states,
regions, or countries). The second section summarizes the evolution of ecotourism
certi?cation and brie?y introduces several existing instruments. The third section discusses
the need for local input in customizing local content in tourism certi?cation indices and the
positive bene?ts of voluntary compliance in developing countries. This leads to the
conclusion that local performance-based certi?cation programs are best for poor countries.
The paper presents the shortcomings of dichotomous or gradated measures of greenness
and discusses the utility of fuzzy sets for aggregating multidimensional concepts.
The importance of ecotourism certi?cation in destination branding
The destination brand is a powerful tool that can conjure emotional appeal and that brand
image is crucial for differentiation and success of a tourism initiative (Leisen, 2001). Hosani
et al. (2006) use canonical correlation analysis to demonstrate that this emotional image
captures the majority of variance on destination personality dimensions. For larger cities,
countries, and regions, a host of tools and options are available for destination branding.
Among these options are global events, in particular sports. A good deal has been written
about the leveraging of the World Cup, the Euro Cup (particularly in Portugal in 2004), the
Olympics (particularly the Barcelona games), and sports in general (Nauright, 2004). State
tourism of?cials in Rio de Janeiro identi?ed sports as the principal mechanism for
re-branding the city, wanting to emulate Barcelona tourism branding as a model, and using
the Panamerican Games (2007), the World Cup (2014), the World Military Games (2011) and
the bid for the 2016 Olympics to springboard this new brand.
Buenos Aires (13 million inhabitants) has a different model based on cultural instead of
sporting events. According to Herna´ n Lombardi, the former national tourism minister and
current culture minister of the city of Buenos Aires, the destination brand and emotional
connection for Buenos Aires emerge through a series of big cultural events such as tango
festivals, regional book festivals, design events, opera, and ?lm festivals (interview by
author, 1 June 2009). These heavily orchestrated events bring in tourists from around the
region and the world, and help to create the image of Buenos Aires as fashionable and hip
(see Cornelissen (2005) for a description of the creation of a similar image in Capetown).
Unfortunately, event and sports tourism do not have the same punch in small towns and
small developing countries (Daniels, 2007). The destination brand and emotional appeal of
the brand image for small entities is often related to culture and markers of identity. One
important dimension of branding and differentiation for places like Papua New Guinea,
Tonga, and Belize is sustainable and cultural tourism. Small places, even in wealthier
countries, have recently moved to the concept of Geotourism, de?ned as: tourism that
sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place – its environment, culture,
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aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents (see www.nationalgeographic.com/
travel/sustainable/about_geotourism.html). Sustainable tourismcerti?cation that focuses too
heavily on process and benchmarks will eliminate an important branding and marketing tool
for small developing countries.
Existing measures of tourism certi?cation
The challenges that tourism certi?cation instruments face is unsurprising as green tourism is
a complex multidimensional concept and practitioners have only recently begun to seriously
consider the rami?cations and challenges of certi?cation mechanics. Indeed, the ?rst
attempt to standardize the de?nition or conceptualization of sustainable tourism
development came in 2000 when a group of leading scholars and practitioners of
sustainable tourism gathered in Canada and drafted the Mohonk Agreement. The
agreement determined that ‘‘sustainable tourism seeks to minimize ecological and
socio-cultural impacts while providing economic bene?ts to local communities and host
countries’’ (Honey, 2002, p. 375). On its most basic level, sustainable tourism development
is only realistic if all stakeholders can agree on priorities: ecological maintenance, local
community, and tourist satisfaction. Achieving sustainable development proves to be
dif?cult because there is a bounty of advice for stakeholders but a shortage of resources,
excessive pressure from demand, and a hedonistic philosophy among tourism operators
despite increased awareness of the local community.
The implementation of tourism certi?cation is one way to encourage sustainable tourism and
to harmonize the conceptualization of sustainable practice. Martha Honey (2003), the
pre-eminent scholar on certi?cation schemes, de?nes certi?cation as a set of procedures
that audits and gives written assurance that a facility, product, process, service or
management system meets speci?c standards or sustainability. It awards a logo or seal or
other indicator to those who meet or exceed established criteria or standards. According to
the World Tourism Organization’s Voluntary Initiatives for Sustainable Tourism, over 260
voluntary initiatives exist, including 104 eco-labeling and certi?cation programs. Invariably,
different criteria are used within the plethora of certi?cation programs to indicate
sustainability. Two main divisions exist in the measurement of sustainability.
One school, supported by the World Tourism Organization, is process-based certi?cation,
an example being Environmental Management System. This form of certi?cation focuses on
management and technical solutions to improve environmental ef?ciency of a destination.
Common criticisms of programs like Green Leaf, Green Globe, and ISO140001 for hotels (all
of which rely on process-based certi?cation measures) is that they focus on the gray
characteristics like wastewater processing and removal rather than the green
characteristics tourists are concerned with, like protection of the local environment. The
high implementation costs of such programs and the fact that what a business does is trivial
yet how they do it matters are two weaknesses of process-based certi?cation. Given the
costs of these programs, their potential is limited for the large number of poor countries that
are embracing ecotourism and seeking mechanisms for sustainable standards and
certi?cation. Moreover, while benchmarking and process based measures have theoretical
appeal, the practical viability is in question for the tourism industry. As Warnken et al. (2005)
demonstrate, it is not viable to establish benchmarking for something as simple as water
consumption even in a wealthy country like Australia, as factors such as age of buildings,
early stage resort planning, climate, and the extent of communal facilities are more
important. The authors ?nd that fully accredited eco-resorts used more water than
non-accredited resorts. As such, they have considerable concern for industry administered
accreditation schemes.
The second school, performance-based certi?cation, determines the goals or targets
requiring achievement to attain certi?cation and hold the same standard to all companies
and products seeking the certi?cation. The popular CST programs in Costa Rica uses such
performance-based certi?cation systems whose drawbacks are the dif?culty in measuring
many standards, the lack of common de?nition of sustainability targets, and the lack of
agreed on methodologies for determining some indicators, like carrying capacity. These can
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lead to charges of greenwashers (Johnson, 2002) and the proliferation of certi?cation
schemes that dilute the impact of certi?cation for branding and lead to confusion (Font,
2002). Bendell and Font (2004) also present a fascinating discussion about how certain
performance-based schemes with emphasis on local development and consumption of
local products might fail to meet GATT standards and treaties.
To Honey (2003), the future of sustainable tourism certi?cation lies in the fusion of process-
and performance-based certi?cation standards. Building on this fusion is one of the biggest
challenges that currently exist for certi?cation.
Current programs vary greatly on target, conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation.
These programs all divide sustainability or greenness into categories or components, as the
one point that is in universal agreement is that tourism sustainability is a concept comprising
multiple dimensions. For example, the Costa Rican CST measures four dimensions or
components of sustainable tourism: biological and physical surroundings, physical plant,
external clients, and socioeconomic context (Bien, 2002, pp. 147-49). The CST has 152
yes/no questions to measure compliance on these four dimensions. Each question is
weighted on a one to three scale, and a formula is used to calculate the ?nal score in each
dimension. The ?nal CST score is the lowest score on any of the four dimensions. For
example, if a hotel has a 90 on three dimensions and a 20 on the fourth, the overall score is a
20. Honey (2003, p. 11) refers to this as an ‘‘unusual and seemingly harsh scoring system’’
that encourages improvement. Finally, hotels receive green leaves to display based on their
?nal scores: 0-19 points receives 0 leaves, 20-39 receives 1 leaf, 40-59 receives 2 leaves,
60-79 receives 3 leaves, 80-94 receives 4 leaves, and 95-100 points receives 5 leaves. As of
this writing, only three hotels have all ?ve leaves and 5 hotels earned four leaves.
Australia’s Nature and Ecotourism Accreditation Program (NEAP) is based on eight criteria:
natural area focus, interpretation, environmental sustainability, contribution to conservation,
work with local communities, cultural component, customer satisfaction, and responsible
marketing. The NEAP allows self-assessment of yes/no questions and descriptive questions
in the eight areas. All core criteria must be met to receive the Eco Certi?ed logo. A trained
assessor is supposed to verify the self-assessment, but this does not systematically happen
due to a lack of funds. It is important to note that even in a country as wealthy as Australia,
there are not suf?cient funds for the veri?cation.
