Since the early 1990s, ecotourism h

Since the early 1990s, ecotourism has been presented as an innovative tool for
linking the dual aims of conservation and development by conservation organisations and other governmental and non-governmental agencies concerned with
conservation and development. Many projects attempt to support rural communities to adopt what are deemed to be sustainable patterns of living. Yet the
projects interpret sustainable as meaning the maintenance of the communities’
way of life, which in the rural third world means a direct relationship with and
dependence on the immediate natural environment. Yet it is this relationship
that defines the marginal, impoverished status of so many in third world countries



Sustainable development became a new rhetorical orthodoxy for those interested in conservation and development at the UN Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
Since this time it has become increasingly acceptable to restrict the debates on
rural development in the Third World to that which is ‘sustainable’ in the eyes of
a milieu of NGOs, environmentalists and ecocentric academics. The Rio process
also promised increased development aid for the Third World, increases that
have not been forthcoming – aid budgets have in almost all cases fallen as a
percentage of GDP (Jordan & Voisey, 1998). Surely a demand for a substantial
increase in development aid to the Third World should be seen as logically and
morally prior to a debate about sustainable living? Surely what the Third World
needs is a massive transfer of resources – development on a massive scale– to
overcome the immense social and economic problems that are so much in
evidence? Yet the philosophy of ecotourism-for-conservation insists that the
problem is too much development, not too little, and seeks to reign in any discussion of thoroughgoing, transformative development.