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ISSN 1108-8931 |
INTERNATIONAL ECOTOURISM MONTHLY |
Year 5-Issue 50, July 2003 |
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The
Expert The Expert
showcases the replies of our Expert
Members who volunteer free advice on their topic of expertise. In this issue: |
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Introduction Certification is the process of assuring consumers and industry that the company being assessed has met the standards set. Certification in tourism is fairly recent, with most programs developed in the nineties as bottom up initiatives with little knowledge of each other, and generally operating as specific responses to manage the key negative impacts or challenges of a particular subsector in a particular location. In the last ten years, they have moved on dramatically to become one of the buzzwords of sustainable tourism and ecotourism, considered as a potential mechanism to combat greenwashing but not without their fair share of sceptics. This paper aims to present an overview of certification and to critically consider how it can be used to improve the performance of our sector. Certification: 6 steps to heaven Ecolabelling is not homogeneous This paints a picture of the type of organisations undertaking certification. There are further differences across these programs, in the nature of the companies they try to certify. What is most striking is that most standards are set for hotels (68%), and very few for tour operators (7%), and the latter are mainly for ecotourism ground operators, not the outbound operators in tourism generating countries, with the access to the market. To the danger of oversimplifying, the European programs focus on environmental issues in hotel management, while developing countries focus on the broader range of sustainability and ecotourism issues, targeting specifically small hotels or ground operators. The issue is also that not all sectors are as easy to certify, and each country prioritises those issues that are pressing in accordance to their sector. The indicators used to measure standards also vary, not only in contents but also in what is measured. The most popular distinction is between process and performance indicators (Honey and Stewart, 2002; Synergy, 2000). Process-based standards mean the company makes a commitment to improvement by putting in place management systems to ensure year on year progress. Progress based standards mean different companies could perform differently and still have the same certificate, hence they aren't a guarantee of sustainability. The advantage is that the system is self updating, the standards are generic and therefore transferable. At the other end of the spectrum, performance standards mean that the applicant has met a threshold level, which is generally defined through sector-specific benchmarks (to different degrees of sophistication). The key advantage is that they are a guarantee of basic standards. The challenges are that because industry performance changes standards need external updating, and because the standards are context specific, they are not easily transferable across destinations. In reality, certification programs tend to combine a number of performance criteria to ensure minimum requirements are met, with a number of process criteria to ensure the company is proactive towards making further improvements (WTO/OMT, 2002). Just over 40% of the criteria in standards relate to management issues, i.e. how the applicant has systems in place to make improvements on a number of sustainability matters. The other nearly 60% of criteria relate to specific actions or benchmarks for environmental (34%), economic (8%), socio-cultural (12%) criteria. 5% of the criteria relate to characteristics on the nature of the firm to be accepted as an applicant. Critical analysis for tourism certification From a local governance point of view, ecotourism is generally not
a standardised product where systems approaches work, and the
economies of scale make it impossible for small producers to apply.
High costs of verification and the needs for expertise in
implementation of the criteria, specially when management systems and
paper trails are required, are further limitations. This is not an
issue while tourism ecolabels do not have a significant weight in the
consumer choice process, but it might change in the future. Effectiveness is a measure of how well an instrument achieves its objectives. Ecolabels are first attracting applications from companies that already met the standards, and only if the core group of these companies is large enough, they have the power to change behaviour in other companies. Efficiency is a measure of how well an instrument uses the resources available. The low take up and high start-up costs from governments and NGOs could indicate they are not an efficient use of resources. Credibility and legitimacy refer to the extent up to which an instrument is accepted by its target audiences as valid. If this is understood as market share, then ecolabels are not credible and legitimate, except in cases such as the Blue Flag. If credibility and legitimacy is understood as quality of the product of each label, we don't have the evidence of which certification programs are good and which aren't, although this is starting to change as programs are benchmarked against developing guidelines. Ecolabels are integrated with other instruments for sustainability only in as far as they are generally linked to voluntary initiatives and incentives to encourage a more sustainable approach to management. In order to position sustainable tourism certification as one of
the tools to improve the quality of our industry, we need progress
towards the following questions: Acknowledgements References |
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