Valuing Foreign Tourism - Regulating the World’s Most Special Places

Focused Discussion
Lesley Wexler  

This focused discussion explores the tools that law and social policy offer for valuing the world’s most special places, and for using those values to regulate tourism to those places. Tourists frequently seek unique places to have unique experiences. Yet this means that the world’s most special places experience an outsized burden from tourism, and are at outsized risk for degradation as a result of overtourism, which arises from unsustainable levels and types of tourism. International law, such as UN protections of World Heritage sites, present one mechanism for regulating foreign tourism, but such protections may be insufficient in many circumstances, and are particularly prone to struggle where local governments and communities lack buy-in. Other international law, like the Sustainable Development Goals, present a broad framework to preserve cultural heritage and site preservation, which might be a useful tool, but the SDGs have not yet been deployed to adequately guide conversation in this area. Unfortunately, absent law and policy that fully conveys the global value of tourist sites to domestic and local authorities, local authorities may generally be underincentivized to protect the world’s most special places, relative to the total value such places offer the rest of the world, both generally and as tourist destinations. The discussion draws on the authors’ past work on valuing foreign impacts to show that global willingness-to-pay to protect a site will often exceed local willingness-to-pay, and presents models for countries and communities to use in incorporating foreign values into domestic tourist law and policy.