Measuring Sustainable Tourism Development in Remote Rural ...

Report. This commission, established by the United Nations General Assembly in
1984, was asked to learn about the connections between the issues of environment
and development. Hence, the term was first used to bring together the apparently
disparate concepts of economic development and environmental conservation. The
Brundtland Report defined sustainable development as:
“Development that meets the needs of the present generation without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (p.
43)”
Real community development must include physical development with people
development; economic development with political development; increasing a
community’s capacity for taking control of its own development. For this to occur, each
at its own pace, an evolving process is necessary for building within the community the
ability for critical thinking and planning with an increased capacity to meet future needs.
Experience has provided some clear lessons about what works and what does not
work in community- based development. Prominent among the failures has been
attempts to achieve results on a wide scale through the infusion of external
management, funds, and technology, controlled from distant places.
A fundamental prerequisite of successful participatory programs at the community level
is the reversal of control and accountability from central authorities to the community
level; and, when the success of projects depends heavily on changes in behaviour at
the community level, promoting participation in community-based programs may be the
only means of meeting objectives (World Bank, 1998). It is up to individual
communities to determine how they want to balance the status quo with the benefits of
growth, and how effective they are going to be in mitigating the negative effects they
want to avoid. In order to achieve these ends, new techniques to supplement and in
some cases replace the traditional methods of land use control are required (Scott,
Brower and Miner, 1975).
It is suggested that the planning process needs to involve those people who live, work,
own property, or own businesses in the community and includes the organisations and
institutions in the planning process. This bottom-up approach empowers communities
through local actors, i.e. people’s organisations, for creating important sources of
action at the local level with a strong interest for promoting sustainable livelihood. In
other words, it needs to include the local residents and the local stakeholders working
together to promote mutual responsibility and joint problem solving.
In establishing and promoting grass-roots mechanisms, capacity-building and
empowerment, we are inducing a community-driven approach to sustainable
development. In this context it is critical to view community economic development as a
long-term process that fuses community control and direction with specific tools and
outcomes (Zdenek, 1987). Empowerment does not so much mean granting or
transferring power as it does increasing civic awareness of the efficacy of democratic
involvement, through self-respect, mutual esteem, capacity-building, genuine
responsiveness and open accountability (Schwerin, 1995). The diverse members of
the community should be represented in order to, more appropriately, identify the
community´s strengths and assets, needs and concerns; establish goals for
community development; provide recommendations for how to reach those goals; and,
influence, or possibly direct, the policy and financial decisions of local decision-makers.