Blackstone Corporation Resource Management & Tourism Consultants is a Toronto-based consulting company providing services in Canada and in over 35 countries worldwide. The company was formed in 1991 by its two partners, Sally Davidson (B.A., M.A., M.C.P.) and Barbara Lamb (B.E.S., M.Sc.) to assist a variety of clients to bring a people-centred approach when designing and implementing projects. Our partners and senior associates are specialists in:
Social assessment and socio-economic impact analyses;
Tourism consulting;
Stakeholder consultation and development;
Sustainability planning; and
Due diligence evaluations.
Our work has resulted in demonstrable action related to ensuring that people's interests have been directly integrated into development projects – to our Clients’ advantage - across a wide spectrum of sectors, including:
Social infrastructure (i.e., water, sanitation, solid waste management, energy, transportation);
Environmental and cultural heritage resource management;
Responsible tourism (i.e., nature-based/ecotourism, cultural heritage, geotourism);
Urban planning and cadastre; and
Rural development (i.e., agriculture; irrigation and drainage).
Our assignments tend to be complex, requiring cross-sectoral thinking, consensus-building and trouble shooting. We have positive reputations among our domestic and international clients for work that reflects a high level of strategic, results-oriented analyses. We pride ourselves on managing projects that are on time and on budget, and meet the needs of our clients.
We are specialists in international tourism market analysis and demand forecasting, having carried out many such assignments over the past 25 years, including surveys with dozens of tour operators working all over the world.
We are able to work in English and Spanish. Our clients have included: private sector developers; municipalities; non-governmental organizations; national and regional governments; and major international lenders and donors including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Canadian International Development Agency.
Our Partners
SALLY DAVIDSON, B.A., M.A., M.C.P.
Sally Davidson, B.A.,M.A., M.C.P., has a Bachelor of Archaeology, Masters Degree in Social Anthropology and a Master of City Planning. Prior to co-founding Blackstone in 1991, Sally acted as President of a 17-person environmental and social science company wholly owned by one of Canada’s largest engineering firms. She has extensive experience working closely with engineers and construction crews, and managing large, multi-disciplinary projects in an international context.
Social Assessment & Sustainability Planning Experience
Sally has directed a wide range of multi-disciplinary assignments across Canada and in over 35 countries around the world. Some representative assignments include social assessments for a number of World Bank projects in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) including Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Serbia and Bulgaria. This work has spanned many sectors. Sally is responsible for designing and overseeing the qualitative and quantitative survey methodologies for each project. This work has often been cited as best practice, generating highly useful and accurate information often generated under very difficult circumstances, such as in post-conflict situations and/or where census data is unavailable.
In addition, she has overseen major environmental and social assessment projects (ESIAs), including: a 115 km highway in Ecuador; an environmental programming strategy for the 15 Commonwealth Caribbean Countries; waste management and institutional strengthening project for several countries/regions; and urban environmental management strategies. Sally’s background as an anthropologist was one impetus for her strong interest in working with indigenous peoples. In addition to the work she has done for over 25 First Nations in Canada, her assignments have included consultation and work with many indigenous peoples from other parts of the world.
For over 20 years she has worked on projects that directly require an integrated sustainable development approach. Based on this experience and bringing leading edge approaches to the table, Blackstone produced a highly regarded Sustainable Planning Toolkit for Ontario’s municipalities and provided training related to the Toolkit in many municipalities.
Tourism Experience
Sally has directed a wide range of multi-disciplinary tourism assignments throughout Canada and in numerous countries around the world, for clients such as the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Canadian International Development Agency, and national governments.
Sally is the firm’s senior expert responsible for tourism land use planning, ecotourism product development, safeguards and best practices, and legislation/policy development. Her work in over 35 countries, along with eco and adventure travel in some 65 countries, has given her extensive experience in observing “lessons learned” from study of a vast array of ecotourism products. Given the fact that supply has outstripped demand for nature/cultural heritage products in many parts of the world, the highly competitive nature of the sector, and the fragmented nature of today’s tourism markets, it is imperative that new tourism developments be carefully planned if they are to succeed. Sally’s experience helps to design plans that are responsive to market demands, natural conditions, institutional realities and financial considerations, and are sustainable over the long term.