The Green Globe 21 is the most ambitious attempt at a global certi?cation program that
includes a wide range of activities, from hotels to bus companies to airports and
communities. The Green Globe certi?cation process is based on benchmarking and
established best practices for nine key areas; greenhouse gas emissions, energy
conservation and management, freshwater resource use, ambient air quality, wastewater
management, waste minimization, ecosystem conservation and management,
environmental and land-use planning, local impact and generating maximum local
employment. To be an af?liate and use the Green Globe af?liate ?ag, a company must pay
$100. This is the most popular status, though it is meant as a stepping-stone to
benchmarking. Displaying the more prestigious Green Globe circle logo requires a $1,000
fee from the company, a community fee of up to $5,000, plus the cost of independent
auditing, even though the value of the additional prestige is uncertain. To use the Green
Globe circle logo with a check, a company must exceed benchmarking and meet
established best practices (Koeman et al., 2002).
Honey (2003) is correct that the ideal certi?cation processes must account for both process
and performance. However, in the poorest of countries, many of which are experiencing
signi?cant growth in inbound tourism, the ideal might not be practicable. It is important to
note that countries such as Belize and Bolivia may not have the state capacity of Costa Rica
and Australia, and even those countries have not been able to fully implement their
measurement. If Paraguay set up an expensive and technical process-based measure for all
hotels and lodges, there would be a high likelihood of a long-term failure even if resources
were provided for the short term.
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Local input and design
One of the potentially powerful externalities of sustainable tourism certi?cation is the
education and incentives to businesses and citizens to learn, accept, and promote new
behaviors that support the vision of tourism development that each country decides best
re?ects their vision of and priorities for sustainable development. In wealthier countries with
established institutions, strong bureaucracies, and long-established post-materialist values,
this is achievable through process, regulations, and mandates. However, in many
developing countries that lack the state capacity to enforce regulations and rely in large part
on voluntary compliance, the expense and technical complexity of process-based
certi?cation make that unrealistic. In some cases, local communities, businesses, and
workers must alter existing values and embrace sustainable norms and will not respond
favorably if they feel forced to meet what may appear as unreasonable measures. Tying
sustainable attitudes with tourism can be a potent force for value shifts. Education and
promotion of sustainable values can change attitudes towards littering and pollution in a
single generation; if the population believes that eco-friendly national tourism branding
brings jobs, then attitudes can shift even more rapidly (Bowman and Jennings, 2005).
Moreover, the standards, complexity, and costs of participation in sustainable tourism
certi?cation must be lower than the perceived bene?ts that accrue to the businesses.
Otherwise the paper park syndrome will be replicated in paper sustainable tourism
certi?cation where the advances might look good on paper, but in actuality are quite limited.
The challenges of process-based indices such as ISO 14001 for poor countries are dif?cult
to overcome, even with an initial in?ux of resources from an NGO, government, or
international institution. It is not only that these highly technical measures are expensive and
require extensive technical skills. For one, the technical nature can lead to a lack of
transparency: it is easy for local stakeholders to judge that a hotel is dumping sewage into
the lagoon (performance), but dif?cult for them verify that the ISO numbers are correct
(process). More importantly, developing countries often lack the institutions to regulate and
oversee the implementation of a process-based sustainable tourism index for a large
industry such as tourism. Process-based indices are most suited to large enterprises, and
many developing countries intentionally encourage small family-owned enterprises as part
of a national tourism plan. The ISO process is simply unsuited for developing countries that
encourage local ownership of hotels and other tourism enterprises, as the cost for a medium
sized business can reach up to $40,000 and $400,000 for a large hotel (Honey, 2003;
Skinner et al., 2004). Sustainable certi?cation programs in wealthy countries throughout
Europe gravitate towards process-based certi?cation while developing countries such as
Costa Rica select performance-based models. Even in countries as wealthy as Spain, the
?rst time certi?cation costs of up to 7,500 Euros and subsequent annual fees of 2,500 Euros,
which are considerably lower than ISO 14001 process, are an signi?cant obstacle for the
EMS ecolabel adoption in the hotel industry even with public funding programs and
technical assistance (Ayuso, 2007, pp. 151-52). If these costs are an impediment in Spain,
they are untenable in places like Nicaragua. Even if a panel of experts concludes that the
process-based measures are more objective and consistent than performance-based
certi?cation, they are so likely to fail to exhibit staying power in poor countries that great
caution must be exercised wherever process dominates performance.
The decision to favor process or performance illustrates how decisions based on technical
issues can shape policy, equity, and power in poor countries. The tourism hotels and
companies in developing countries who are able to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the
ISO process will often be multinational chains. Family-owned lodges and hotels in Costa
Rica face a much greater burden for a process-based assessment than a Marriot or Accor
property. Therefore, if Costa Rica selects a process-based certi?cation program, the entire
tourism industry would tilt towards multinational corporations and away from locally owned
businesses. There are good reasons to nurture smaller enterprises, particularly if
sustainability goals include the reduction of leakage, the increase in better employment
for locals, the consumption of locally grown food, authentic cultural experiences, and
environmental buy-in from local stakeholders. While there is general agreement in the
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literature that some local input in necessary, in the developing world stakeholder
participation must be enthusiastic and fundamental (Medina, 2005), and that enthusiastic
support will be more likely with performance-base instruments that favor social and cultural
concerns (Honey, 2002, p. 33).
There are two important reasons for the trend toward global standardization. First,
supporters argue that the value of a certi?cation and the use of logos and branding for
meeting certi?cation would be enhanced if tourism establishments used a universally
recognized seal of approval to lure and assure environmentally conscious tourists (Koeman
et al., 2002). And second, the lack of a global accreditation body has led to different
de?nitions of sustainable tourism, false claims of greenness by actors who are not so green
(greenwashing), and confusion.
The evidence, however, suggests that the arguments for standardization are heavily
outweighed by the bene?ts of locally designed certi?cation programs. In a systematic study,
Font and Buckley (2001) ?nd no effects, including on the marketing and promotion side, of
ecolabels. There is no compelling evidence for tourists wanting standardized ecotourism
labels, and therefore there is no need for an international system. While tourists will claim in
theory that they will pay 5-10 percent more to stay at sustainable hotels, there is scant
evidence that they will actually pay it in practice (Higgins, 2006). Ayuso ?nds that ecolabels
have no effect on bringing more tourists to a hotel or in allowing a hotel to charge higher
rates. As one hotel owner explains (quoted in Ayuso, 2007, p. 151): ‘‘A sales increase
because of the ecolabel? Zero.’’ Even one of the most emphatic proponents of an
international standard and single logo, Green Globe, has three logos, the af?liate ?ag that
requires nothing more than $100, a globe without a tick that requires benchmarking and a
higher fee, and a globe with a tick that is reserved for those establishments meeting a higher
standard. Green Globe asserts that there is value in being able to use the green globe logo
that is widely identi?ed with the program. Yet, few entities choose to pay the benchmarking
price and are apparently content to use the Af?liates’ Green Globe ?ag that requires no
action at all. Over 100 tourist interviews in ?ve countries conducted for this research did not
reveal a single individual who sees any additional value in staying at a Green Globe logo
hotel over a Green Flag logo hotel. While this survey is limited, it supports the extant literature
that ?nds no empirical value for universal logos.
The bene?t that accrues internationally and ?nancially is to the sustainable destination
country itself, and not to the individual properties. Costa Rica is perhaps the most successful
in branding itself, with regular stories in the press about the CST and Blue Flag beach
programs, its award-winning ‘‘No Arti?cial Ingredients’’ ad campaign, and its decision to set
aside huge percentages of its land as national parks (PR Newswire, 2002). The limited
evidence that individual properties bene?t from sustainable certi?cation is for those rare
hotels with superior environmental performance across the entire range of sustainability
dimensions (Rivera, 2002).
