ABSTRACT
The emergence of cultural tourism as a fashionable tourism activity presents both opportunities and threats to its sustainable management. We defined sustainable cultural tourism in Chapter 1 as a partnership that satisfies both tourism and cultural heritage management objectives. But is this ideal realistic, and can it be achieved across the broad spectrum of cultural tourism products and experiences? Ideologically, most tourism and cultural heritage management stakeholders acknowledge the mutual benefits that can accrue from such a partnership (Robinson 1999). For example, ICOMOS, in its second tourism charter, states “Tourism can capture the economic characteristics of heritage and harness these for conservation by generating funding, educating the community and influencing policy” (ICOMOS 1999: paragraph 5). In practice, though, the partnership seems to be an uneasy one, for tourism and cultural heritage management seem often incompatible (Berry 1994; Bowes 1994; Boniface 1998; Jacobs and Gale 1994; Jansen-Verbeke 1998; Garrod and Fyall 2000).
