Harmonizing Heritage Conservation and Tourism Development

There is an apparent dichotomy between conserving cultural heritage sites and ensuring tourism development. The former is usually considered as an exorbitant luxury that developing countries can ill afford and hence is usually accorded low priority. Thus, developing countries are often characterized as indiscriminately pursuing mass tourism with little consideration for culture and social values. This exacerbates the sacrifice of cultural values for commercial gain, and cultural assets are presented as commoditized tourism products. On the other hand, there are situations when tourism is also compromised to ensure that cultural values are not sacrificed merely for the benefit of tourism. Therefore, the relationship between tourism and heritage conservation is often characterized by contradictions whereby one sector is antithetical to the other.