Ecotourism and Certification: Confronting the Principles and Pragmatics of Socially Responsible Tourism

Many ecotourism proponents advocate certification as a means to distinguish legitimate ecotourism from counterfeit ‘greenwashed’ products. This paper discusses efforts by certification advocates operating in global arenas to generate standards for measuring compliance with one dimension of widely accepted definitions of ecotourism, the stipulation that it should provide benefits to local communities. The paper then presents an ethnographic case study from Belize that reveals disagreements among ecotourism stakeholders in Belize and between them and international experts about the meaning of several key terms: who should count as ‘local’, what should count as ‘participation’ by locals, and what constitutes a ‘benefit’ to local communities. The author argues that divergent perspectives on these issues must be recognised and accommodated in the process of harmonising or standardising certification criteria for ecotourism; failure to do that could imperil both the principled and pragmatic rationales behind the requirement that ecotourism provide benefits to local communities.