Global standardization takes policy power away from local government and tilts the process
in favor of wealthier countries whose goals are more technical and centered on the process;
poor countries more often view sustainable tourism as including issues of distribution, local
content of food and products, and cultural issues. Flexibility in de?ning green tourism is a
process that can then be a powerful tool to not only encourage the meeting of certain
sustainable standards, but also in educating stakeholders and citizens about the
conceptualization of sustainability that best re?ects the particular development vision of
the country. Indeed, the process of each developing country in deciding which types of
sustainability to emphasize is an important part of the process of voluntary buy-in and
ownership that is lost with global standards imposed from outside.
For example, an ethnically heterogeneous country like Fiji or Bolivia is much more likely than
Japan or Uruguay to consider support of indigenous businesses, local foods, and authentic
indigenous cultural activities as crucial for sustainable tourism activities. The bene?ts of
universally recognized logos are presently abstract and unsubstantiated, and do not
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compensate for the lost bene?ts of local participation in conceptualizing and developing
local certi?cation programs and local sustainable logos.
The local design of the dimensions of sustainability for each country and the accompanying
logo are an important part of country branding. Costa Rica uses leaves for hotels and blue
?ags for the beaches, tying into the international branding of nature tourism, natural parks,
and an abundance of ?ora and fauna. Fijian of?cials are developing a logo that builds on the
brand of friendly and authentic indigenous communities. Different countries have different
conditions, needs, and goals, and a certi?cation program and the logo are, in best practice,
an outcome of an important national dialogue and a potentially crucial component both of
national identity and international branding in the international inbound tourism market.
Fuzzy logic and multidimensional concepts
The complex nature of sustainability, that it maintains both gradated and dichotomous
dimensions, adds an additional challenge to sustainable tourism certi?cation, one
overlooked by the academic community. The majority of the certi?cation schemes in
place and even those building global acceptance do not account for both dimensions. A
tourism enterprise or destination either is or is not sustainable or is moving toward or away
from sustainability. Only the application of fuzzy-logic as an aggregation mechanism to
certi?cation schemes can maintain theoretical ?delity since the concept of sustainability has
both gradated and dichotomous dimensions. The use of fuzzy set theory in the social
sciences is the subject of many excellent recent works (see Smithson and Verkuilen, 2006;
Ragin, 2000; Ragin and Pennings, 2005) and it is not our purpose here to discuss fuzzy sets
in any detail. Fuzzy set theory emerged in response to classical set theory where objects
could be precisely de?ned as being part of a set or not. In the mathematical world objects
often ?t neatly into crisp sets, but empirical objects often do not easily ?t either into one set or
another (Smithson and Verkuilen, 2006, p. 6). One example of this is the heap of sand. We
can easily imagine a heap of sand. We can subtract a grain of sand at a time, but there is no
precise point at which the reduction of one grain of sand transforms the resulting pile from a
heap to a non-heap.
Issues such as greenness, democracy, human development, and poverty are similar to the
heap of sand in that it is impossible to precisely de?ne with any theoretical ?delity precise
dichotomous crisp sets. While we may have an arbitrary division that a family of four earning
$17,999 is poor and another family that earns $18,000 is not poor, in the real world this
distinction is completely arti?cial and the family earning the extra dollar per year is unlikely to
feel any better off than the of?cially poor family.
Some sustainable tourism certi?cation programs are also dichotomous, such as Green
Globe. Either a company meets all of the benchmarks to receive the round logo or they do
not. There are two principal problems with this. First, there is no theoretical ?delity. Imagine
two hotels with identical scores on every measure except one, with one hotel barely over the
proper benchmarking score on the ?nal measure and one hotel barely below. One hotel
would be certi?ed as Green Globe certi?ed and the other would not, even though the
difference between the two could be reasonably accounted for by measurement error or a
rounding error by the hotel owner following the benchmarking guide. A reasonable observer
in the community, however, would be unlikely to be able to declare which of these two
establishments should be able to exhibit the sustainable certi?cation; is one hotel really
sustainable and the other not sustainable? Even worse, Hotel A could have near perfect
scores on every attribute except one, and barely miss clearing the bar on that one attribute,
while Hotel B could be barely above the bar on all attributes. Stakeholders would realize that
Hotel A was in fact more sustainable even though only Hotel B could exhibit the sustainable
certi?cation logo. The dichotomous sustainable tourism certi?cations do not pass the
common sense test. Still worse for the certi?cation programs in the developing world are the
heaven or hell consequences. If a locally owned hotel in Ecuador works to green its facility,
and barely misses the cut, it receives the same bene?t (completely not green) as a
neighbouring hotel that did nothing, creating a strong disincentive to expend resources for
sustainability. As established earlier, one of the major goals in developing sustainable
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certi?cation programs in developing countries is to encourage participation and education
by all stakeholders. Participation is much more likely to occur in the developing world with
carrots than with sticks. Dichotomous aggregation also provides an incentive to hotels to do
the bare minimum to get over the minimum threshold for sustainability, and then never
improve.
An alternative option to dichotomous (all or nothing, yes or no) aggregation of certi?cation
indices is gradation or continuous measures. Instead of thinking of a heap or not a heap, one
could simply have a measure of the size of the sand pile based on the number of grains of
sand (or ounces or pounds or cubic meters). This would add precision. In ecotourism
certi?cation, a gradated score could have a number of questions and a score for each
question, and then sum up a ?nal score, or average the different dimensions, and even
convert the ?nal score to a 0-100 or 0-10 index. While this seems like a simple solution to the
aggregation problem of the dichotomous scales, this solution is also unsatisfactory. These
continuous measures may have theoretical ?delity when measuring a single-dimensional
concept like grains of sand or dollars per year, but lose all theoretical ?delity when
measuring multidimensional concepts such as human development or democracy or
sustainable tourism.
While it is universally agreed that sustainable tourism is a concept that is comprised of
multiple dimensions, there is wide-ranging disagreement on what those dimensions are, and
there are some dimensions that are country-speci?c appropriate. A hypothetical example is
a sustainable tourismcerti?cation programbased on three simpli?ed dimensions: waste and
pollution, education and green services to clients, and bene?ts to local communities. The
certi?cation instrument has ten questions for each dimension, for a total possible score of 30.
For this example, assume that all questions are weighted equally. Imagine a hotel, the Green
Inn, that is completing its assessment for certi?cation. The Green Inn earns a perfect score
on two of the three dimensions, education/green services to clients and inclusion of local
communities. However, the Green Inn scores a zero on waste and pollution. Untreated
sewage is pumped directly into the river. Vehicles are old diesels that belch pollution into the
air. Trash is dumped into a nearby park. Should the Green Inn be rewarded with a
sustainable tourism score of 67/100 (20/30) and be allowed to display a recognition of their
greenness? This type of scoring lacks any theoretical ?delity, makes a mockery of green
scoring, and would quickly lose the necessary support of the local stakeholders.
Neither dichotomous nor gradated measures maintain theoretical ?delity. The appropriate
aggregation technique for sustainable tourism certi?cation is fuzzy set logic. There are four
important attributes of fuzzy sets for aggregating a multidimensional concept such as
sustainable tourism (Smithson and Verkuilin, 2006, pp. 1-2; see also see Bowman et al.,
2005):
1. They are able to handle vagueness systematically.
2. They are able to aggregate concepts that have both a categorical and a dimensional
character.
3. Fuzzy set theory combines set-wise thinking and continuous variables in a rigorous
fashion.
4. Results will have theoretical ?delity and will be understandable to the local community.
Sustainable tourism certi?cation should follow the same model for aggregation. The
dimensions or attributes of sustainable tourismchosen by each country should be viewed as
a group of necessary conditions that are jointly suf?cient for sustainable tourism. Without
being explicit, this is precisely what the Costa Ricans chose for the CST. The CST has ?ve
dimensions and the ?nal score is the lowest score of any of the dimensions (all dimensions
are necessary, and jointly suf?cient). Honey calls this aggregation ‘‘unusual and seemingly
harsh’’ (Honey, 2003, p. 11), but it is not harsh at all. Rather, it is the best way of aggregating
multiple dimensions of a single concept such as sustainable tourism. The Costa Ricans
intuitively realize that neither dichotomous nor gradated measures can adequately represent
a company’s sustainable tourism score. And they are right. Instead of the three-level scoring
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of the democracy scale, the Costa Ricans have a slightly more complex ?ve-level scoring
(0-19 points receives 0 leaves, 20-39 receives 1 leaf, 40-59 receives 2 leaves, 60-79 receives
3 leaves, 80-94 receives 4 leaves, and 95-100 points receives 5 leaves). For the sake of
ease, developing countries should start with a three-value system, and increase to a four or
?ve-value system after successful implementation.
