Moral Limits of the Market: The Impossibility of Balanced Tourism Development

Scholars and the practice community unanimously advocate sustainable balanced and sensitive tourism development. Engaging with locals and setting up public-private partnerships are frequently championed. This working paper introduces a set of lenses in the moral philosophy tradition and argues that the current pragmatic solutions to sustainable tourism development could not resolve issues of authenticity, equity, rights and fairness. There are three in-built moral limits in the tourism market, and namely: the market assumes it can price everything including culture and nature; the market distributes welfare through one's ability to pay rather than one's needs; and the market is structured in ways that benefit some groups more than others. The so-called solutions are compromises, and are tainted ideologically and politically. This work-in-progress is merely a starting point to a longer discussion on how narratives of balanced sustainable tourism development gloss over the contradictions in the tourism market.