Sustainable Tourism Law

478 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW Tourism Law, which contains conceptual elements derived from common, general Administrative Law. Following this line of thought, we find that there is no autonomous Tourism Law, per se , since social relations, and correlatively the legal ones, are not differentiated enough to claim a specific normativity. Thus, this order of ideas sustains that tourism changes the structure of a legal relation, imposes an activity thereon, and, therefore, perhaps it would suffice to produce new situations, but not to define new juridical relations. On the other hand, Latin American authors remove themselves from this primarily administrative discussion and, with a broader view, attempt to approach the issue of tourism regulation from the perspective of Economic Law. Such jurists give it a new denomination, stating that there is aTouristic Economic Law made up of a set of juridical rules and tourism planning instruments that are a part of the field of Economic Law, a branch of Public Law that utilizes principles and instruments, and can be conceptualized as a normative system that regulates the tourism planning process, the use of natural and cultural attractions that constitute our touristic heritage, the incentives for productive sectorial investments, quality control in tourism services and the relations between those who offer and those who consume such services. This vision certainly provides no clarity to the field of tourism in particular and it encroaches on other subjects, such as planning, environmental affairs and financial affairs, among others. For their part, Mexican authors from the 1970’s have attempted to enter that study of Tourism Law but have been content with merely citing current juridical norms. In most of the few available studies that were reviewed, description prevails over analysis, given that they only described the existing public administrative structure, without any debate whatsoever. To illustrate the foregoing, we shall mention that the issue of Tourism Law was brought up in the 1980’s, though it did not progress beyond a publication called Mexican Legislation and Touristic Organization , which is a word-by-word copy of positive legal regulations prevalent at the time. Nevertheless, the merit of those works lies in the compilation of legal texts and their chronological sorting for later publication 10 . In general, we can see that in that period, an outlet found for the study of tourism was the collection of the current legislation. On that basis, we have found recent Mexican publications that do not escape that 10 See Olivera Toro, 1988.