Equity in sustainable development. A study of tourism development in Uganda.

Abstract

Sustainable development is hard to envision along with increased inequity and this issue has been emphasized in relation to the United Nations 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs. There is a pledge to leave no one behind and Goal 10 is specifically about reducing inequality. Recent studies have focused on the dynamics between equity and sustainable development and what conceptual framework is best suited to evaluate equitable development. The most conventional way to measure equity has been to use economic indicators to assess the distribution of benefits, but the three-pillar approach to sustainable development, with economic, social, and environmental dimensions, has called for a more comprehensive method. The conceptual idea used in this study divides equity into distributional, procedural, and recognitional equity, and each dimension has further characteristics, useful for evaluative purposes. The aim of this study is to explore how this recently suggested conceptual framework for equity can be used to assess development plans and search for possible causes or dangers of increased inequity. Tourism development in Uganda was chosen as the case for investigation and documents were gathered about public policy in recent years for the sector. Data was also gathered from small and medium sized tourist operators in Uganda, using an email survey and texts from their websites. The public policy documents were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory, but a form of critical discourse analysis was used on the data from the tourist operators. The main results indicate that the distributional aspect of equity gets the most attention in tourism development planning in Uganda while recognition, e.g. who is to benefit, participate and who has what rights, is a less addressed factor of equitable development in the observed case. This study is an input in the discussion of how the suggested conceptual framework can be applied to measure and evaluate comprehensively the impact that development planning has on equity.Key words: equity, sustainable development, SDGs, grounded theory, critical discourse analysis, sustainable tourism, ecotourism, modernization theory, dependency theory