ABSTRACT
For many years tourism has been identified as a method for economic development by governments of potential and actual destination areas (Wolfson 1967, Mathieson and Wall, 1982) and especially those in developing countries such as the Caribbean islands (Ferguson 1990). Yet writers like Naipaul (1962) suggest that tourism has a flawed record in this role, because it has led to a perpetuation of economic dependency on the metropolitan core countries and thereby replicates the plantation system of an earlier colonial era. One of the questions posed here is whether tourism is a dependent, or necessarily a dependent activity. A range of theories has been evolved by academics concerned with dependency (see Forbes 1984 for a detailed analysis) and, with little adaptation, have been considered useful frameworks for the description and explanation of emerging patterns of tourism in developing countries (Britton 1980, Harrison 1992), including those in the Caribbean (Woodcock and France 1994). New approaches addressing this problem, in particular, notions of sustainability introduced by the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987) and reformulated by Agenda 21 at the Rio Conference (Kirkby et al. 1995), were relatively slow to spread to tourism. This chapter focuses on one aspect of sustainability, which is central to modern development thinking-the concept of participation. Participation is concerned with stakeholders and therefore has clear links with dependency. The Caribbean provides an appropriate backdrop for exploring the relationship between dependency and participation since tourism is an important economic activity in the majority of the island nation-states, but varies in its nature, intensity and history among the islands.
