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

At one 'extreme', are those who could be described as holding a traditional,
resource-exploitative, growth-orientated view of resource management. They view
the environment as a collection of goods and services of instrumental value to
humans. Naturally, this is a strongly utilitarian and anthropocentric stance, and under
this paradigm, intra-generational equity considerations are typically ignored, and it is
immaterial who in a particular society receives the benefits or bears the costs of
development. This stance would appear to have dominated much tourism
development in developing countries to date. Also, future costs and benefits are
given less weight than current costs and benefits. This can be justified on the
grounds that the pursuit of economic development now, provides increasing material
benefits, increasing consumer choice and need/aspiration satisfaction and, hence,
improved human welfare. Resource scarcities can be mitigated by investment in new
technologies to solve technical fixes and substitution mechanisms for environmental
problems. As such, research and development expenditure (paid for by the
prerequisite of continuing economic growth) contributes to a stock of human capital,
including knowledge, that is inherited by future generations who will then be richer
and more able to cope with any environmental cost burdens created by earlier
generations (Hunter and Green, 1995).
For those who cling to this world-view, sustainable development can be regarded as
the equivalent to sustained economic growth, with no particular need for resource
conservation. However, in the context of tourism, this attitude might result in a direct
and short-term threat to economic activity if the resource which attract tourists are
undermined. With regard to the appraisal of development projects, programmes and
policies, the typical approach under the resource-exploitative paradigm is to utilise
conventional cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as a narrow measure of economic
efficiency of alternatives. While environmental impact assessment (EIA) might form
part of the appraisal process, to gain a wider appreciation of associated
environmental impacts, it is likely that the EIA would be regarded as a small,
separate, 'add on' to the CBA. What's more likely is that the full range of
environmental impacts will fail to be fully considered within the decision-making
process (Hunter and Green, 1995).
At the other 'extreme' of the development/conservation debate is what can be
viewed as the extreme resource-preservationist, zero-growth world-view, which may
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