Important Events

Until 1994, the international issue of sustainable tourism was only dealt with by national governments and organizations. There were two exceptions. one was the World Tourism Organization, a governmental initiative, the other was the ECTWT, a NGO initiative. The sustainable tourism site of WTO offers information on the meetings they have been organizing over the years paying. The first important international (non-WTO) meetings on sustainable tourism were organized by the ECTWT in Chiang Mai and in Cyprus, the "activists" meeting. The next important event was the Lanzarote conference in 1995. The United Nations Committee on Sustainable Development paid attention to tourism in its 7th meeting in 1999. The preparation of the multi-stakeholder sessions led to many interesting position-papers by several parties. In the eyes of many the final document of this UN-CSD-7 might be the best and most complete document on sustainable tourism ever. At the World Eco-tourism Summit, which was co-initiated by the UN-CSD, a lot of work was done on the final document, but unlike the UN-CSD, it is not a negotiated document, and only reflects a collection of interesting opinions. Nevertheless this was a step forward in thinking on Eco-tourism. It was therefore a slight disappointment that hardly anything of the learning experiences of UN-CSD nor WES was reflected in the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development.

Since the year 2000 it seems that sustainable tourism has gotten onto the agenda of many organizations. The number of international meetings is growing rapidly and they are hard to catch up with, but therefore they also lack a little of the innovative character of the meetings of the past.