Conclusion
Sustainable certi?cation is a powerful tool for international branding and marketing for
developing countries that see sustainable tourism as an important component in their
development strategy. Sustainable certi?cation programs in the developing world should
meet several conditions. First, performance should be favoured over process. Second, the
dimensions or attributes of sustainability should be locally determined. Third, the program
and logos should be local and designed to enhance national branding for inbound tourism
and encourage change in national attitudes and behaviours. Fourth, the aggregation of the
multiple dimensions and attributes should be neither dichotomous nor gradated, but based
on fuzzy set theory. Fifth, the program must not start out too ambitiously, because a failed
program also reduces state capacity and reduces the likelihood of success in future
attempts. How should a developing country proceed? The ?rst step is to set out the goals of
certi?cation.
The elements of sustainable tourism certi?cation goals are:
1. In advanced industrial countries:
B De?ne and enforce environmentally sustainable practices in hotels and other tourism
businesses.
B Educate owners, employees, and clients and change behaviour in all three.
B Use the signi?cant capacity of the state to enforce.
2. In developing countries:
B Have national dialogue about the type of sustainable tourism for the country.
B Develop the dimensions of sustainability that stakeholders support.
B Develop logos and other elements that enhance national branding.
B Provide bene?ts to local communities and indigenous communities.
B Build legitimacy for the program, such that participation is voluntary and supportive.
B Use limited capacity of the state to coordinate and reward.
B Create a certi?cation program that is limited in complexity and cost, rewards
participation, and has incentives for improvement.
As shown above, these goals are broader and more comprehensive in the developing world
than in advanced industrial countries, and these differences must be understood to increase
the likelihood of success.
Sustainable tourism certi?cation is an important element in greening the industry. In the
developing world, an ambitious but ultimately failed programundermines state capacity and
future programs. The process of building a sustainable certi?cation process can be a
powerful tool for building national development consensus and engendering legitimate and
enhanced state capacity.
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doc_468153091.pdf
The purpose of this paper is to examine the state of sustainable tourism certification in
developing countries and to present methodological and practical critiques and improvements.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
Sustainable tourism certification and state capacity: keep it local, simple, and fuzzy
Kirk S. Bowman
Article information:
To cite this document:
Kirk S. Bowman, (2011),"Sustainable tourism certification and state capacity: keep it local, simple, and fuzzy", International J ournal of
Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 5 Iss 3 pp. 269 - 281
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Sustainable tourism certi?cation and state
capacity: keep it local, simple, and fuzzy
Kirk S. Bowman
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the state of sustainable tourism certi?cation in
developing countries and to present methodological and practical critiques and improvements.
Design/methodology/approach – The study uses methodological re?nements of fuzzy logic and
comparative analysis based on ?eldwork in seven countries.
Findings – Sustainable tourism programs should be locally designed with local logos, largely
performance-based, and aggregation should be based on fuzzy logic concepts of necessary and jointly
suf?cient attributes of sustainable tourism.
Originality/value – The paper uses political science concepts of state capacity and methodological
advances of fuzzy logic to provide keys for successful sustainable tourism certi?cation programs in
developing countries.
Keywords Tourism management, Quali?cation, Ecotourism, Sustainable tourism, State capacity,
Fuzzy logic
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
International tourismincreasingly affects every corner of the globe. By 2007, over 900 million
tourists crossed international borders for their holidays, generating revenues of US $856
billion (www.unwto.org). While growth is signi?cant in Western Europe and other developed
countries, international tourism growth in developing nations is even more impressive with
many countries using their attractive ‘‘sea, sand and sun’’ to climb the development ladder.
Growth in East Asia and the Paci?c, for example, increased from 190,000 international world
tourist arrivals in 1950 to over 70 million in 1993, while international tourism revenues in Latin
America and the Caribbean reached some US $37.3 billion in 2005 (www.unwto.org). For
many, tourism is a magical industry that brings foreign currency and jobs without
smokestacks. However, it is also increasingly apparent that tourists destroy the very things
that they come for (Honey, 1999). Interest in alternate forms of tourismarose as a response to
the exploitative aspects of the new mass tourism whose growth is strongest in developing
countries.
By the late 1980s, the governments of most countries as well as the United Nations noted the
increase in global tourism and the industry’s deleterious effects to the environment and
society of those countries in which it was most rapidly expanding. In 1992 the international
agreement of both the Rio Declaration on the Environment and Development and the
Agenda 21 marked the emergence of a global awareness of new issues arising with tourism
and globalization. In 1995 the ?rst World Conference on Sustainable Tourism was held
further identifying the need of tourism to develop in ways compatible with the tourist states.
By the late 1990s governments and international organizations were clearly interested in
regulating the tourist industry and educating both hosts and participants. Community
DOI 10.1108/17506181111156961 VOL. 5 NO. 3 2011, pp. 269-281, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
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PAGE 269
Kirk S. Bowman is an
Associate Professor at the
Sam Nunn School of
International Affairs,
Georgia Institute of
Technology, Atlanta,
Georgia, USA.
Received: April 2009
Revised: June 2010
Accepted: June 2010
The author would like to thank
Rachel Bankeser for research
as a President’s Undergraduate
Research Assistant at Georgia
Tech. Danny Breznitz, Peter
Brecke, Zachery Taylor, and
Virginia Webber provided
useful comments and
suggestions on an earlier draft.
This project is supported by the
International Conservation
Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) Fiji
Program, with funding from the
National Institutes of Health
(USA) and the National Science
Foundation. Generous support
was provided by the Center for
International Business and
Education Research (CIBER) at
Georgia Tech, the Georgia Tech
Foundation, and the Sam Nunn
School of International Affairs.
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leaders and other local stakeholders also began to exert pressure from below to alter the
tourism product in order to protect the environment, emphasize local culture and products,
and share tourism revenues with local communities. Green, sustainable, and eco-friendly
are now ubiquitous terms in tourism policy papers, regulations, and promotional materials.
Precisely what sustainable tourism actually means is debatable. Economically advanced
countries portray sustainability as dealing with the environment, while developing countries
view it to include signi?cant economic and political components.
As governments, environmental groups, tourism organizations, tourists, and others focused
on sustainability, efforts began to conceptualize, measure, and standardize sustainable
tourism practices and to create certi?cation programs. From 2000-2004, at least 48
countries created or de?ned national eco-tourismstrategies (Higgins, 2006), though in many
countries the efforts are still insuf?cient (Medina, 2005; Mycoo, 2006). In North America
alone there are over 50 certi?cation schemes. While a general consensus exists for some
standardization, important debates about conceptualization and measurement endure
(Buckley, 2002; Font, 2002; Font and Harris, 2004; Honey, 2002, 2003). To explore these
debates, research for this paper includes dozens of interviews with stakeholders and
of?cials and sustained observation of attempted implementation and practice of sustainable
tourism certi?cation in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Fiji, and Honduras.
Political science brings a perspective that highlights two important issues of sustainable
certi?cation. First, that the principal positive bene?ts of sustainable tourism indices and
measures in the poorest countries are not the establishment of internationally recognized
and technically rigorous measurement. Rather, development and implementation of
sustainable tourism certi?cation in poor countries is a process that can result in an important
dialogue and policy-making process about the type of tourism development that a country
wishes to pursue, greater awareness in the business community of the needs and
contributions of the local communities, and a shift in attitudes across sectors and
generations. Previous survey work in Costa Rica suggests that a sustained effort in
promoting sustainable tourism leads to greener attitude shifts in the general population and
most strongly in the youth (Bowman and Jennings, 2005). Indeed, a strategy based on
international standards could have a net negative effect for sustainable practices in
developing countries. In a survey of existing studies and literature, Adams et al. (2004) ?nd
that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is a negative relationship between conservation
efforts and social development of local communities. And Silva (2003) demonstrates howthe
selling of environmental sustainability can actually undermine the fabric of social equity in
places like Costa Rica. Poverty eradication and conservation of the environment, unless
carefully planned, are often at cross-purposes. Local stakeholder support can quickly erode
if the local bene?ts are not emphasized.
