Buddhist Ethics: Planning Towards Sustainable Community-based Tourism

Abstract

        One of the main “sustainable tourism development” issues that policy-makers will face in the next millennium is the problem of dealing with the very complex interaction between cultural resources, host communities and visitors. In the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) of Southern China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, anumber of historical and archaeological sites are becoming well known. These World Heritage sites attract extraordinary numbers of international tourists. Moreover, the traditional social activities and life patterns of local communities and indigenous people, especially minority groups on the mountains, are still unique to various locations in this subregion. This research reviews the roles of policy-makers. The problem may be expressed as how to solve the conflicts of interest of multilateral decision-makers by focusing on planning ethics interpreted from Buddhist philosophy, a major religion in the GMS. To achieve this aim, it is necessary to ask what political ethics should they have in planning practice? Buddhist ethical principles are proposed and applied to evaluate alternative tourism policy options. The initial findings from a field survey will be discussed in order to show how different policy options could be linked to the Buddhist ethics to enhance the sustainability of host communities.