Parallel to the emergence of a large and diverse literature concerned with the concept of sustainable development (SD), many studies have highlighted tourism-ecology interactions and, in particular, the negative impact of mass tourism on natural and built environments. Accordingly, there now exists a sd on any explicit delineation of SD principles, but more a general concern over the maintenance of the physical and cultural environment. It may be argued that this vagueness, ubstantial stock of research relating to the notion of sustainable tourism development(STD), including Nash and Butler(1990), Weaver (1991), Jarvilouma(1992), Klemm(1992), Cater(1993), Wight(1993), McKercher (1993), Dearden and Harron(1994), Stewart and Sekartjakrarini (1994), Lindberg, Enriquez and Sproule(1996), Wallace and Pierce(1996), Driml and Common (1996), and Brown, Turner, Hameed and Bateman 1997. An extensive recent survey and dissection of the components and development of various approaches to sustainable tourism is provided by Clarke 1997. While there are several exceptions, much of the work in this field seems not to be baseand the poverty of reference to explicit SD principles, has helped debase the concepts of SD and STD in the public arena. It may partly have contributed to the position where, in the tourism sector, they have become commercial mantras, which have been used without adequate validation, by tourism. The industry, using or hijacking the terms ecotourism and alternative tourism as a popular label for sustainable tourism, has seemingly been able to justify further commercial exploitation of culturally and environmentally sensitive areas. This paper explores the use and abuse of sustainability principles in tourism development from what may be termed an explicit natural capital perspective. Problems of limiting access to tourism resources are identified which can militate against the use of tourism as an element in a genuine SD strategy. Averting these problems imposes particularly restrictive conditions, and arguably requires recourse to corrective market intervention in the tourism sector, on a scale unprecedented for most market or mixed economies. This paper leads to the view that the vast majority of STD, as currently espoused (though not necessarily practised), cannot be genuinely conceived of as sustainable.

The widely recognized definition of sustainability, invoked by the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission), considers SD to be development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This definition, and its embodiment in the rest of that report, may be interpreted as requiring development to be characterized by intergenerational and intragenerational equity, embracing social justice, cooperation, and global community. As far as intergenerational equity is concerned, the issue is not solely that of current use values of resources but also existence and option values in the future which bring in a wide range of uncertainties about the nature of future human demands (Dixon and Sherman 1990). Regarding intragenerational equity, the distributional aspects supporting social justice require a modification of the standard welfare economics. Essentially, this means that the Hicks-Kaldor potential compensation criteria, which provides the theoretical underpinning to orthodox cost-benefit analysis, must give way to actual compensation within and across generations. Satisfying the Hicks–Kaldor potential compensation criteria refers to an outcome where winners could potentially compensate losers, following some project or policy, but would still remain better off. This gives rise to practical implications regarding the degree of substitutability between man-made and natural capital (flora, fauna, earth resources). Depending on ones school of thought on this question, it may be argued that net social benefit arithmetic cannot provide a sufficient guide to project or policy selection. Turner (1993) demonstrated how SD is interpreted by the majority of economists, as non-declining consumption per capita—or per unit of GNP or alternative agreed welfare indicator(s). Consistent with this interpretation, Turner identified a spectrum of weaker to stronger variants of sustainability, including various gradations. Weaker positions are associated with perfect or at least a high degree of substitutability between natural and man-made capital. This is particularly suspect, and its use as a guide for genuine SD can be easily challenged. In the context of tourism, there is a compelling case that the strong forms of sustainability conditions are, and should be widely deemed as, most appropriate for preserving biodiversity. Whether such conditions are realistic in practice is a political question. Thus, the documented central concerns reflected in the tourism-environment and sustainable tourism literature, are unequivocally primarily focused on flora, fauna, and habitat preservation issues. Such issues, however, need not be relevant with weak sustainability conditions, since non-natural capital can readily be conceived of as an adequate substitute in this context. A strong sustainability position is clearly associated with environmental protection and, in development terms, may be characterized by a non-declining stock of natural capital over time. This position is intuitively appealing, not just because there must be some substitutability limits in production processes, but also because the costs of environmental degradation are typically and systematically undervalued. This is due to the neglect of reduced ecosystem resilience, which is not readily amenable to environmental valuation. Reduced resilience heightens the vulnerability of an ecosystem to future environmental stress and natural or human induced shocks. The stock of natural capital (K_n), in aggregate, must be maintained over time in the face of shocks and stresses for real SD since, under strong sustainability conditions, natural capital serves as the compensatory intergenerational transfer. The exception relates to certain critical components of natural capital which have no effective substitutes (e.g., the ozone layer, the Amazon forest). That said, there remains problems associated with the practical definition of critical natural capital.