The second perspective that a political science perspective brings to the certi?cation
debate is an awareness of the importance of state capacity. State capacity is the ability of a
government to develop and successfully implement effective policies. A distinguished
group of political scientists and political economists including Hirschman (1958),
Gerschenkron (1962), Evans (1979), North (1990), Schneider and Heredia (2003), and
Breznitz (2007) argue that state capacity is a crucial element in political and economic
development. Huber (1995, p. 167) assesses state capacity by conceptualizing state
strength broadly as the ability to achieve four goals:
1. enforcement of the rule of law throughout the state’s entire territory and population (legal
order);
2. promotion of economic growth (accumulation);
3. elicitation of voluntary compliance fromthe population over which the state claims control
(legitimation); and
4. shaping of the allocation of societal resources (distribution).
The developing world requires greater state capacity and must avoid actions that reduce
state strength. The announcement of new policies or programs that are subsequently
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discarded, unmet or obvious failures not only represent opportunity costs and failures for the
particular program, but contribute to a weakening of state capacity as they undermine
voluntary compliance (legitimation). For example, if government, stakeholders, and NGOs
adopt a dif?cult and stringent international certi?cation program, spend resources and
energies in the implementation, and get buy-in from local stakeholders through meetings
and regulations, any subsequent abandonment or failure of the program not only reveals a
lack of state capacity, but also makes it harder to implement voluntary compliance for future
programs. This can initiate a vicious downward cycle of state failure where government
announcements of new policies and programs are met with skepticism and policy fatigue. A
modest certi?cation program, successfully implemented and maintained, is far superior to a
more robust certi?cation program that is unlikely to survive. The technically best certi?cation
program might not result in the best outcome without suf?cient existing state capacity, and
that capacity is insuf?cient in much of the developing world.
The work done by Buckley (2002), Font (2002), Honey (1999, 2002) and others to green
tourismand to certify sustainable practices is laudable. However, the current discussion fails
to resolve two key issues and ignores a third issue, all of which are crucial for successful
sustainable tourism certi?cation in the poorest countries of the developing world.
The ?rst unresolved issue that is addressed in the literature is the tradeoff between
process-based and performance-based certi?cation measures. Performance-based
measurements are much more likely to be successfully implemented in developing
countries than are process-based measures. Process-based measures are technical and
expensive. Resources are limited in poor countries and state capacity and institutions
necessary to monitor, assess, and enforce compliance for process-based indicators are far
different in Bolivia and New Zealand.
The second contested issue deals with universality and whether programs should be global
with a universally recognized logo, or whether the programs should be largely based on
local conditions, with locally designed logos. The components of sustainable tourism
development in places like Fiji, Belize, Australia, Singapore, and Sweden are not the same.
The sustainable tourism certi?cation process must provide governments and stakeholders
with an opportunity to carefully consider such factors as the type of tourism that they want,
the amount of local cultural and economic participation involved, and the products and
activities to be encouraged (Brinkerhoff, 1996; Medina, 2005). These local conditions and
goals cannot be window-dressing to satisfy local concerns, but must be a major component
of the sustainable index conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation. The evidence is
quite clear that local actors should design local instruments with locally recognized logos.
Sustainable tourism certi?cation is long-term process in the developing world, and locally
developed performance measures are the most likely to generate the necessary and
voluntary buy-in from a large range of local stakeholders for long-term success. In
developing countries, certi?cation conceptualization must be organic and local and the
process should be relatively simple to implement. In addition, the national dialogue and
development of sustainable tourism certi?cation can play an important role in national
branding as a tourism destination.
One key reason for the organic necessity of tourism logo and the components of greenness
is power. Marsano and Scott (2009) convincingly employ the theories on power from the
social sciences to reveal how power is used in destination branding in a fairly sophisticated
and resource-rich region – Australia’s Gold Coast. Issues of power are even more relevant in
developing countries with lower levels of education and resources.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the current discussion fails to systematically consider
one of the most crucial aspects of the certi?cation instrument, aggregation of indicators or
attributes to a ?nal score or sustainable ranking. Sustainable tourism, as with concepts such
as democracy and human development (Smithson and Verkuilen, 2006, p. 21), is a concept
that is comprised of multiple dimensions. It is theoretically dif?cult, if not impossible, to add
or aggregate multiple dimensions to a ?nal gradated or dichotomous score while retaining
theoretical ?delity. One way to satisfactorily aggregate a multidimensional concept such as
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sustainable tourism is with fuzzy sets. Without the theoretical ?delity that can only be
achieved through the use of fuzzy sets, local stakeholders may abandon sustainable tourism
programs.
Sustainable tourism certi?cation programs in the developing world must meet four criteria to
be most successful. First, the program must favor cultural and social concerns in order to
gain support of local stakeholders and must be based on cooperative or voluntary
compliance from businesses and other stakeholders in the developing world; therefore, the
program must be suitable for success in an environment of limited state capacity and
performance should outweigh process. Second, the conceptualization of green or
sustainable must be organic and conceptualized by local actors. Efforts to create a single
instrument that can be used in multiple dissimilar countries are not practical. Third, the
likelihood of long-term success of any program must be suf?ciently high to limit the
possibility of a failed program weakening existing state capacity. Fourth, the instrument and
design must maintain theoretical ?delity. If these four conditions are met, the chances of a
successful program are much greater, leading to a potential virtuous circle of capacity
building in the state and in the local communities.
This paper will proceed as follows: The ?rst section presents the importance of ecotourism
certi?cation in destination branding and marketing for small economies (cities, states,
regions, or countries). The second section summarizes the evolution of ecotourism
certi?cation and brie?y introduces several existing instruments. The third section discusses
the need for local input in customizing local content in tourism certi?cation indices and the
positive bene?ts of voluntary compliance in developing countries. This leads to the
conclusion that local performance-based certi?cation programs are best for poor countries.
The paper presents the shortcomings of dichotomous or gradated measures of greenness
and discusses the utility of fuzzy sets for aggregating multidimensional concepts.
The importance of ecotourism certi?cation in destination branding
The destination brand is a powerful tool that can conjure emotional appeal and that brand
image is crucial for differentiation and success of a tourism initiative (Leisen, 2001). Hosani
et al. (2006) use canonical correlation analysis to demonstrate that this emotional image
captures the majority of variance on destination personality dimensions. For larger cities,
countries, and regions, a host of tools and options are available for destination branding.
Among these options are global events, in particular sports. A good deal has been written
about the leveraging of the World Cup, the Euro Cup (particularly in Portugal in 2004), the
Olympics (particularly the Barcelona games), and sports in general (Nauright, 2004). State
tourism of?cials in Rio de Janeiro identi?ed sports as the principal mechanism for
re-branding the city, wanting to emulate Barcelona tourism branding as a model, and using
the Panamerican Games (2007), the World Cup (2014), the World Military Games (2011) and
the bid for the 2016 Olympics to springboard this new brand.
Buenos Aires (13 million inhabitants) has a different model based on cultural instead of
sporting events. According to Herna´ n Lombardi, the former national tourism minister and
current culture minister of the city of Buenos Aires, the destination brand and emotional
connection for Buenos Aires emerge through a series of big cultural events such as tango
festivals, regional book festivals, design events, opera, and ?lm festivals (interview by
author, 1 June 2009). These heavily orchestrated events bring in tourists from around the
region and the world, and help to create the image of Buenos Aires as fashionable and hip
(see Cornelissen (2005) for a description of the creation of a similar image in Capetown).
Unfortunately, event and sports tourism do not have the same punch in small towns and
small developing countries (Daniels, 2007). The destination brand and emotional appeal of
the brand image for small entities is often related to culture and markers of identity. One
important dimension of branding and differentiation for places like Papua New Guinea,
Tonga, and Belize is sustainable and cultural tourism. Small places, even in wealthier
countries, have recently moved to the concept of Geotourism, de?ned as: tourism that
sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place – its environment, culture,
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aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents (see www.nationalgeographic.com/
travel/sustainable/about_geotourism.html). Sustainable tourismcerti?cation that focuses too
heavily on process and benchmarks will eliminate an important branding and marketing tool
for small developing countries.
