ABSTRACT
The tourism sector is embedded within the global economy, human society, and natural environment, and large-scale links outside the sector itself are as signifi cant for sustainable development as small-scale environmental management practices within the industry. Sustainable development is still a somewhat contested term in the theoretical literature, but its practical interpretation by national governments and multinational corporations may be deduced from topics covered at the 1992 Earth Summit and the 2002 Rio World Summit on Sustainable Development (“Rio +10”) in Johannesburg. Agenda 21, the top-level policy product from the Earth Summit, did not include tourism in its sectoral studies, and a separate Tourism Agenda 21 was produced subsequently by the industry itself. Rio +10 did indeed include tourism, and a number of previous meetings such as the World Ecotourism Summit in Quebec produced internationally agreed documents which were delivered at Rio +10. In addition to inputs from the tourism industry itself, tourism received a signifi cant mention in contemporaneous inputs from the conservation sector, such as the Benefi ts Beyond Boundaries statement from the 2003 World Parks Congress. More recently, as governments worldwide have begun to grapple with policies related to climate change, the tourism sector produced a report and a declaration on this topic at Davos in 2007 (UNWTO et al., 2007).
