4 An illustration of the Delphi technique

Box 8.4 An illustration of the Delphi technique

A landowner intends to lease an area of land close to the rim of an active volcano to a building consortium which has plans to develop the site for a hotel and tourist observa- tion post. The hotel will incorporate a restaurant which will be open to non-residents. The site is in a National Park area and is adjacent to a small wildlife reserve within the park. Apart from the crater itself, which has little vegetation other than a few mosses, the area outside the crater rim is covered by cloud forest and has all the rich and varied wildlife and plant life associated with that vegetation type.

At present, there is only a rough track, just suitable for four-wheel drive vehicles. The scheme will necessitate the construction of a surfaced road. The park authorities are seeking agreement from all interested parties about several factors concerning the devel- opment. These are:

• the width of the road; •

the capacity of the hotel; •

the height of the hotel; •

the numbers of tourists allowed into the reserve; •

the training and management of the tourist guides; •

a possible minibus system from a village 3 km away to the observation post;

• the possible need for a car park next to the observation post. The people to be consulted are: •

the managing director of the building consortium; •

the landowner; •

the national park director; •

the mayor of the nearby village; •

a biologist who works at the research station in the wildlife refuge; •

a vulcanologist (who works at the same place); •

the director of a tour company interested in running tours to the volcano; •

a conservationist from a leading environmental organisation concerned particularly with tourism.

process of approaching a consensus:

All these people are to be asked to answer the following questions as part of a Delphi

1 What should be the maximum height of the hotel?

2 How should sewage from the hotel be dealt with?

3 Should there be a maximum capacity fixed for the hotel?

4 What should be the maximum width of the road?

5 Who should pay for the road?

6 The hotel will have a car park for its residents’ cars. Should a car park be constructed next to the observation post for other members of the public? Or should the public

be encouraged to use a minibus service? (It is possible to prevent cars, other than those of the hotel users, from using the road.)

7 As very few people visit the crater at present, there has been no need to restrict the numbers of people on the trails in the wildlife refuge. But many more visitors are expected once the hotel is built. What should be the maximum carrying capacity of

a trail in the wildlife refuge?

8 Guides will be needed in the refuge. Who should train them?

‘Hosts’ and destinations • 223

effective carrying capacities of a trail in the Guayabo National Monument in Costa Rica, each of these measures refers to some tangible and physical factor pertaining to the area under study. Clark (1990), however, outlines the need to add a further dimension to these calculations by incorporating the social carrying capacity to measure the level at which tourist activity becomes a cause of social unrest and/or tourist discomfort. Clark expands the number of factors under consideration and the number of output measures or results, and makes it clear that he does not see carrying capacity purely as a nega- tive idea which results in restriction, but relates it instead to the notion of sustainable development. Despite acknowledging difficulties in measurement and definition, he does however assume that a scientifically rational balance can be reached between all these factors, resulting in an ‘objective’ measure.

Watson and Kopachevsky, however, argue that the result of carrying capacity 13111

measurements will always depend on the context of the situation being measured and that this context will vary not just with the physical and social environments, but also with the values of those asking the questions and establishing the conditions for measurement: ‘carrying capacities cannot be determined in the absence of value judge- ments that specify the type of experience a given area is attempting to provide . . . the establishment of target levels is fundamentally an exercise in human value judgement’ (1996: 175). They identify different types of carrying capacity (see Box 8.5) and are adamant in their belief that values ‘influence all phases and elements of social research’ (177) and ‘play a critical role in the choice and application of science’ (177). Referring to the work of Thomas Kuhn (1962), they state that ‘conceptual frameworks and para- digms rise and fall . . . as much on political grounds as on scientific ones’ (177). In other words, human judgement will always be required in assessing appropriate threshold levels for a given activity, in this case tourism.

It is also clear that carrying capacities may vary with time, a point made by the Belize Centre for Environmental Studies (BCES): ‘the physical carrying capacity of a road may decrease at night when visibility is less, or the environmental carrying capacity of Half Moon Caye, in terms of visitor numbers, may decrease when the boobies are nesting’ (1994: 1). The way in which visitor carrying capacity has had to be recalculated over time as visitor numbers have increased to the Galápagos Islands also illustrates the point about calculation changes with both time and perceptions or values. Jonathan Croall reports that the Galápagos Islands’ ‘sustainable’ capacity of 12,000 visitors per annum set by the Ecuadorean government was soon increased to 50,000 for economic reasons (1995: 61).

This growing realisation, that the setting of limits is a normative process which cannot

be divorced from the objectives of the exercise or from the values of those who set them, has led to enquiry into the techniques of setting limits of acceptable change (LACs), which are to some extent developing out of the work on carrying capacity. One essential element that has been built into the development of LACs has been the involve- ment of different interest groups in the technique, on the grounds that the setting of limits based on value judgements would be more acceptable to users if they were involved in setting them. As Sidaway says, ‘In LAC, the entire process involves the interest groups from the outset’ (1994: 1).

Sidaway identifies the features which distinguish the LAC approach from carrying capacity and other management planning systems as ‘its attempts to identify measur- able aspects of quality, to monitor whether environmental quality is maintained and the degree of interest group involvement throughout the process’ (1994: 3). The first two of these features show a similarity with another recent development in planning systems, that of sustainability indicators; and in its degree of interest group participation it resem-

11111 bles the Delphi technique discussed earlier.

224 • ‘Hosts’ and destinations