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Sharing Best Practices of Nepal's Tourism at the WTO Forum

Friday - 19th November 2004

The Tourism Policy Forum organized by World Tourism Organisation (WTO) from 18-20 October 2004 at Washington D.C. marked the first time that donor agencies, developing countries, and the civil society have met together at a high-level international conference to focus specifically on ways to cooperate and harness the economic power of toursm for sustainable development.

Organized by WTO and The George Washington University, the forum attracted 200 participants and more than 200 observers from 52 countries, including 20 tourism ministers or top-level government officials. Participating donor agencies included multilateral banks such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, as well as bilateral development agencies such as USAID, DGSC/MAE Italy, AECI Spain, DGCID/MAE France, SNV Netherlands, GZT Germany, CIDA Canada, and JICA Japan.
During the forum it was stressed that properly managed tourism can be a powerful tool for sustainable development. However, it was agreed that the complex, multifaceted nature of the tourism industry presents special management challenges for donor agencies as well as governments. Ensuring cooperation and communication among the diverse tourism development stakeholders and developing analytical measurement tools have been considered as major challenges to evaluate the success or failure of sustainable tourism development projects.
The importance of tourism in the Latin American region have been highlighted where 54 million international visits per year translate into 2.5 million jobs, or roughly 15% of the regions workforce. In this region, over 30 years of experience on various tourism projects the focus has finally changed from big infrastructure projects to more community-based projects. Similarly, it is reported that in the past five years, the World Bank Group has undertaken approximately 100 projects involving tourism in 56 countries, representing 3% of the banks total investment. During the forum, the importance of tourism development has been noted not only for economic growth but also for conservation and social sustainability. Likewise, it is stressed that WTOs intention is to help the developing world to harness its tremendous tourism potential for sustainable tourism development. Moreover, the need for community involvement and the importance of their capacity building are considered as the prime factors to ensure for sustainable tourism development.
The messages that were reiterated by all participants during tourism ministers' panel discussion were that tourism is the most efficient sector for generating jobs and economic growth, master plans need to stress long-term sustainability and poverty reduction, and that legal and regulatory frameworks for investors are needed. Mr. Shanker Prasad Koirala, Joint Secretary of Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation (MoCTCA) participated at the panel discussion on behalf of Nepal.
It is argued that the value of knowledge management is a key instrument for tourism policy. The framework presented by WTO for Tourism Policy for Development consists of (i) building public/private partnerships for action; (ii) using knowledge management as the main instrument in tourism for development policies and (iii) creating strategic tourism policy plans with development as the main objective.
The ST-EP Foundation, which stands for Sustainable Tourism Eliminating Poverty, is an initiative of the World Tourism Organisation that will be launched at the beginning of next year. ST-EP will finance new research and new development projects that link sustainable tourism to the UN Millennium Development Goals, specially poverty reduction. The foundation, which will be based in Seoul, aims to attract US$ 100 millon in seed money and sponsor 5,000 projects by 2015.
The last day of the forum was focused on working group sessions organized according to eight tourism development themes. They were - Strategic Assessment Planning and Implementation; Decentralized Governance and Community Capacity Building; SME Business Development and Competitiveness; Natural Resource and Protected Area Management; Cultural Heritage Preservation; Marketing Sustainable Tourism Product; Rural Development; and Financial Instruments and Enabling Environments.
In each session, five or six tourism experts presented case studies. Rabi Jung Pandey, National Programme Manager presented case study on Tourism for Rural Poverty Alleviation Programme (TRPAP) under the theme Rural Development. Presentation mainly focused on project context, project objectives, stakeholders and implementation approaches, major challenges faced by the programme, indicators used to measure the success of the programe, and project achievements and lesson learned. All presentations were illustrations of projects or programs that have used a particular approach or entry supported by development assistance funding. The basic objective of the case presentation was to inform and stimulate the working group to help them to priorities recommendations concerning strategy and implementation actions.
Finally, the forum concluded with Washington Declaration on Tourism as a Sustainable Development Strategy which pointed out the emergence of a new mindset among top officials of the international financing institutions, who had asserted that tourism can be the entry point to development in areas like infrastructure and rural renewal. It has also been stressed that all participants need to collaborate in order to leverage their strengths, offering the WTO as reference point for the sector and focal point for linkages with the Millennium Development Goals.
The Forum has provided an opportunity to share thoughts and explore possible courses of actions with development assistance recipients and donors. Similarly, it has helped to exchange views with bilateral and multilateral donor organisations, as well as to respective recipients. Likewise, the forum has provided opportunity to discuss sustainable tourism development policies in relation to the MDGs. The case studies presented has shared promising practices for sustainable tourism development and has considered lessons learned from these exemplary tourism projects including TRPAP from Nepal.

- Rural Tourism Feature - 12/ TRPAP