Labeling, Certification and Accreditation

Various stakeholders in sustainable tourism have over the years expressed a desire to establish a eco-label for sustainable tourism. A recent WTO study reports on more than 100 tourism labels. Since eco-labeling ultimately should provide the customer with information to buy sustainably, it is a pre-condition that labels offer clarity. Now with so many different labels it is clear that it is hardly clear for the customer.

The number of labels also points to the fact that at this moment there is no one institution in the tourism sector that is accepted as the one and only authority with the status to over-rule all the other labelers. This gives opportunities to parties that want to (ab-)use the complexity of the tourism phenomenon to create their own labels, offering quasi-quality.

To overcome this problem, initiatives have been started to create bodies that get their authority through cooperation between a number of existing labels and that can accredit or certify labels that comply with their norms. The problem is that the system gets even more complex for the tourist. Besides these accreditation bodies only represent the interests of the labels and stakeholders involved excluding others. Since labeling institutions amongst each other often are competitors, they will negotiate about the norms to be applied. As a result these will either be too all-inclusive or too diluted, to a degree that they do not reflect the complexities and dilemmas of sustainable development.

Exemplary in this case is the fact that in the discussion on labeling, the issue on sustainable tourism (tourism contributing to sustainable development) is often reduced to a discussion on eco-tourism (tourism to natural areas, contributing to nature conservation). Whereby eco-tourism represents only 5% of the market and the sustainability issue should cover all forms of tourism, including so-called mass tourism, cultural-, adventure-, city-, spiritual-, alternative-, or any-kind-of-tourism.

A major problem is that the bureaucracy needed to guarantee a flawless functioning of labels and certification conflicts with the interests of the entrepreneurs involved. Many of them do not accept strict controls, and only agree to voluntary initiatives. This coincides with the biggest problem: who will finance these strict controls? A reliable monitoring system is very costly and someone has to pay. It either raises the prices for the customer which, looking at the price competition in the tourism market, does not seem a very attractive option. Or it is an extra cost for small scale enterprises who have to pay for accreditation and control. This option is often seen as market protection by the more affluent stakeholders, and as a threat to small scale (local) entrepreneurs (and including them in tourism often is a target of sustainable tourism. Critical NGOs from developing countries raised the question: who wants labeling bad enough to pay for it?

Labeling and accreditation belong to the best-debated issues in the history of sustainable tourism. It seems that large interests involved in tourism have generated more funds to promote this issue, than to elaborate the more basic, and more complex issues of social or economic justice in sustainable tourism. Looking at labeling, certification or accreditation initiatives, one should always search for the criteria which these initiatives apply, the vigor with which they have elaborated the general criteria into measurable indicators, with a special attention to the balance they bring into social, economic and ecological interest and to the quality of monitoring system they have put in place.

With these thoughts in mind, these are some of the sites that offer interesting information on labeling, certification and accreditation.

• Rainforest Alliance
• Visit
• WTO
• Blue Flag

An interesting internet discussion has been carried out by Planeta.com. The results are available at their Ecotourism Certification pages