ABSTRACT
In the wake of the Brundtland Report’s articulation of the concept of sustainable development (1987), ecotourism has been promoted as an optimum way to achieve sustainable development in the tourism sphere. Ecotourism, as a subset of sustainable tourism, is touted as a win-win endeavour – a high-yield, low-volume strategy is often pursued in the hope of achieving good economic returns for local communities while simultaneously creating fewer negative environmental impacts than other economic development options. However, the concept of sustainable development contains the tensions of an oxymoron as the conservation implied in “sustainability” conflicts with the growth and resource use implied in “development”. In an era where market imperatives dominate, this results in “trade-offs” between requirements for environmental conservation and demands for greater economic growth through tourism. This paper narrates the story of governance and the development approval process for an ecolodge on Kangaroo Island (KI) in order to explore the nature of such trade-offs. Evidence suggests that the requirements of environmental protection are “traded off” in the pursuit of tourism development and the income and employment it provides. Is sustainability possible when such incremental development, in fact, results in “death by a thousand cuts”?