Existing measures of tourism certi?cation
The challenges that tourism certi?cation instruments face is unsurprising as green tourism is
a complex multidimensional concept and practitioners have only recently begun to seriously
consider the rami?cations and challenges of certi?cation mechanics. Indeed, the ?rst
attempt to standardize the de?nition or conceptualization of sustainable tourism
development came in 2000 when a group of leading scholars and practitioners of
sustainable tourism gathered in Canada and drafted the Mohonk Agreement. The
agreement determined that ‘‘sustainable tourism seeks to minimize ecological and
socio-cultural impacts while providing economic bene?ts to local communities and host
countries’’ (Honey, 2002, p. 375). On its most basic level, sustainable tourism development
is only realistic if all stakeholders can agree on priorities: ecological maintenance, local
community, and tourist satisfaction. Achieving sustainable development proves to be
dif?cult because there is a bounty of advice for stakeholders but a shortage of resources,
excessive pressure from demand, and a hedonistic philosophy among tourism operators
despite increased awareness of the local community.
The implementation of tourism certi?cation is one way to encourage sustainable tourism and
to harmonize the conceptualization of sustainable practice. Martha Honey (2003), the
pre-eminent scholar on certi?cation schemes, de?nes certi?cation as a set of procedures
that audits and gives written assurance that a facility, product, process, service or
management system meets speci?c standards or sustainability. It awards a logo or seal or
other indicator to those who meet or exceed established criteria or standards. According to
the World Tourism Organization’s Voluntary Initiatives for Sustainable Tourism, over 260
voluntary initiatives exist, including 104 eco-labeling and certi?cation programs. Invariably,
different criteria are used within the plethora of certi?cation programs to indicate
sustainability. Two main divisions exist in the measurement of sustainability.
One school, supported by the World Tourism Organization, is process-based certi?cation,
an example being Environmental Management System. This form of certi?cation focuses on
management and technical solutions to improve environmental ef?ciency of a destination.
Common criticisms of programs like Green Leaf, Green Globe, and ISO140001 for hotels (all
of which rely on process-based certi?cation measures) is that they focus on the gray
characteristics like wastewater processing and removal rather than the green
characteristics tourists are concerned with, like protection of the local environment. The
high implementation costs of such programs and the fact that what a business does is trivial
yet how they do it matters are two weaknesses of process-based certi?cation. Given the
costs of these programs, their potential is limited for the large number of poor countries that
are embracing ecotourism and seeking mechanisms for sustainable standards and
certi?cation. Moreover, while benchmarking and process based measures have theoretical
appeal, the practical viability is in question for the tourism industry. As Warnken et al. (2005)
demonstrate, it is not viable to establish benchmarking for something as simple as water
consumption even in a wealthy country like Australia, as factors such as age of buildings,
early stage resort planning, climate, and the extent of communal facilities are more
important. The authors ?nd that fully accredited eco-resorts used more water than
non-accredited resorts. As such, they have considerable concern for industry administered
accreditation schemes.
The second school, performance-based certi?cation, determines the goals or targets
requiring achievement to attain certi?cation and hold the same standard to all companies
and products seeking the certi?cation. The popular CST programs in Costa Rica uses such
performance-based certi?cation systems whose drawbacks are the dif?culty in measuring
many standards, the lack of common de?nition of sustainability targets, and the lack of
agreed on methodologies for determining some indicators, like carrying capacity. These can
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lead to charges of greenwashers (Johnson, 2002) and the proliferation of certi?cation
schemes that dilute the impact of certi?cation for branding and lead to confusion (Font,
2002). Bendell and Font (2004) also present a fascinating discussion about how certain
performance-based schemes with emphasis on local development and consumption of
local products might fail to meet GATT standards and treaties.
To Honey (2003), the future of sustainable tourism certi?cation lies in the fusion of process-
and performance-based certi?cation standards. Building on this fusion is one of the biggest
challenges that currently exist for certi?cation.
Current programs vary greatly on target, conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation.
These programs all divide sustainability or greenness into categories or components, as the
one point that is in universal agreement is that tourism sustainability is a concept comprising
multiple dimensions. For example, the Costa Rican CST measures four dimensions or
components of sustainable tourism: biological and physical surroundings, physical plant,
external clients, and socioeconomic context (Bien, 2002, pp. 147-49). The CST has 152
yes/no questions to measure compliance on these four dimensions. Each question is
weighted on a one to three scale, and a formula is used to calculate the ?nal score in each
dimension. The ?nal CST score is the lowest score on any of the four dimensions. For
example, if a hotel has a 90 on three dimensions and a 20 on the fourth, the overall score is a
20. Honey (2003, p. 11) refers to this as an ‘‘unusual and seemingly harsh scoring system’’
that encourages improvement. Finally, hotels receive green leaves to display based on their
?nal scores: 0-19 points receives 0 leaves, 20-39 receives 1 leaf, 40-59 receives 2 leaves,
60-79 receives 3 leaves, 80-94 receives 4 leaves, and 95-100 points receives 5 leaves. As of
this writing, only three hotels have all ?ve leaves and 5 hotels earned four leaves.
Australia’s Nature and Ecotourism Accreditation Program (NEAP) is based on eight criteria:
natural area focus, interpretation, environmental sustainability, contribution to conservation,
work with local communities, cultural component, customer satisfaction, and responsible
marketing. The NEAP allows self-assessment of yes/no questions and descriptive questions
in the eight areas. All core criteria must be met to receive the Eco Certi?ed logo. A trained
assessor is supposed to verify the self-assessment, but this does not systematically happen
due to a lack of funds. It is important to note that even in a country as wealthy as Australia,
there are not suf?cient funds for the veri?cation.
The Green Globe 21 is the most ambitious attempt at a global certi?cation program that
includes a wide range of activities, from hotels to bus companies to airports and
communities. The Green Globe certi?cation process is based on benchmarking and
established best practices for nine key areas; greenhouse gas emissions, energy
conservation and management, freshwater resource use, ambient air quality, wastewater
management, waste minimization, ecosystem conservation and management,
environmental and land-use planning, local impact and generating maximum local
employment. To be an af?liate and use the Green Globe af?liate ?ag, a company must pay
$100. This is the most popular status, though it is meant as a stepping-stone to
benchmarking. Displaying the more prestigious Green Globe circle logo requires a $1,000
fee from the company, a community fee of up to $5,000, plus the cost of independent
auditing, even though the value of the additional prestige is uncertain. To use the Green
Globe circle logo with a check, a company must exceed benchmarking and meet
established best practices (Koeman et al., 2002).
Honey (2003) is correct that the ideal certi?cation processes must account for both process
and performance. However, in the poorest of countries, many of which are experiencing
signi?cant growth in inbound tourism, the ideal might not be practicable. It is important to
note that countries such as Belize and Bolivia may not have the state capacity of Costa Rica
and Australia, and even those countries have not been able to fully implement their
measurement. If Paraguay set up an expensive and technical process-based measure for all
hotels and lodges, there would be a high likelihood of a long-term failure even if resources
were provided for the short term.
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Local input and design
One of the potentially powerful externalities of sustainable tourism certi?cation is the
education and incentives to businesses and citizens to learn, accept, and promote new
behaviors that support the vision of tourism development that each country decides best
re?ects their vision of and priorities for sustainable development. In wealthier countries with
established institutions, strong bureaucracies, and long-established post-materialist values,
this is achievable through process, regulations, and mandates. However, in many
developing countries that lack the state capacity to enforce regulations and rely in large part
on voluntary compliance, the expense and technical complexity of process-based
certi?cation make that unrealistic. In some cases, local communities, businesses, and
workers must alter existing values and embrace sustainable norms and will not respond
favorably if they feel forced to meet what may appear as unreasonable measures. Tying
sustainable attitudes with tourism can be a potent force for value shifts. Education and
promotion of sustainable values can change attitudes towards littering and pollution in a
single generation; if the population believes that eco-friendly national tourism branding
brings jobs, then attitudes can shift even more rapidly (Bowman and Jennings, 2005).
