Linking Culture and the Environment

104 WWF Arctic Tourism Guidelines Initiative
expressions (Fennell and Malloy, 2007). Codes exist at a variety of levels,
commonly the level of the individual tourist, the operator and the destination
community or region (United Nations Environmental Program, 1995;
Mason and Mowforth, 1996). Although identified as distinct, the scientific,
managerial and principle-based approaches may well overlap in application.
This is likely desirable if a comprehensive approach to sustainability in tourism
is pursued in any region. At the minimum, these three approaches clearly
are complementary and provide among them a variety of tools and mechanism
for moving towards tourism that offers the environmental and cultural
advantages sought in sustainable tourism movements.
This chapter explores a principle-based project initiated to encourage a
greater integration of conservation concerns in Arctic tourism. The chapter
outlines the initiative through five stages of evolution: initiation, development,
implementation, establishment and monitoring. It focuses upon the
options in this initiative for evaluating operator achievement of the programme
principles and uses a study of operator awareness and activities in
Nunavut, Canada, in order to identify challenges related to monitoring sustainable
tourism guidelines. The chapter outlines more recent developments
in the region and then concludes by examining relevance of this case study
for the wider context of sustainable tourism initiatives.
The Arctic tourism project: initiation and development
Since 1995 the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Arctic Programme, based
in Oslo, has facilitated the process of establishing appropriate guidelines and
codes of conduct for Arctic tourism. These are the tools of a sustainable tourism
programme through which WWF hopes to encourage responsible and
sensitive tourism, an effort that is commendable and that appears to be necessary
given continuing increases in Arctic tourism numbers and the potential
for negative impacts (see Johnston and Viken, 1997; Viken and Jørgenson,
1998; Marquez and Eagles, 2007). The effects of increasing numbers of tourists
are complicated by impacts on tourism behaviour, infrastructure and
access being brought about by the very evident climate change in the Arctic
(see Johnston, 2006; Dawson et al., 2007), with implications for communities,
tourists and conservation. This section describes the initiation and development
of the WWF project and the particular approaches to sustainable tourism
that it takes.
The project to develop and implement guidelines for Arctic tourism
stems from a suggestion at the 1994 St Petersburg Arctic tourism conference
that a mechanism for encouraging responsible tourism in the Arctic be pursued
(Johnston and Mason, 1997). Discussion about the apparent effectiveness
of the codes of conduct used in Antarctic tourism and the cooperation
among Antarctic tour operators prompted a comparison with the situation in
the Arctic, where no region-wide code of conduct or operators’ association
existed. The recommendation that something similar to the Antarctic be
attempted in the Arctic was taken up by the WWF Arctic Programme, headed