the role of tourism in natural resource management in the okavango ...

or displacing another group of users dependent upon that use (Gibbs and Bromley,
1989).
In terms of non-renewable resources, the very depletion of the resource may be
considered a cost to society. Even if a large supply of the resource remains
elsewhere, these remaining supplies are likely to be more costly to develop than the
supplies just exhausted. Furthermore, the use of a resource as a factor of production
may levy costs on the use of other resources in that ecosystem. For example, the
burning of high-sulphur coal can affect fisheries through the acidification of lakes, or
forests by making trees more vulnerable to disease. These form part of the social
costs of production or 'externalities' in the environmental economist's jargon - the
cost which is not considered within the market. An externality is, in essence, a failure
of the market system (Gibbs and Bromley, 1989). As Kneese and Bower (1968)
point out, this market failure tends to be pervasive in the economy, rather than rare.
In this sense, then, natural resources are not free, as the depletion of fish by one
group of fishers, for example, creates externalities for another group. The pollution of
a river's waters by an industrial plant generates externalities for the recreational
users of that river. It may be true that the first group of fishers and the industrial plant
in the above examples regarded their resources as free goods. However, sooner or
later, some other group - or society as a whole - will end up paying for the cost of
treating resources as free goods (Gibbs and Bromley, 1989; Pattullo, 1996).
2.10 Tourism and Natural/Environmental Resources
Given the massive growth in, and scale of, tourism activity around the world, and the
international tourism growth potential for the foreseeable future (Latham, 1990;
Shaw and Williams, 2004), the impact of tourism on environmental quality should be
of interest and relevance to academics, decision-makers and tourism operators
alike. The ever increasing concern amongst the general public about environmental
issues and problems, such as pollution and habitat destruction, is reason enough for
those involved with tourism to show an interest in the relationship between tourism
development and the use of natural or environmental resources. This is because
tourism is dependent upon environmental resources and may be prone to changing
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