Balinese Reactions to UNWTO's Global Code of Ethics for Tourism: A Case Study of Balinese NGO's Initiative

This paper examines an emerging tourism-related movement in Bali, initiated by the local NGO to reform long established mass-tourism. While Bali is well-known as Indonesia’s most prestigious tourism destination today, Bali's economic prosperity has been seen as resulting from the development of the tourism industry since the 1970s. However, especially after the 2002 terrorist attack, various socio-cultural, economic and environmental changes caused by modernization have come to be recognized as serious threats not only for the social stability but also for the tourism development among the Balinese. This is partly but significantly because Bali has been relying on international tourism. In other words, tourists’ fluid attitudes on culture and the environment seriously concern tourism practitioners. Consequently, although there is no unified idea and approach, introducing sustainable tourism has come to attract considerable attention especially among Balinese intellectuals, policy makers and NGOs.

A local NGO, Wisnu foundation, has launched a village tourism project called ‘Bali DWE’ in 2010. The project has two purposes: to promote alternative forms of tourism and to preserve the Balinese cultural heritage. In order to publicly demonstrate the necessity of reforming Balinese tourism, Wisnu foundation came up with ethical standards based on the UNWTO’s Global Code of Ethics for Tourism (GCET) supported by urban intellectuals.

This paper firstly illustrates how Wisnu foundation and its collaborators identified the issues of tourism in Bali and promoted its ethical dimension by ‘rearranging’ the concept of tourism. The outcome of the field research reveals that although there is an apparent divergence between active villagers and urbane including NGO staffs in terms of their perspectives on tourism, preserving culture and means of livelihood, the usage of GCET is playing a certain role in uniting the participants of the project.