Dr.Hesham Mohamed El-Barmelgy

The notion of linking sustainable tourism to the sustainable development of the Egyptian rural communities although well recognised is not without its doubts. Sustainable tourism could (Fsadni and Selwyn, 1997; Mills, 1993; and Hall, 2000) and should (Butler, 1993; and WTO, 1993) provide means of economic, social and environment regeneration for such communities. However, sustainable tourism is not a panacea and cannot be self-contained, its’ needs must be recognised within the wider context of the community sustainable development framework (Lane, 1994; and Human, 1994). After all it is the challenge of sustainable tourism to ‘build on the positive’ and ‘not to reproduce the negative’. The paper provokes the ability of sustainable tourism to act as the catalyst for promoting sustainable development in rural communities through the ability of introducing a deep ecological sustainable form of tourism defined as ‘sustainable eco-rural tourism’.
The paper aims to investigate and define a practical model for promoting a sustainable form of tourism within the Egyptian rural context defined as ‘sustainable eco-rural tourism’ through adopting the ‘Innovation-Diffusion’ theory (Moseley, 2000) in an attempt to address the questions of, what is meant by ‘sustainable eco-rural tourism’ as an innovative form of tourism, and how can it be locally adopted through a community-led approach to insure maximum host integration in the process ‘diffusion elements and channels’.