Posted: April 13th, 2015

World Heritage and Sacred Sites

QUESTION: Discuss the issues concerned with promoting sites of special interest (such as World Heritage and Sacred Sites) and strategies for managing negative impacts.

For the first part of this question: ‘Discuss the issues concerned with promoting sites of special interest (such as World Heritage and Sacred Sites)’ :

The question is about whether and how sites of special interest should be promoted (which means marketed or sold as a tourism product). So you would start by discussing the difficulties surrounding this – what are sites of special interest? (eg world heritage sites, sacred and heritage sites) why might people want to visit? Why might this be problematic? You could discuss the sacredness of some sites (eg Uluru) and why it is a problem for aboriginals to see tourists climbing the rock for example, or why people with religious beliefs might not welcome tourists to their places of worship.

Your argument might then balance this with the BENEFITS of promoting tourism to such sites, perhaps for educational reasons for example and what the tourists might get out it?

Overall, the problem is about balancing the need to preserve the site and all that it means (to many and varied groups of people) with promoting it for tourism and for use (think about the Jurassic coast and how people are allowed to collect fossils for example).

For the second part of this question: ‘strategies for managing negative impacts.’:

This question then asks for you to consider strategies for managing these impacts so you will want to think about different visitor management strategies – what are they? Where have they been used? To what effect? You might want to consider here the problems and potential solutions in trying to manage tourists at these sites.

＊You must FOLLOW the instructions (on top) and INCLUDE those readings that I provided (in the additional file), and use it when you are writing this essay. ＊