English - Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal ...

Sustainable tourism and post-conflict state buildinggave worldwide attention and concerted efforts to sustainable mountaindevelopment specific issues for which mountain tourism is essentiallylinked as key factor in achieving this goal (Nepal 2003).Tourism can help in promoting sustainable development by usingrenewable resources, provided it is carefully managed and appropriatestrategies and tactics for the main actors involved in the industry areapplied. Indeed, tourism is often quoted as a justification for the existenceof national parks in East Africa, while in some countries it is the mostfeasible of the few options for development from small tropical islandsin the Caribbean and the Pacific and India Oceans, to mountain states likeNepal (France 2006).The UN Division for Sustainable Development lists ST as one of the 21 keyareas coming within the scope of sustainable development. The globalsignificance of ST is associated with its potential of poverty eradication andpeace building. UNWTO, with its belief that tourism can be effectively usedas a force for the elimination of global poverty, has made a commitmentto contribute to the UN Millennium Development Goals through a newprogramme known as Sustainable Tourism - Eliminating Poverty in 2003.This initiative of UNWTO to develop ST as a force for poverty alleviationcame in collaboration with United Nations Conference on Trade andDevelopment during the World Summit on Sustainable Developmentin Johannesburg in 2002. This Summit had addressed ST in Chapter 4,paragraph 43 of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation. Studies of thedamaging effect of the expanding skiing industry in the Alps in the 1970sled to the idea of ST in practice (Ward 1991).The ST is about making tourism economically efficient while at the sametime safeguarding the environment and promoting social and culturalprogress. These three aspects under ST are interconnected as shown inFigure 5.1.90