In 1999 John Swarbrooke wrote the major textbook on Sustainable Tourism Management, it quickly became a mainstay of tourism courses in universities in Europe and around the world. Now something of a collector’s item, it is still available. In the UK, the optimism of Swarbrooke’s text now reads as though from another age. Swarbrooke recognised that a multistakeholder approach was required, led by the public sector. In the 1990s, local governments had the responsibility to represent and protect the interests of the whole population, not the particular interests of those engaged in the business of tourism.
Swarbrooke recognised that tourism management is inherently political and that local government has professional officers and elected politicians. accountable to the local communities they served. Swarbrooke worked as a qualified planner for Visit Kent and became a local councillor. John’s knowledge and skills in destination management came from practice. Earlier this year, the Responsible Tourism Partnership published John’s trenchant critique of sustainable tourism. He pointed out that the highly influential Brundtland report, ‘Our Common Future’ [1985] … “made little or no mention of either climate change or tourism. At that time, the threat of climate change was not really recognised or understood. At the same time, the tourism industry was not thought important enough to be discussed in relation to sustainable development.” Swarbrooke’s substantial 2023 paper on Why Sustainable Tourism Failed can be downloaded for free.
In “The sad demise of effective tourism planning and management in England”, John is very critical of the decline of destination management in the UK.
At a time when we are painfully aware of the urgent need to make tourism more responsible and therefore hopefully sustainable, it is sad to see England putting the final nails in the coffin of what was once one of the world’s most effective systems of tourism planning and management.
John Swarbrooke
John recounts his experience with a degree in “town and country’ planning and subsequently in the tourism group in the structural planning team at Kent County Council and as a District Councillor in Maidstone on the committee responsible for tourism. The decline of tourism management is in large part a consequence of the weakening of local government as neoliberalism led to the abandoning of structural planning at the national and county level. The UK abandoned regional policy in the 1980’s and built a motorway to the Channel Tunnel.
The focus of tourism policy at central government level became focused almost exclusively on destination marketing and generating business for the private sector. With no statutory requirement to manage tourism and with declining resources, local authorises have withdrawn from managing tourism. In England there is no longer any public body with the powers or the resources to respond to the challenge of overtourism. Not to address the negative impacts of the ‘Airbnb phenomenon’ and the growth of second homes. As John points out “we have seen the replacement of destination management with pure destination marketing, which is focused solely on attracting more tourists rather than being concerned with managing their impacts as well.”
Local public-private partnerships functioning as Destination Management Organisations or DMOs such as Visit Kent and Visit Cornwall have emerged In an attempt to fill the vacuum filled by the demise of regional tourist boards and local authority-led destination management and marketing. In April this year Local Visitor Economy Partnerships or LVEPs were launched.
“They are to be developed and administered by Visit England and their priority is to ‘grow the local visitor economy’. When the LVEPs were launched the press release stated that they were designed to ‘play a central role in transforming the visitor economy in an inclusive, accessible and sustainable way’
Swarbrooke conclude his paper warning of the further consequences of the retreat of local government.
“Continuous growth is not sustainable, and the idea that the private sector always knows best has been shown to be incorrect. It is not about returning to a mythical ‘golden age’ of tourism planning and managing tourism because that never existed but rather taking the best of what went before and blending that with the latest thinking and the principles of sustainability to create an approach that will work for us in the future.”
What we need is to recognise that the public sector has to play a key role in tourism planning and management as it is the custodian of the public goods on which tourism depends in a democracy.
Elected bodies which are accountable to the people who elect them need to be able to exercise more control over activities such as tourism whose impacts, both positive and negative, affect whole communities not just businesses. The private sector certainly has a role to play in tourism management but only as part of an equal partnership with the public sector and local communities.
My fear is that if we do not change our approach to tourism planning and management tourism will have no chance of becoming more sustainable in England and the wider UK, and we will also lose out to other countries which take a more enlightened and progressive approach. “
The decline of local government in the UK is reflected in the pothole index.
More than 50,000 drivers had journeys brought to a halt because of pothole-related damage this July, compared to 41,790 the July before.
AA Pothole Index
Take care if you plan to drive in England this summer.
