3.2.1 Political Constraints
There are two main political barriers to the sustainable tourism development policy in Korea. Firstly, there is absence of sufficient legislation to support ecotourism as the ministry of Environment relies on the Ministry of Culture and Tourism for developing ecotourism. They required a coordinated initiative from the local authorities, tour operators, and NGOs for implementing their educational programs on resource monitoring, and training facilities for conserving tourism under the Natural Environment Conservation Act article 46.Secondly, entirely centralized decision making has resulted in lack of separation of the tourism development from the land development program, which resulted in ineffective ecotourism development for individual areas.
4.1 Policy-oriented Solutions
First of all, there has to be a prioritization for the Infrastructure Establishment Projects or Tourism Complex Development Projects which are part of 10 year land development plans. Core ministries of agriculture, tourism, infrastructure, and environment should develop effective implementation plans with effective dispute resolution provisions. Further, development of ecotourism should be considered as a cross-disciplinary process where national development, social issues, and cultural setup need to be fused in to be integrated. The environmental policies need effective protection by a cross-disciplinary approach to deal with global environmental issues. The organizations such as NGOs, environment ministry, and academic institutions should focus on inter-departmental cooperation for regional development for biodiversity similar to that done by The Nature Environment Regulation (NER) established in 1997. Finally, local residents should be promoted and rewarded to develop optimism on current policies and participate in the preservation of environmental biodiversity for their regions. NGOs can be effective partners in this process where regional and local level integration of residents, authorities and ministry will be gained for conserving biodiversity, similar to that achieved via "Korea's Biodiversity project in the year 2000"
Political sustainability can be achieved only by eliminating political lobbying and developing region wise polices. Steady policies regarding declaring the sites to be of natural conservation is an important step in this regard. For example, commercial fishing in designated zones in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia (Tisdell, 1989), is done to avoid complicated politics intervening into environmental sustainability issues.
Bibliography
Tisdell, C., 1997. Ecotourism: Aspects of its Sustainability and its Compatibility [online]. St Lucia: University of Queensland. Report 26.