Sally has acted as Project Director for a large cultural heritage and alternative tourism planning project for two large municipalities in China, which resulted in a major World Bank loan to Ningbo and Shaoxing cities for tourism development. She has carried out major ecocultural tourism planning projects throughout the Canadian Arctic over the past 20 years. She works regularly for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (Canadian Government) as a due diligence reviewer for large scale tourism projects being developed throughout Yukon Territory, most recently carrying out a major comprehensive study of a $12 million dollar river cruise and multi-ecotourism lodge development. She also was Project Director for the National Ecotourism Plan for Belize. This plan (widely cited on the country’s tourism web site as “The Blackstone Report”) resulted in a multi-million dollar loan to the government from the Inter-America Development Bank. It has been cited by the Bank as representing “Best Practice” in regard to ecotourism planning. Another example of her work is the development of a tourism plan for the ecologically sensitive Bolivian Pantanal region, where she designed “The World’s Longest Wetland Walkway”.
Barbara Lamb
BARBARA LAMB, B.E.S., M.Sc.
Barbara Lamb (B.Env. Studies), M.Sc., has a Masters Degree in Urban & Regional Planning and an Honours Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a strong economics component. She co-founded Blackstone Corporation Resource Management & Tourism Consultants in 1991.
Social Assessment & Sustainability Experience
Barbara has designed and participated in all of Blackstone’s social assessment assignments and in dozens of consultative processes to ensure that the wide range of stakeholder interests are understood and addressed through project design. Typically, in Blackstone’s social sciences projects, she is responsible for any economic and financial analyses, institutional and capacity analyses, ana monitoring and evaluation plans, including performance indicators.
Recently, she has been Project Director of a series of environmental sustainability-related assignments, including the development of a leading-edge Sustainability Planning Guide for all of Ontario’s Municipalities. She has led numerous training sessions attended by hundreds of municipal representatives. This sustainability work builds on international environmental management assignments undertaken, among others, in 13 countries of the Caribbean and on several projects undertaken in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Tourism Experience
Barbara is a highly seasoned professional tourism planner. Her tourism background extends back to the 1980s, when she worked for one of the world’s largest hospitality industry firms undertaking market and financial feasibility studies for a variety of international tourism attractions and accommodations properties. Since the late 1980s, however, she has chosen to specialize in responsible nature and culture-based tourism planning. On Blackstone’s tourism initiatives, Barbara oversees primary and secondary market research (very important since tourism is a market-driven industry), institutional analyses, economic impact and consultation processes. The plans and research results that Blackstone produces are extremely effective because of our emphasis on primary market research, creative product development and our careful evaluation of the institutional capacity to undertake various aspects of the tourism plan. We recognize that implementation depends on having the right people, processes and resources in place, and on the will of the overseers to pay attention to the institutional and policy framework.
Barbara, along with the other co-founder of Blackstone, Sally Davidson, has created a highly useful “Tourism Scale” which provides a planning tool to governments that incorporates considerations of cultural and natural carrying capacity and environmental fragility. The scale enables the planner to identify the need for Increasingly strict tourism management guidelines as one moves along the scale towards “deep” ecotourism.
Among others, Barbara was Project Manager of the national Ecotourism Strategy for Belize that is still being followed over a decade later. The national Plan was extremely successful in renewing the country’s tourism industry and in generating a unified approach among very disparate stakeholders. She contributed to the generation of a national Ecotourism Policy which, again, prevails to this day. She was Project Manager of a large and complex World Bank-funded cultural heritage tourism project in China. This project encouraged the government to increase the loan significantly to implement the Tourism Plan that was produced. She has also been Manager recently of tourism-related due diligence assignments in Aruba and in Canada’s Yukon. The aim was to ensure that proposed large tourism developments were both financially feasible and socially and environmentally sustainable.