Moreover, the standards, complexity, and costs of participation in sustainable tourism
certi?cation must be lower than the perceived bene?ts that accrue to the businesses.
Otherwise the paper park syndrome will be replicated in paper sustainable tourism
certi?cation where the advances might look good on paper, but in actuality are quite limited.
The challenges of process-based indices such as ISO 14001 for poor countries are dif?cult
to overcome, even with an initial in?ux of resources from an NGO, government, or
international institution. It is not only that these highly technical measures are expensive and
require extensive technical skills. For one, the technical nature can lead to a lack of
transparency: it is easy for local stakeholders to judge that a hotel is dumping sewage into
the lagoon (performance), but dif?cult for them verify that the ISO numbers are correct
(process). More importantly, developing countries often lack the institutions to regulate and
oversee the implementation of a process-based sustainable tourism index for a large
industry such as tourism. Process-based indices are most suited to large enterprises, and
many developing countries intentionally encourage small family-owned enterprises as part
of a national tourism plan. The ISO process is simply unsuited for developing countries that
encourage local ownership of hotels and other tourism enterprises, as the cost for a medium
sized business can reach up to $40,000 and $400,000 for a large hotel (Honey, 2003;
Skinner et al., 2004). Sustainable certi?cation programs in wealthy countries throughout
Europe gravitate towards process-based certi?cation while developing countries such as
Costa Rica select performance-based models. Even in countries as wealthy as Spain, the
?rst time certi?cation costs of up to 7,500 Euros and subsequent annual fees of 2,500 Euros,
which are considerably lower than ISO 14001 process, are an signi?cant obstacle for the
EMS ecolabel adoption in the hotel industry even with public funding programs and
technical assistance (Ayuso, 2007, pp. 151-52). If these costs are an impediment in Spain,
they are untenable in places like Nicaragua. Even if a panel of experts concludes that the
process-based measures are more objective and consistent than performance-based
certi?cation, they are so likely to fail to exhibit staying power in poor countries that great
caution must be exercised wherever process dominates performance.
The decision to favor process or performance illustrates how decisions based on technical
issues can shape policy, equity, and power in poor countries. The tourism hotels and
companies in developing countries who are able to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the
ISO process will often be multinational chains. Family-owned lodges and hotels in Costa
Rica face a much greater burden for a process-based assessment than a Marriot or Accor
property. Therefore, if Costa Rica selects a process-based certi?cation program, the entire
tourism industry would tilt towards multinational corporations and away from locally owned
businesses. There are good reasons to nurture smaller enterprises, particularly if
sustainability goals include the reduction of leakage, the increase in better employment
for locals, the consumption of locally grown food, authentic cultural experiences, and
environmental buy-in from local stakeholders. While there is general agreement in the
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literature that some local input in necessary, in the developing world stakeholder
participation must be enthusiastic and fundamental (Medina, 2005), and that enthusiastic
support will be more likely with performance-base instruments that favor social and cultural
concerns (Honey, 2002, p. 33).
There are two important reasons for the trend toward global standardization. First,
supporters argue that the value of a certi?cation and the use of logos and branding for
meeting certi?cation would be enhanced if tourism establishments used a universally
recognized seal of approval to lure and assure environmentally conscious tourists (Koeman
et al., 2002). And second, the lack of a global accreditation body has led to different
de?nitions of sustainable tourism, false claims of greenness by actors who are not so green
(greenwashing), and confusion.
The evidence, however, suggests that the arguments for standardization are heavily
outweighed by the bene?ts of locally designed certi?cation programs. In a systematic study,
Font and Buckley (2001) ?nd no effects, including on the marketing and promotion side, of
ecolabels. There is no compelling evidence for tourists wanting standardized ecotourism
labels, and therefore there is no need for an international system. While tourists will claim in
theory that they will pay 5-10 percent more to stay at sustainable hotels, there is scant
evidence that they will actually pay it in practice (Higgins, 2006). Ayuso ?nds that ecolabels
have no effect on bringing more tourists to a hotel or in allowing a hotel to charge higher
rates. As one hotel owner explains (quoted in Ayuso, 2007, p. 151): ‘‘A sales increase
because of the ecolabel? Zero.’’ Even one of the most emphatic proponents of an
international standard and single logo, Green Globe, has three logos, the af?liate ?ag that
requires nothing more than $100, a globe without a tick that requires benchmarking and a
higher fee, and a globe with a tick that is reserved for those establishments meeting a higher
standard. Green Globe asserts that there is value in being able to use the green globe logo
that is widely identi?ed with the program. Yet, few entities choose to pay the benchmarking
price and are apparently content to use the Af?liates’ Green Globe ?ag that requires no
action at all. Over 100 tourist interviews in ?ve countries conducted for this research did not
reveal a single individual who sees any additional value in staying at a Green Globe logo
hotel over a Green Flag logo hotel. While this survey is limited, it supports the extant literature
that ?nds no empirical value for universal logos.
The bene?t that accrues internationally and ?nancially is to the sustainable destination
country itself, and not to the individual properties. Costa Rica is perhaps the most successful
in branding itself, with regular stories in the press about the CST and Blue Flag beach
programs, its award-winning ‘‘No Arti?cial Ingredients’’ ad campaign, and its decision to set
aside huge percentages of its land as national parks (PR Newswire, 2002). The limited
evidence that individual properties bene?t from sustainable certi?cation is for those rare
hotels with superior environmental performance across the entire range of sustainability
dimensions (Rivera, 2002).
Global standardization takes policy power away from local government and tilts the process
in favor of wealthier countries whose goals are more technical and centered on the process;
poor countries more often view sustainable tourism as including issues of distribution, local
content of food and products, and cultural issues. Flexibility in de?ning green tourism is a
process that can then be a powerful tool to not only encourage the meeting of certain
sustainable standards, but also in educating stakeholders and citizens about the
conceptualization of sustainability that best re?ects the particular development vision of
the country. Indeed, the process of each developing country in deciding which types of
sustainability to emphasize is an important part of the process of voluntary buy-in and
ownership that is lost with global standards imposed from outside.
For example, an ethnically heterogeneous country like Fiji or Bolivia is much more likely than
Japan or Uruguay to consider support of indigenous businesses, local foods, and authentic
indigenous cultural activities as crucial for sustainable tourism activities. The bene?ts of
universally recognized logos are presently abstract and unsubstantiated, and do not
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compensate for the lost bene?ts of local participation in conceptualizing and developing
local certi?cation programs and local sustainable logos.
The local design of the dimensions of sustainability for each country and the accompanying
logo are an important part of country branding. Costa Rica uses leaves for hotels and blue
?ags for the beaches, tying into the international branding of nature tourism, natural parks,
and an abundance of ?ora and fauna. Fijian of?cials are developing a logo that builds on the
brand of friendly and authentic indigenous communities. Different countries have different
conditions, needs, and goals, and a certi?cation program and the logo are, in best practice,
an outcome of an important national dialogue and a potentially crucial component both of
national identity and international branding in the international inbound tourism market.
Fuzzy logic and multidimensional concepts
The complex nature of sustainability, that it maintains both gradated and dichotomous
dimensions, adds an additional challenge to sustainable tourism certi?cation, one
overlooked by the academic community. The majority of the certi?cation schemes in
place and even those building global acceptance do not account for both dimensions. A
tourism enterprise or destination either is or is not sustainable or is moving toward or away
from sustainability. Only the application of fuzzy-logic as an aggregation mechanism to
certi?cation schemes can maintain theoretical ?delity since the concept of sustainability has
both gradated and dichotomous dimensions. The use of fuzzy set theory in the social
sciences is the subject of many excellent recent works (see Smithson and Verkuilen, 2006;
Ragin, 2000; Ragin and Pennings, 2005) and it is not our purpose here to discuss fuzzy sets
in any detail. Fuzzy set theory emerged in response to classical set theory where objects
could be precisely de?ned as being part of a set or not. In the mathematical world objects
often ?t neatly into crisp sets, but empirical objects often do not easily ?t either into one set or
another (Smithson and Verkuilen, 2006, p. 6). One example of this is the heap of sand. We
can easily imagine a heap of sand. We can subtract a grain of sand at a time, but there is no
precise point at which the reduction of one grain of sand transforms the resulting pile from a
heap to a non-heap.
