For several decades now, ecotourism has been touted as a means of stemming the loss of biodiversity around the world by replacing the economic growth achieved via extractive industries and subsistence activities with growth realized through low impact tourism. National governments, major international development agencies, multilateral lending banks, and transnational environmental organizations have all jumped aboard the ecotourism bandwagon by establishing programs that provide assistance to ecotourism projects. For entrepreneurs, ecotourism continues to offer one of the fastest growth areas for product development. Acknowledging this, the United Nations celebrated 2002 as the “International Year of Ecotourism” (IYE), with events that highlighted ecotourism’s contribution to Agenda 21, which seeks a balance between economic growth and natural resource conservation.

But the IYE was greeted with skepticism, and even rejection in some cases, by an important number of indigenous and rural communities, tourism monitoring groups, environmentalists, human rights and social justice activists, academics, development workers, and government officials (Vivanco 2002). This negative response was primarily the result of two problems: 1) the lYE appeared to be dominated by the narrow interests of the tourism industry and its consultants while marginalizing environmental, community, and indigenous concerns, and 2) positive visions of ecotourism became increasingly suspect given growing evidence that the industry’s record for generating sustainable economic growth, not to mention effective nature conservation, was often inconsistent.

These two problems are continuing concerns.

Examples of “greenwash” abound, that is, claims of sound ecological and social practices that do not hold up under scrutiny (one well-known example is the hotel that claims green credentials because it gives guests the option of reusing their towels, without reforming other polluting or exploitative activities). Especially when there is little local control over development, ecotourism’s negative impacts can include disrupted lifestyles and economies, overwhelming pressure on underdeveloped rural infrastructure, poorly-distributed or inconsistent profits for locals, high rates of leakage (where as much as 80% of the dollars spent on tourism flow out of communities and into the bank accounts of non-resident business owners), the pressure to turn cultural traditions and landscapes into products to be bought and sold, threats to native autonomy, and unequal local participation in the planning of projects dominated by foreign capital or government bureaucrats (McLaren 2003).

Tourism is also not the “clean industry” its advocates have claimed, as forests and mangroves are leveled to make way for infrastructure, hotel and restaurant pollution pours into local waters, and land use patterns change to accommodate visitors in fragile ecosystems. A recent article published in New Scientist (2004) reports that in addition to introducing disease, ecotourism’s negative impacts on wildlife populations include changes to animal heart rates, physiology, stress hormone levels, and social behaviors-in other words, ecotourism often threatens the very thing it purports to protect. Ecotourism rarely calls into question such impacts, or the validity of the consumption-oriented lifestyle to which it appeals.

To be fair, one of the main reasons for organizing the lYE was to confront at least one of these problems: “green wash.” Bogus claims can negatively affect perceptions of a whole industry, and undermine those businesses that genuinely strive for ecological sustainability and social equity. The major solution that has been proposed - one that received a lot of attention during the lYE - is for the industry and its allies to certify and monitor those businesses with a superior commitment to values of sustainability, in order to give them a competitive advantage in the marketplace and give tourists a chance to purchase a service that meets certain measurable standards. Such certifications, also called “green seals,” have been around for several decades in products like appliances, coffee, textiles, and so on, but they are new to tourism. During the last couple of years, there has been an explosion in the number of conferences and funded initiatives aimed at developing and implementing the standards and best practices upon which sustainable tourism and ecotourism certification will be based (Honey 1999), not to mention organizations competing to create the successful model.

For a cultural anthropologist like myself who has been researching socio-cultural and political dimensions of ecotourism for over a decade, this is a remarkable development, and it has brought me back to Costa Rica for a six-month Fulbright fellowship to study how Costa Ricans - who have been at the forefront of ecotourism for several decades - are now at the forefront of efforts to certify ecotourism and other forms of sustainable tourism. These include a government program that certifies hotels that meet certain environmental standards (known as CST, or “Certification of Sustainable Tourism”) and efforts by the Costa Rican office of the Rainforest Alliance to lead international and local efforts to define and implement best practices and certification. When I came here almost a decade ago to do ethnographic research for my Ph.D. on struggles over environmentalism and ecotourism in one particular rural community (Monteverde), there was still a gap between the distinctly celebratory tone at the international level about ecotourism’s potential contributions to sustainable development, and the difficult realities being recognized at the community level, including problems like those described above. Efforts to create certification and monitoring regimes indicate an open acknowledgement by ecotourism promoters themselves that there is a significant gap between the rhetoric and the reality, and that the very sustainability of their activity depends on narrowing that gap.

