dossier sur le tourisme et le développement durable

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Political scope
draw up the first balance sheet. These approaches are often used to avoid strengthening of
environmental legislation, and an assessment of their results shows that they often only
endorse environmental improvement without actually doing anything concrete in this direction
themselves. The energy efficiency of tourist accommodation and facilities is improving with
technical progress and operators are adopting new techniques such as low-consumption light
bulbs, because it is first of all in their direct financial interest. By integrating such measures in an
environmental label, they give the impression of acting in favour of the environment but often it
is just the consequence of normal accommodation management. If operators are to be pushed
further in their voluntary initiatives, it means that either there has to be consumer pressure on
them or that there has to be the threat of stronger legislation if the professionals do not commit
themselves to more ambitious objectives.
4. Perspectives
4.1. Tourism should be included in a territorial project
Local development is merely limited to approaches based on a specific sector or theme, to
networks of commercial enterprises or to territorial marketing. It relies on such dynamics but
goes far beyond, mobilising a complex group of players. It can be defined as a long-term
collective territorial innovation process 7 . It is implanted in a relevant territory where it federates
and organizes the political, economic, social and environmental players in a network by
inspiring a common culture for project. It is the product of all the existing sectors and themes
networking. Local development has four dimensions:
• Players or sectors: local development requires the mutual understanding and the respect between
public and private sectors, essential for implementing joint initiatives and for a new approach to
sectoral policies.
• Themes: economy, social issues, culture and environment. These themes are transversal and concern
all the sectors. Local development obliges the different actors to go beyond the sector-based limits.
• Temporalities: they strongly vary according to the players and produce very different logics and action
paces which sometimes are antagonistic. For example the tour operator’s time is not the same as that
of a politician or of a farmer. Territory project takes into account such differences.
• The territory: local development is constructed through a global approach and is based on the
complementarity of activities, of men and of natural habitat existing on a given area.
The project and its territory are the reference and implementation framework for the local
development process, which can be based on the tourist activity. Such an approach implies a
broaden outlook of the development notion, gets rid of institutional barriers and takes into
account the different territory levels. It relies on the actors’ involvement in the definition of
common objectives they will have to respect over time. Thereby, it constitutes an interesting
means for regulating the tourism system (Figure 25).
7 Froms D.P. DECOSTER, 2000, Le développement local : sésame de la citoyenneté, ULB.