WILLEMSTAD – The new carrying capacity study for Curaçao warns that rapid tourism growth is placing increasing pressure on nature, infrastructure and society. The figures for Curaçao are new. The underlying mechanism is much less so. Researcher Arjen Alberts described in 2020 how Aruba and Sint Maarten continued to grow despite increasingly clear limits. His research helps explain why stopping in time is so difficult.
For the underlying question, how a tourist island economy can continue to grow despite known limits, research has existed for some time.
In 2020, Arjen Alberts defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Amsterdam: Small Island Tourism Economies and the Tourism Area Lifecycle: Why Aruba and Sint Maarten have exceeded their carrying capacity.
The title already contains his conclusion: Aruba and Sint Maarten had, according to Alberts, grown beyond the limits of their carrying capacity. But his research was not only about the consequences of that. He primarily wanted to explain why that development continues even when governments and society can already see the problems coming.
Alberts placed the development of both islands within the Tourism Area Life Cycle, a model in which tourist destinations pass through different phases. First a destination is discovered, then investments and rapid growth follow. After that comes a phase in which tourism matures and growth becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Without timely intervention, stagnation and decline can ultimately follow.
Small islands face a particular additional problem. Land, beaches, roads, housing and other facilities are physically limited, while the economic growth model is not inherently so.
Alberts therefore devoted an entire section of his thesis to the governance of tourism development and another to what he calls the ‘mandatory growth paradox‘: the paradox of an economy that must keep growing in order to maintain the benefits of the existing system.
The problems were already known
A key insight from Alberts’ research is that Aruba and Sint Maarten did not only discover that there were limits to their tourism development once those limits had been exceeded.
Governments and civil society organisations had already signalled the problems much earlier. Studies were conducted, plans were written and discussions were held about the future scale of tourism.
Yet the economic model itself was not fundamentally changed.
Alberts describes in his conclusion an apparent contradiction: governments and society acknowledge the problems of a mature tourist economy, but this does not lead to a decision to halt volume growth. Even when further growth barely leads to higher average productivity and incomes, the number of tourists continues to rise.
In his words, there is a contradiction between the awareness of the limitations of the model and the failure to act on that knowledge.
That finding is relevant to the current debate on Curaçao.
The new carrying capacity study also does not present exclusively unknown problems. The government already has policies and projects in areas that are now once again being identified as bottlenecks. The researchers refer, for instance, to existing tourism policy, a funded wastewater project and ongoing research into waste management. The new study primarily finds that urgency, coherence and implementation are lacking.
The question therefore becomes less straightforward than: did Curaçao know there were problems?
More important is: what happens now that these problems are being calculated together and it becomes clear that further tourism growth amplifies them?
Everyone can get ahead, as long as the economy grows
Alberts looks for part of the answer to that question in the labour market.
Tourism growth in Aruba and Sint Maarten was accompanied by large-scale labour migration. Hotels, restaurants, shops and the construction sector needed more workers than the local population could provide.
In Aruba, according to the data Alberts analysed, approximately 12,700 jobs were added during the 1990s. Only a small portion of that growth was filled by Aruba-born workers; the majority was filled by new immigrants. At the same time, local workers increasingly moved into higher-level positions and better-paid parts of the economy.
In 2000, approximately 60 percent of people living in Aruba who were born in developing countries worked in hotels and restaurants, trade, repair or construction. At the same time, the number of Aruba-born workers in higher occupational categories such as management and professional roles increased, while their presence in lower categories declined.
Alberts concludes from this that the local workforce was able to move upward, while the bottom of the labour market was continually replenished with immigrants.
This gives rise to a distinctive economic pyramid.
New labour migrants can improve their situation compared to where they came from. People who have lived on the island longer can take the next step on the career ladder. Entrepreneurs benefit from a larger economy and the government receives more tax revenue.
For individual groups, the system can therefore remain attractive for a long time, even when average productivity barely rises any further.
But for that to work, the pyramid must keep getting bigger.
The next hotel needs workers again
That is Alberts’ mandatory growth paradox.
