Ecotourism and Legal Institutions

Abstract

Ecotourism refers to efforts to provide for environmental and social sustainability through the use of tourism as an economic activity. The concept has been a source of considerable debate within social scientific disciplines addressing environmental issues. However, political science has been less involved in those discussions, mainly because most of the past discussions have discussed the effectiveness and appropriateness of either specific ecotourism practices or a reliance on ecotourism in general. This paper seeks to begin to fill that void by laying out a framework for the analysis of the role that legal institutions play in the development and maintenance of ecotourism. This first step requires that attention move away from the normative basis of the evaluation of ecotourism and focus on a descriptive approach to analyzing the phenomenon of ecotourism.