Sustainability Reporting and Certification in Tourism

Abstract

Various forms of environmental certification and sustainability reporting are promoted by many industry sectors as a key component to self regulation, which is itself promoted as an alternative to government regulation. The tourism industry has a large number of different ecocertification schemes (Font and Buckley 2001; Black and Crabtree 2007), and these continue to grow and change. Academic evaluation of these initiatives is an important step in distinguishing those which do indeed contribute to improving environmental management and social sustainability, from those whose only effects are financial or political, or indeed those whose net environmental effects are negative. A recent Special Issue of this journal, edited by Jamal and Dredge (2011) presented seven recent case studies in this field. Here I conduct a meta-analysis of those studies to examine what they may reveal about overall progress in tourism ecocertification and sustainability reporting.