25 Years "Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism"

This year, the Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism (ECOT) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. In this issue of TourismWatch (incidentally our "No. 50” – and another reason to celebrate!), we therefore take the opportunity to congratulate ECOT, one of our main partners, on this special occasion.

We join ECOT in looking at the past, present and future of the organisation. In our interview, ECOT's director Caesar D'Mello points out the severe social costs tourism entails for developing countries. Tourism, he says, violates people's dignity and rights. It is based on patterns of global relationships and transactions that are unjust and inequitable. However, despite the size of the tourism industry, advocacy through networking is the way for civil society to respond.

Networking is also key to 'maintaining the rage', as Peter Holden puts it in his article, looking back at the roots of ECOT. The foundation of ECOT in 1982 was facilitated by a group of people with a Christian background who came together for a workshop on Third World Tourism in Manila in 1980. They concluded that as far as the Third World is concerned, tourism has wreaked more havoc than any good it could have possibly done. As there is a qualitative difference looking at the phenomenon of tourism from a Southern perspective, they decided that if something was to be done, it should be done in the South. Thus, the Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism was founded in Thailand to empower Third World people to respond to tourism in their own place.

According to Ron O'Grady who has reviewed the forthcoming ECOT publication, "Transforming Tourism/Re-forming Tourism", there is a need for a campaigning group like ECOT to provide direction, and the tourism industry needs a mosquito organisation like ECOT to keep it honest.