Proceedings of the 12th Meeting of
The COMCEC Tourism Working Group
8
For each case study, Mr. Shikoh shared the country’s sustainable tourism strategies, its
approach to stakeholder engagement, funding sources for sustainable tourism, monitoring and
evaluation practices, and lessons learned.
For the Maldives, which was a field visit case study, the lessons learned were that continuous
monitoring is needed to ensure adherence to sustainability standards, tourism stakeholders
need to be more involved in the development of tourism sustainability regulations, support
from international organizations, such as the UNWTO in the Maldives' case, can be
instrumental in developing destination-specific monitoring tools for sustainable tourism.
For Oman, which was the second field-visit case study, the lessons learned were that it is best
to target the right tourists that are in line with its sustainability efforts; diversifying
accommodation to include guest houses, homestays, camps, heritage lodges, green lodges
allows the community to benefit; entry fees to wildlife reserves fund conservation efforts and
raise awareness about ecosystems; private sector leading sustainability efforts, ahead of
legislation.
For Uganda, which was also a field-visit case study, the lessons learned were that limiting
tourism in protected areas while increasing price can generate revenues while protecting local
areas; revenue share with local communities helped community development and
conservation efforts, but utilization needs improvement; regional cooperation can play an
important role in sustainable destination management; improvement is needed in monitoring
of tourism impact on parks and local communities; more incentives are needed to encourage
investment in sustainable tourism projects.
For Denmark, which was a desk-based case study, the lessons learned were that strategies are
more effective when part of wider sustainability efforts and strategies, it is important to
identify sustainability issues and set a clear strategy to tackle them; presenting a good
business case for sustainability can facilitate adoption; one of the motivations for adopting
sustainable and environmentally-friendly policies for stakeholders is the financial benefit,
regional projects can benefit from funding from regional organizations.
For Italy, a desk-based case study, the lessons learned were that the increase in the number of
visitors can have negative environmental and cultural impacts, destinations should plan to
avoid over tourism before a crisis situation actually occurs, good communication channels
have to be established between the private and public sector, and tourists’ impact on the
environment should be measured using quantitative as well as qualitative indicators.