World Heritage, tourism and sustainable development in Africa: discourses, approaches and challenges

Résumé

This paper analyse the combined role that tourism and heritage, particularly World Heritage, can play in Africa’s development, and their relation with the principles and imperatives of sustainable development. This issue needs to be addressed by scalar reasoning, although this approach has intrinsic pitfalls, biases and ideologies. Such a question should therefore be broken down into its implicit or explicit parts before new insights can potentially be proposed. First, it will be necessary to call into question the relationships between tourism and development, heritage and tourism and the supposedly more significant role that World Heritage can play in this tourism-based development. Second, the existence of a possible “African specificity” in the establishment of this three-fold “(world) heritage-tourism-development” relationship must be considered. How do the known or supposed specificities of African heritage and of heritage in Africa play a part ? How do these heritage specificities impact tourism, and in turn create development conditions ? Inversely, how do the tourism specificities in Africa contribute to the emergence of heritage as a development factor ? Finally, the question arises as to whether, in such a context, the social, economic and environmental sustainability of tourism- and heritage-based development can be analyzed.

Keywords: World Heritage, tourism, development, discourses, challenges, Africa.