As an anthropologist, I am intrigued by whatcertification indicates about the wider cultural environment in which ecotourism exists. The rise of certifications, auditing, and monitoring schemes in various fields (which until recently were largely associated with the financial sector) should not be underestimated for their cultural importance: they suggest what one anthropologist calls “a culture on the make,” or the rise of what others have called “the audit society,” in which social activities are increasingly being defined and regulated in terms of neoliberal logic. On the surface auditing processes appear obscure, mundane, and neutral, since they are largely based on technical criteria. Proponents often invoke ideals of empowerment and participation. But such rhetoric aside, they also embody certain powerful social norms and processes: trust is placed less in individuals and individual relations and more in the institutionalized functions of auditing; new subjectivities and moralities appear in which people self-manage and render themselves open to audit in the names of “efficiency” and “good practice”; and states that were once defined as providers and regulators turn more control over to markets, private managers, and the “moral workers” of the non-profit sector (Power 1997; Strathern 2000).

There are a number of significant political, not to mention practical, questions that need to be asked in the rush to develop the standards for ecotourism and sustainable tourism certification, where the discussions can quickly turn toward Byzantinian details concerning tools and measurements for best practices. A question that commonly arises is “who certifies the certifiers.” This otherwise keen political question rather misses the point, though. The outcome of an auditing process cannot be audited, just as the outcome of certifying processes cannot be certified. The intended outcome of auditing and certification is the creation of a sense of reassurance (Strathern ibid.). If, as one analyst has said, certifications are like dandelions (once there is one, they seem to spring up everywhere, and the question of whether or not they are weeds or flowers is determined by the beholder), then the real problem is how to prevent over saturation: that is, how to avoid overwhelming and confusing consumers with so many varieties of certification, that the distinctiveness or appeal of any particular certification is diluted and thereby undermines other certification programs. Some insist that harmonization between the many ecotourism certification schemes (there are well over one hundred, with more emerging every year) is a challenging but necessary step in establishing both the viability and utility of the concept. The Sustainable Tourism Stewardship Council, based in Brazil but including members all over the world, was established for this reason.

But this may be, as one critic has pointedly observed, “putting the cart before the horse.” There is an unsettled debate over whether tourists (as opposed to coffee drinkers, for example) really care enough yet about the sustainability of their activities to make the effort to search for certified products or pay the higher cost for them. Achieving consumer interest, largely through marketing, is the foundation and justification for certification; business owners have little incentive to open themselves to voluntary environmental and social regulations unless there is some evidence that it gives them a competitive advantage. The uniqueness of tourism adds other layers of complexity to this dynamic. Unlike situations where a commodity or product is certified, tourism is a service, and behind the service the tourist actually pays for are a whole series of other services and products. Should these be sustainability-certified too? How far back in the chain of relations and products should the certification reasonably strive? Tourism also involves and affects a multitude of sectors and social groups - governments, international and domestic businesses, biologists, natural resource managers, cultural specialists, internally¬diverse rural communities, indigenous peoples, etc. - so the process of defining acceptable standards requires achieving a certain operational consensus based on inclusive and participatory processes. Inevitably these processes must address who will have access to being certified. If certification is expensive to achieve and maintain (in terms of investments into sustainable technologies and paying for the accreditation itself, not to mention the time and literacy required to fill out the paperwork), will that not favor those who already have resources and privilege? Since in poor rural areas that often means foreign sources of capital, will this not further undermine ecotourism’s already uneven record of supporting locally-controlled economic development? What will happen to those businesses that follow good practices, but that choose not to be certified, for whatever reason? And finally there are concerns that will likely be raised by indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups who have not yet expressed their position on the issue. How will certification schemes take into account regional and local particularities? How will they overcome the tendency to privilege biological and technical criteria over concerns of social equity and cultural protection?

Ecotourism certification is a particular form of globalization that has the potential to reshape the way business owners relate to the environment and to validate new forms of governance and organizational change. So far it has been an article of faith that it will work, but this is even before a clear understanding of its precise role has been established or what its effects will be on tourists, tourism businesses, host communities, and ecosystems. This faith is not surprising; it reflects how unquestioned the audit society really is. Perhaps it is time that in our discussions about sustainability we address some of the changes, opportunities, and dilemmas raised by the audit society.

References
Honey, Martha. (2002) Ecotourism Certification: Setting Standards in Practice. Island Press.
McLaren, Deborah. (2003) Rethinking Tourism and Ecotravel. 2nd Edition. Kumarian Press.
Power, Michael. (1997) The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford University Press.
New Scientist, “Massive growth of ecotourism worried biologists.” March 4, 2004. World Wide Web site accessed at: http://www.newscientist.com/news/ news.isp?id=ns99994733, on April 27, 2004.
Strathern, Marylin, ed. (2000) Audit Cultures. Routledge.
Vivanco, Luis. (2002) “Escaping from Reality.” The Ecologist 32(2): 26-30.

Luis Vivanco is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Vermont. He is the author of a forthcoming book Green Encounters: Shaping and Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica. as well as several articles exploring the cultural politics of nature conservation and ecotourism in Latin America. He is also an active member of the advisory council of Indigenous Tourism Rights International, an indigenous peoples’ tourism organization.