Linking Culture and the Environment

68 Sustainable Tourism Development on a ‘Mediterranean Isle’
national planning agencies and other bodies which seek to institute a series
of controls (e.g. building moratoria, comprehensive planning and tools such
as zoning) for steering tourism’s future development.
Meanwhile, local reaction to tourism development is mixed. Although
the local residents begin to recognize certain social and environmental problems,
they remain willing to put up with tourism in its current mass-market
form because of the real and perceived benefits it provides. Only certain
NGOs, including ‘fringe’ environmental activists, oppose future development
to ensure that the physical environment of the destination is not further
compromised. The latter are the only group at this stage to adopt a ‘strong’
perspective of sustainable development.
Consolidation/Stagnation/Decline Stage
This is the phase when a destination will normally begin to demonstrate structural
difficulties (Table 4.3). Many Mediterranean destinations, among them
Ayia Napa and Limassol in Cyprus, the north-eastern coast of Rhodes, Mykonos
and mass-tourist destinations in Crete (Andriotis, 2006), have reached this stage.
The growth rate of tourist arrival and receipts begins to wane. International
tourists show increasing dissatisfaction with the quality of the tourism product
and eventually find alternative, less-developed destinations (either in other
parts of the region or completely new destinations). This situation causes alarm
among local policy makers, leading to a search for strategies to enhance the
destination’s quality. Like their national or regional counterparts, local authorities
adopt a ‘weak’ approach to sustainability. Economic growth remains the
local policy makers’ overriding objective, but they also realize the need to introduce
strict environmental and land-use regulations. The atmosphere may turn
increasingly regulatory and incentives to the private sector are reduced. Ideally,
local policies will begin to converge with national priorities and increasingly
aim at supporting ‘quality’ (high-spending) as opposed to ‘quantity’ (massoriented)
tourism. This has happened in a variety of localities on islands such as
Malta (Holcomb and Balm, 1996) and Mallorca (Bruce and Cantallops, 1996).
Authorities introduce measures to rejuvenate the destination by diversifying
the product (e.g. promoting alternative tourism forms such as ecotourism or
constructing recreational facilities such as golf courses) and undertaking an
aggressive marketing campaign which targets a broad range of market segments
(Cooper, 1997). There is a growing realization that failure to intervene in
such a manner will lead to decline. In the case of Crete, Andriotis (2006) notes
that many of the municipalities have sought to tackle the problem of haphazard
growth and aim to diversify the tourist product by backing the development of
integrated, planned resorts. However, he also warns that because the local
authorities are politically weak, they lack the mechanism to fully impose their
new regulatory framework on exogenously driven development and, thus
problems are likely to continue in the foreseeable future.
Interestingly, at this stage, certain local entrepreneurs (e.g. hotel owners)
worry about business survival and, thus, may support a moratorium on