Ecotourism: The Concept and the Practice of Sustainability Within Tourism

Sustainability is a challenge for tourism since it often implies travelling and high levels of consumption. As a concept, sustainable tourism envisions a major change: making tourism compatible with environmental sustainability without hindering both the economic and the social benefits it brings. It is therefore about introducing a third arm of positive impacts, which are environmental impacts. Tourism thus becomes an interesting focal point in a sustainability research agenda, due to the opportunity it creates for testing the possibilities of convergence between the economic, the social and the environmental pillars of sustainability. Ecotourism is a particular type of tourism and, given its specificities, a privileged field for testing sustainability, whether ‘strong’ or ‘weak’. The chapter has two main foci: the genesis and conceptual contours of ecotourism within sustainable tourism and policy-oriented practices, standardisation and benchmarking in sustainability. Additionally, a selection of cases in ecotourism are presented in brief, in order to characterise ecotourism as a field for the sustainability research agenda.