Indonesia tackles lies, damned lies, & sustainable tourism statistics?

Sus­tain­able Tour­ism Devel­op­ment Work­ing Group head I Gede Ardika said the dis­cus­sion was about Indone­si­a’s present­a­tion of its recom­mend­a­tions at an upcom­ing con­fer­ence in Manila, Philippines.

The 6th Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence on Tour­ism Stat­ist­ics, June 21 – 24, is expec­ted to pro­duce a declar­a­tion on the import­ance of devel­op­ing a stat­ist­ic­al frame­work to integ­rate sus­tain­able tour­ism region­ally, nation­ally, and globally.

This blog won­ders how much time and resources are spent every year on pre­par­a­tions to meet, talk, listen, nod, and declare the obvious.

To his cred­it, how­ever, Ardika drove the focus group dis­cus­sion towards: 1) an under­stand­ing of the issues around quan­ti­fy­ing sus­tain­able tour­ism; and 2) a stand­ard meth­od­o­logy that can sup­port policy mak­ing at all levels.

The Tour­ism Ministry’s IT spe­cial­ist Sam­s­riy­ono Nugroho said: “No one has ever dis­cussed cre­at­ing a stand­ard­ised basis for data col­lec­tion of rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion on a nation­al or sub-nation­al level.

“This sig­ni­fic­ant gap is lim­it­ing the poten­tial devel­op­ment of policy to improve sus­tain­able tourism.”

To bridge the gap, the United Nations World Tour­ism Organ­iz­a­tion (UNWTO) with sup­port from the UN’s Stat­ist­ics Divi­sion (UNSD) has ini­ti­ated “Towards a Stat­ist­ic­al Frame­work for Meas­ur­ing Sus­tain­able Tour­ism (MST)”.

The awk­wardly-named ini­ti­at­ive is appar­ently a con­tinu­ation of two of UNW­TO’s pre­vi­ous pro­jects: the Tour­ism Satel­lite Account (TSA) and Inter­na­tion­al Recom­mend­a­tions for Tour­ism Stat­ist­ics (IRTS).

Tour­ism Min­is­ter Arief Yahya said that Indone­sia has good judg­ment when it comes to sus­tain­able tourism.

“In fact, Indone­sia ranked second after China in that cat­egory,” accord­ing to one report.

Ranked by whom?

“Tour­ism isn’t merely just about des­tin­a­tions, but also takes into account the over­all sus­tain­able devel­op­ment of infra­struc­tures,” the Min­is­ter was quoted as say­ing, before then cit­ing the offi­cial UNWTO defin­i­tion of sus­tain­able tour­ism.

Full stor­ies at Jakarta Globe and The Jakarta Post.