Out of the Box 4 - Sustainable investment in Tourism

By Renton de Alwis

Reposting of a column from 'Out of the Box' in the Financial Times, Sri Lanka published in February 2010


Late Robbie Collins was a well-known and highly respected tourism personality in the Asian region, during the 80’s and 90’s. Hailing from the historic township of Jacksonville in the conservation state of Oregon in the USA, he came over to Asia to live and work among us. I had the privilege and good fortune to closely associate with him, when he was an active campaigner for conserving heritage resources of most Asian cities and regions for tourism during much of that time. His campaigns extended through Kathmandu’s Lalithpur, Vietnam’s Hue, Bali’s Ubud, Cambodia’s Angkor-Wat, Thailand’s Cheng Rai, Macau’s Portuguese heritage to Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar. Today these stand as proud monuments, as well as successful tourism sites benefiting from the valuable input he gave to convince those in governance and in tourism policy making of the power they had, both as iconic conservation sites and money spinning tourism resources.

He also worked closely with our heritage conservation activist and administrator Dr. Roland de Silva, when he was heading Unesco, supporting him strongly with initiatives such as our Cultural Triangle and the World Heritage Sites initiatives. Robbie was then holding the position as Head of the US ICOMOS, the organisation dedicated to the preservation of monuments. I recollect how he held our legendary architect late Goeffrey Bawa in very high esteem and cited his example at many forums where he spoke.  

Today in this column, I took on to reminiscing of Robbie, whom I consider a mentor and friend for several reasons. It is not only because of the many insights he gave me as a novice tourism administrator in the region at the time, but because of the solid contribution he made to focus on an area, that most entrepreneurs in tourism today leave for conservationists and governments to look after. His unique selling point was the much neglected aspect of direct economic benefit that accrued not only to government coffers but also to individual tourism investors in each of those areas. I had heard of how he and his friends persistently wooed then prime minister of Singapore Lee Kwan Yew to stop the demolition of buildings of heritage value in Singapore, using it as the key rationale. 

At a time when we in Sri Lanka are taking on a fresh phase of tourism development and investment, the value of work done by the likes of Robbie become extremely relevant. Especially when, tourism policy makers and investors are talking about rapid development of hotels and resorts, we need to re-evaluate our own thinking on how such development should take place. I recollect how a tourism consulting team from a European country a few years ago designing a strategy for eco-tourism for Sri Lanka, came up with a report where most scenic spots on our island were recommended as being suitable for building eco-lodges. Robbie’s position on this would be that any eco-lodge or other accommodation development should not be located on or in too close proximity to a scenic spot or a heritage site. He would argue that having accommodation placed at the scenic site will diminish the economic value of the area and affect the sustainability of the investment itself.    

This is food for thought for those in search for land for individual tourism development projects and also for those that are responsible for evaluating the environmental and economic impacts of such investments. Our spatial planners, heritage conservationists and architects have a responsibility to innovate ways in which we could ensure that we will continue to reap the most economic value from our scenic and heritage sites.

We do have the good among us. But we also have the bad and the ugly. What we need to do is to exercise caution at all times and ensure that we must always attempt to get it right, for such beauty and value as we have in our midst, can never be regained once lost.

Pix credit: Self