Problematizing tourism for conservation: An eco-cultural critique on sustainability

Abstract

Nature conservation has often been depicted as an effective policy measure to redress the ongoing environmental problems across the globe. The need to ensure sustainability for people’s secured subsistence has rendered nature conservation an indispensable scheme in the tourism development policy. It is evident that during the last couple of decades, the notion of “conservation” has become less established whilst tourism development has been prioritised as a profit making venture by both the national and international agencies. Numerous solutions have been prescribed by international organisations adopting tourism as an “immense potentiality” which mostly represented a sustainability effort for the local development and environment. South Asia in general and Bangladesh, in particular, are no different, since policy for nature conservation has been misplaced and misread to reach sustainability goals, as it has always been connected with the tourism development agenda. From a systematic literature review, it was found that the use of natural resources by local people was exemplified as a threat to sustainability where the relations between conservation and tourism became a policy issue. The paper intends to problematise the mechanism of tourism policies for nature conservation or conservation policies for tourism development that overlooks the local eco-cultural management practice for sustainability. Along with the environmental discourses, an eco-cultural critique on sustainability was employed.