New hotels create employment. But if insufficient local workers are available, new labour migrants are needed. They then also come to live on the island and require housing, transport, water, electricity, healthcare and other services.
The population thus grows alongside the tourist economy.
Alberts refers in his thesis to earlier research on Aruba that calls this the ‘pumping effect’: each time a new hotel is built, a new wave of immigration and settlement follows, causing the island to approach its carrying capacity more quickly.
This means tourism growth is far more than simply adding hotel rooms.
More hotels lead to more jobs. More jobs require more workers. More workers can lead to more residents. More residents require more housing and infrastructure. And that larger economy in turn creates a renewed need for economic growth.
The system can thereby become dependent on further expansion.
And that is precisely why stopping becomes politically difficult.
The benefits are immediate, the bill comes later
A decision to approve a new hotel has immediately visible benefits. Investment flows in, the construction sector receives contracts, people get jobs and eventually tourists arrive who spend money.
The social costs develop far more gradually.
One extra car does not cause a traffic standstill. A hundred extra homes do not immediately solve a capacity problem with electricity or sewage. One new hotel does not fill a beach.
But after years of accumulation, those effects can converge.
According to Alberts, this is where a governance problem lies. In the early growth phases of tourism, a government can relatively easily facilitate development. In a mature tourist economy, coordination becomes essential: spatial planning, the labour market, nature, infrastructure and social services must all be steered simultaneously.
That proves far more difficult.
The Curaçao carrying capacity study ultimately arrives at the same governance issue. Tourism falls under one ministry, infrastructure under another, and nature and the environment under yet another. According to the researchers, tourism can therefore no longer be treated as a single economic sector, but must be governed as a national system.
Alberts studied Aruba and Sint Maarten. His thesis therefore does not prove that Curaçao will follow the same trajectory.
But several developments described in the new study for Curaçao do fit the pattern he examined.
The tourism sector is, according to the carrying capacity study, becoming increasingly dependent on foreign labour. With further hotel development, demand for workers will, according to the researchers, quickly exceed local supply. At the same time, this development contributes to housing pressure and greater demand for public services.
The researchers therefore advise Curaçao, among other things, to develop a national labour market strategy for tourism, with more training and local employment and less dependence on workers from outside the island. The consequences of tourism growth for housing must also, according to them, be explicitly addressed.
This raises a question that in the debate about tourism growth is barely being expressed in figures.
If Curaçao grows from just over 700,000 staying tourists to one million, 1.2 million or ultimately 1.5 million tourists per year: how many additional workers will be needed?
And if part of that must come from outside Curaçao: how many additional residents will that mean?
From that follow further questions. Where will those people live? How many extra cars will be on the roads? What does it mean for schools and healthcare? How much additional water and electricity will be consumed, and how much extra waste and wastewater will be generated?
The current executive summary provides no concrete staffing or population projections.
The study does warn, however, that the supply of accommodation is already growing faster than the infrastructure can handle, and that foreign labour further increases pressure on housing, roads and public services.
Not the first warning, but a moment for decision
This gives the new carrying capacity study a different significance.
The report matters because for Curaçao, for the first time, a large number of economic, ecological, infrastructural and social indicators are being calculated together. It maps the pace of current development and attempts to make limits measurable.
But the underlying process being described is not new.
Six years ago, Alberts already showed how two other tourism-intensive islands within the Kingdom ended up in a situation where further growth clashed with their physical carrying capacity — and how difficult it subsequently proved to actually slow that growth.
His most important insight for Curaçao may therefore not be that overtourism exists.
It is that an island can know the problems and still keep growing, because the economic and political system has in the meantime become dependent on the benefits that new growth repeatedly delivers.
The carrying capacity study states that the choices made in the next two years will determine whether Curaçao governs its growth or is governed by it.
Alberts’ research into Aruba and Sint Maarten adds a historical warning to that: once further growth has become necessary for jobs, investment and social mobility, knowing where the limit lies is not the same as being willing to defend it.
For Curaçao, alongside the question of how many tourists the island can handle, a second question therefore becomes at least as important:
what economic and population growth is Curaçao prepared to accept in order to keep receiving ever more tourists?
