Linking Culture and the Environment

118 Tourism, Place and Community
sustainability must continue. To ensure social equity, stakeholder involvement
throughout the development needs to be incorporated in the tourism
product, market identification and in destination promotion. Jamrozy and
Walsh review the progress made towards more sustainable ways of marketing
destinations. They argue that adopting a societal marketing approach
that shifts from a consumer focus to one more in line with the sustainability
concerns of the local residents would focus on understanding, protecting
and marketing residents’ ‘sense of place’. Jamrozy and Walsh suggest a
broader ‘bioregional’ perspective on place marketing that places a community
into a globalized world without losing its identity, and therefore would
develop more sustainable grounded bioregional brands. Communities identify
a bioregional core identity, develop place-branding strategies that build
upon the unique characteristics of the local culture, and ultimately strengthen
local quality of life.
They note that the inclusion of sense of place in a societal marketing
approach may lead to more authentic tourism experiences for tourists and
the host community, and ultimately a more sustainable form of tourism
development. Indeed, for many communities, it is their shared and individual
‘sense of place’ that defines residents’ attachment to the community and
the surrounding resources and determines how tourism developments may
or may not meet sustainability goals.
Yellowstone National Park, the first designated national park in the USA,
provides yet another example of the potentially conflicting goals of resource
protection and the provision of visitor experience. Yellowstone has been
described as the ‘crown jewel’ of the national park system in the USA and, as
such, is one of the country’s most visited natural areas. Meyer proposes that
in light of increasingly complex management issues and questions, the Park,
and particularly the ‘park experience’ might be better sustained by including
the concepts of ‘sense of place’ and ‘historical appropriateness’ in developing
management options. Meyer argues that managers concerned with protecting
the ‘sense of place’ uniquely provided by Yellowstone National Park may
be more sensitive to the environmental as well as experiential consequences
of management decisions.
Mitchell explores the notion that to achieve sustainability, the existing
patterns of power and unequal development must be breached through the
involvement of local communities in tourism development. Mitchell argues
that higher levels of integration within the planning process lead to enhanced
socio-economic benefits for the community thus increasing the potential for
tourism sustainability. The level of community solidarity in turn determines
not only support for tourism development but also the degree of citizen participation.
Mitchell notes that a ‘collective indifference’ towards tourism
results from lack of participation in the planning process and the subsequent
uneven sharing of tourism benefits and costs.
In the final chapter in this part, Horochowski and Moisey further propose
that to even initiate community involvement, underlying social and
political structures that engender public participation must exist. Societal
values and political systems to a large degree dictate the role of the citizenry