Encouraging Environmentally and Socially Responsible Practices Through Well-designed Certification: A Case Study of the Camping and Caravan Industry, Australia

The tourism industry has developed a range of voluntary initiatives such as certification programmes as a means to improving environmental performance. The plethora of programmes and their criteria, benchmarks, monitoring and assessment methods raise questions of credibility. A WTO study conducted in 2001 revealed over 7,000 certified products worldwide. Of 500 voluntary initiatives examined, only 59 certification/ecolabel programmes had the basic requirements of a credible programme. This study produced a series of recommendations to improve the effectiveness of these initiatives. This article highlights how a major certification initiative for the New South Wales Camping and Caravan Industry Association (CCIA), Australia uses the critical elements from UNEP, WTO publications, the Mohonk Agreement, certification programmes, practitioners and tourism operators worldwide to produce a programme that is more effective, efficient and credible. It specifically focuses on how the new 'Gumnut Award' has tailored the programme to the needs of the industry, and that the fundamental process of stakeholder involvement is crucial to the success of any quality assurance programme. Engagement with stakeholders provides a greater understanding of their needs, attitudes and barriers to implementation and their willingness to participate, resulting in a more effective mode of delivery. CCIA NSW acknowledged the significant social, cultural, ecological and economic impacts on local communities. With an exceptionally high uptake by the industry to date, this paper benchmarks this programme against current best practice

Enclaves and ethnic ties: The local impacts of Singaporean cross-border tourism in Malaysia and Indonesia

Cross-border tourism is often proposed by governments as an incentive for economic growth, but critics have suggested that its impacts are, in fact, overplayed. This paper presents research in the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle (IMS-GT). It examines the broad economic impacts of Singaporean cross-border tourism on local host communities in two locations: Kukup, a traditional Malaysian fishing village in Johor, southern Peninsular Malaysia, and Bintan in Riau Islands Province in western Indonesia. The study found that cross-border tourism generated income, employment and some local economic linkages. In Kukup clear economic benefits with increased income and employment were unevenly distributed between ethnic groups. The Bintan enclave development had some linkages to the island economy but was reliant on immigrant labour. Cross-border ethnic ties, particularly Chinese, also played an important role in the growth of tourism in the IMS-GT. The paper shows that cross-border tourism can be a useful addition to more conventional forms of international tourism within national tourism planning and could lead to significant economic benefits for local communities

Biosecure citizenship: politicising symbiotic associations and the construction of biological threat

Biosecurity politics in New Zealand is implicated in the constitution of a new dimension of citizenship, a biosecure citizenship. This form is distinct in that the political determinants of citizenship do not fully rest on the individual body, but on the body’s connections to other entities, the inter- and intra-active symbiotic condition of human-non-human ‘living together’. Through its constitutive role in enabling the ‘dangerous’ mobility of pathogens, viruses and invasive species, symbiotic individuality has become politicised as a matter for state determination and control. Contemporary articulations of biosecure citizenship emphasise a variety of contractual and non-contractual responsibilities, which augment the national coordinates of citizenship, reconstitute symbiotic individuality, and justify the state penetration of the private sphere. Drawing on biosecurity legislation, public education campaigns and research with community weed removal projects, I chart the reinforcement and practice of this biosecure citizenship. I argue that there is an urgent need to democratise decisionmaking about the construction of biological threat, about where and how to make cuts in our symbiotic associations with different species, and between species and spaces. By articulating biosecure citizenship not only as a discourse of ecological responsibility but of rights, biosecurity could be reinvigorated as ‘bios-security’, the inclusive politics of continually questioning the ecological good life

Beyond sustainability: Optimising island tourism development

This paper aims to identify the current challenges facing the sustainable development of island tourism and to develop a new conceptual approach to sustainable development based upon optimisation. The optimisation process for island tourism will be discussed through the development of a new life cycle model — the multifunctional interactive process cycle that is calibrated using a set of 15 island tourism status indicators. The paper also seeks to explain how a complex and dynamic tourism system can be developed that takes a destination towards an optimal sustainable state to satisfy both visitors and the local community