Sustainable Tourism in Practice: Promoting or Perverting the Quest for a Sustainable Development

Sustainable tourism has achieved the status of being the superior goal in Norwegian government tourism policy, and is attaining much attention in the international scientific and political discourse on tourism. However, have policies on sustainable tourism and related concepts actually managed to make tourism more sustainable? This article seeks to address this question by first presenting the history of sustainable tourism and related concepts, and specifically analyzing how the triple bottom line approach has influenced the prevailing understanding of the concept of sustainable tourism. The article concludes by claiming that prevailing EU as well as Norwegian national policies aiming to make tourism more sustainable most likely will result in “sustaining tourism” more than actually making tourism more sustainable. The article uses Norway—the “home of the Brundtland report”—as an illustrative case for the discussion.