Issues such as greenness, democracy, human development, and poverty are similar to the
heap of sand in that it is impossible to precisely de?ne with any theoretical ?delity precise
dichotomous crisp sets. While we may have an arbitrary division that a family of four earning
$17,999 is poor and another family that earns $18,000 is not poor, in the real world this
distinction is completely arti?cial and the family earning the extra dollar per year is unlikely to
feel any better off than the of?cially poor family.
Some sustainable tourism certi?cation programs are also dichotomous, such as Green
Globe. Either a company meets all of the benchmarks to receive the round logo or they do
not. There are two principal problems with this. First, there is no theoretical ?delity. Imagine
two hotels with identical scores on every measure except one, with one hotel barely over the
proper benchmarking score on the ?nal measure and one hotel barely below. One hotel
would be certi?ed as Green Globe certi?ed and the other would not, even though the
difference between the two could be reasonably accounted for by measurement error or a
rounding error by the hotel owner following the benchmarking guide. A reasonable observer
in the community, however, would be unlikely to be able to declare which of these two
establishments should be able to exhibit the sustainable certi?cation; is one hotel really
sustainable and the other not sustainable? Even worse, Hotel A could have near perfect
scores on every attribute except one, and barely miss clearing the bar on that one attribute,
while Hotel B could be barely above the bar on all attributes. Stakeholders would realize that
Hotel A was in fact more sustainable even though only Hotel B could exhibit the sustainable
certi?cation logo. The dichotomous sustainable tourism certi?cations do not pass the
common sense test. Still worse for the certi?cation programs in the developing world are the
heaven or hell consequences. If a locally owned hotel in Ecuador works to green its facility,
and barely misses the cut, it receives the same bene?t (completely not green) as a
neighbouring hotel that did nothing, creating a strong disincentive to expend resources for
sustainability. As established earlier, one of the major goals in developing sustainable
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certi?cation programs in developing countries is to encourage participation and education
by all stakeholders. Participation is much more likely to occur in the developing world with
carrots than with sticks. Dichotomous aggregation also provides an incentive to hotels to do
the bare minimum to get over the minimum threshold for sustainability, and then never
improve.
An alternative option to dichotomous (all or nothing, yes or no) aggregation of certi?cation
indices is gradation or continuous measures. Instead of thinking of a heap or not a heap, one
could simply have a measure of the size of the sand pile based on the number of grains of
sand (or ounces or pounds or cubic meters). This would add precision. In ecotourism
certi?cation, a gradated score could have a number of questions and a score for each
question, and then sum up a ?nal score, or average the different dimensions, and even
convert the ?nal score to a 0-100 or 0-10 index. While this seems like a simple solution to the
aggregation problem of the dichotomous scales, this solution is also unsatisfactory. These
continuous measures may have theoretical ?delity when measuring a single-dimensional
concept like grains of sand or dollars per year, but lose all theoretical ?delity when
measuring multidimensional concepts such as human development or democracy or
sustainable tourism.
While it is universally agreed that sustainable tourism is a concept that is comprised of
multiple dimensions, there is wide-ranging disagreement on what those dimensions are, and
there are some dimensions that are country-speci?c appropriate. A hypothetical example is
a sustainable tourismcerti?cation programbased on three simpli?ed dimensions: waste and
pollution, education and green services to clients, and bene?ts to local communities. The
certi?cation instrument has ten questions for each dimension, for a total possible score of 30.
For this example, assume that all questions are weighted equally. Imagine a hotel, the Green
Inn, that is completing its assessment for certi?cation. The Green Inn earns a perfect score
on two of the three dimensions, education/green services to clients and inclusion of local
communities. However, the Green Inn scores a zero on waste and pollution. Untreated
sewage is pumped directly into the river. Vehicles are old diesels that belch pollution into the
air. Trash is dumped into a nearby park. Should the Green Inn be rewarded with a
sustainable tourism score of 67/100 (20/30) and be allowed to display a recognition of their
greenness? This type of scoring lacks any theoretical ?delity, makes a mockery of green
scoring, and would quickly lose the necessary support of the local stakeholders.
Neither dichotomous nor gradated measures maintain theoretical ?delity. The appropriate
aggregation technique for sustainable tourism certi?cation is fuzzy set logic. There are four
important attributes of fuzzy sets for aggregating a multidimensional concept such as
sustainable tourism (Smithson and Verkuilin, 2006, pp. 1-2; see also see Bowman et al.,
2005):
1. They are able to handle vagueness systematically.
2. They are able to aggregate concepts that have both a categorical and a dimensional
character.
3. Fuzzy set theory combines set-wise thinking and continuous variables in a rigorous
fashion.
4. Results will have theoretical ?delity and will be understandable to the local community.
Sustainable tourism certi?cation should follow the same model for aggregation. The
dimensions or attributes of sustainable tourismchosen by each country should be viewed as
a group of necessary conditions that are jointly suf?cient for sustainable tourism. Without
being explicit, this is precisely what the Costa Ricans chose for the CST. The CST has ?ve
dimensions and the ?nal score is the lowest score of any of the dimensions (all dimensions
are necessary, and jointly suf?cient). Honey calls this aggregation ‘‘unusual and seemingly
harsh’’ (Honey, 2003, p. 11), but it is not harsh at all. Rather, it is the best way of aggregating
multiple dimensions of a single concept such as sustainable tourism. The Costa Ricans
intuitively realize that neither dichotomous nor gradated measures can adequately represent
a company’s sustainable tourism score. And they are right. Instead of the three-level scoring
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of the democracy scale, the Costa Ricans have a slightly more complex ?ve-level scoring
(0-19 points receives 0 leaves, 20-39 receives 1 leaf, 40-59 receives 2 leaves, 60-79 receives
3 leaves, 80-94 receives 4 leaves, and 95-100 points receives 5 leaves). For the sake of
ease, developing countries should start with a three-value system, and increase to a four or
?ve-value system after successful implementation.
Conclusion
Sustainable certi?cation is a powerful tool for international branding and marketing for
developing countries that see sustainable tourism as an important component in their
development strategy. Sustainable certi?cation programs in the developing world should
meet several conditions. First, performance should be favoured over process. Second, the
dimensions or attributes of sustainability should be locally determined. Third, the program
and logos should be local and designed to enhance national branding for inbound tourism
and encourage change in national attitudes and behaviours. Fourth, the aggregation of the
multiple dimensions and attributes should be neither dichotomous nor gradated, but based
on fuzzy set theory. Fifth, the program must not start out too ambitiously, because a failed
program also reduces state capacity and reduces the likelihood of success in future
attempts. How should a developing country proceed? The ?rst step is to set out the goals of
certi?cation.
The elements of sustainable tourism certi?cation goals are:
1. In advanced industrial countries:
B De?ne and enforce environmentally sustainable practices in hotels and other tourism
businesses.
B Educate owners, employees, and clients and change behaviour in all three.
B Use the signi?cant capacity of the state to enforce.
2. In developing countries:
B Have national dialogue about the type of sustainable tourism for the country.
B Develop the dimensions of sustainability that stakeholders support.
B Develop logos and other elements that enhance national branding.
B Provide bene?ts to local communities and indigenous communities.
B Build legitimacy for the program, such that participation is voluntary and supportive.
B Use limited capacity of the state to coordinate and reward.
B Create a certi?cation program that is limited in complexity and cost, rewards
participation, and has incentives for improvement.
As shown above, these goals are broader and more comprehensive in the developing world
than in advanced industrial countries, and these differences must be understood to increase
the likelihood of success.
Sustainable tourism certi?cation is an important element in greening the industry. In the
developing world, an ambitious but ultimately failed programundermines state capacity and
future programs. The process of building a sustainable certi?cation process can be a
powerful tool for building national development consensus and engendering legitimate and
enhanced state capacity.
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Corrresponding author
Kirk S. Bowman can be contacted at: [email protected]
VOL. 5 NO. 3 2011
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