Selling Anthropocene space: situated adventures in sustainable tourism

Abstract

The Anthropocene is a proposed technical term for a new geological timeframe, but it is also a conceptual tool with the potential to redefine the stakes of contemporary environmental politics. One facet that is often overlooked is that the Anthropocene is a concept with commercial potential, even if the term itself has not been widely adopted. This article presents an investigation of the commercial potential of the Anthropocene idea through the lens of self-described sustainable tourism ventures in The Bahamas. These examples demonstrate some of the ways in which Anthropocene imaginaries participate in the recreation, redesign, and rebranding of specific spaces as emergent “tourism products”, specifically the small island farm and the anthropogenic coral reef. The goal is twofold: (1) to explore the symbolic and material creativity of the Anthropocene idea as its themes are used to extend capitalist innovation, and (2) to examine the Anthropocene idea as a strategy that builds upon existing histories of inequality to enable transnational accumulation in particular locales. As a situated adventure, this article articulates a reflexive mode of political ecological research for the Anthropocene that is equipped to critically articulate emergent practices at the intersection of postcolonial tourism, environmental conservation, and sustainable development.     

Tourism and environmental subjectivities in the Anthropocene: observations from Niru Village,Southwest China

ABSTRACT

The increasingly popular notion of Anthropocene urges us to reflect and review the role of the human, the Anthropos, as part of the planet earth. In this context, tourism has been singled out as a global industry that is driven by neoliberal economic principles and is inevitably intertwined in the production of the Anthropocene. At the same time, tourism has been adopted also as part of environmental governance and management, aiming for a more sustainable economy. Based on the idea that ecotourism contributes to the discourse of “nature” (and Anthropocene) disruptively as well as productively in unsettling the normative ideas of “nature” and “culture”, in this article I attempt to understand more specifically how ecotourism may enable individuals' subject formation in relation to the broader environmental discourse. Drawn on fieldwork in Niru Village, Shangri-La, Southwest China, I employ a political ecology approach and examine the ways individuals relate themselves to “nature”, through a process of negotiation and exchange with others engaged in ecotourism activities. The tourism encounters in Niru Village, therefore are also embodied encounters of different environmental subjectivities.     

Friction in the forest: a confluence of structural and discursive political ecologies of tourism in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract

Tourism in the Anthropocene is a powerful driver of global connections that has direct consequences for social and environmental well-being across the planet. This political ecological analysis of tourism in the Ecuadorian Amazonian presents ethnographic vignettes to account for the ways that interwoven global discourses related to biodiversity conservation and community development are encountered, contested, and leveraged to advance particular approaches to tourism at the local level. We invoke Tsing’s theory of friction to frame these discursive encounters in the context of tourism-related decision-making in the community of Misahuallí, including instances of discursive shifts being leveraged into improved well-being of local residents. This paper makes an important contribution to the scholarship on the political ecology of tourism by bringing the emic perspectives of local residents to the forefront and by demonstrating the value of Tsing’s friction metaphor for analyzing the global connections inherent in tourism. Frictions between inequities and imbalances of power, perpetuated by both the structures and discourses associated with the use of tourism to address conservation and development objectives, remain at the vanguard of tourism research as we move through the Anthropocene.     

Nicaragua's Buen Vivir: a strategy for tourism development?

ABSTRACT

Although often framed as an emerging anthropocenic socio-ecological imaginary, the Latin American paradigm of Buen Vivir has provided a broad base of support for tourism development in the region. This article focuses on Nicaragua's Buen Vivir, a national development campaign entitled “Live Clean, Live Healthy, Live Beautiful, Live Well” (called Vivir Bonito, Vivir Bien) The campaign was launched in 2013 as a multi-pronged approach to integrated development in distinct areas including employment, public health, waste management, education, urban aesthetics and national pride. However, it has also had the effect of opening up opportunities for tourism development not only in the capital city of Managua but also alongside other mega-projects such as the planned interoceanic canal. This article draws upon the example of Vivir Bonito, Vivir Bien to illustrate the variety of tourism development strategies currently emerging at the intersection of a left-turn toward Socialism of the 21st Century and Buen Vivir in Latin America, on the one hand, and a post-neoliberal context in which political economic projects of the past continue to leave their mark.     

Ecotourism after nature: Anthropocene tourism as a new capitalist “fix”

Abstract

How does ecotourism – conventionally characterized by its pursuit of a “natural” experience – confront assertions that “nature is over” attendant to growing promotion of the “Anthropocene”? One increasingly prominent strategy is to try to harness this “end of nature” itself as a novel tourism “product”. If the Anthropocene is better understood as the Capitalocene, as some contend, then this strategy can be viewed as a paradigmatic example of disaster capitalism in which crises precipitated by capitalist processes are themselves exploited as new forms of accumulation. In this way, engagement with the Anthropocene becomes the latest in a series of spatio-temporal “fixes” that the tourism industry can be seen to provide to the capitalist system in general. Here I explore this dynamic by examining several ways in which the prospect of the loss of “natural” resources are promoted as the basis of tourism experience: disaster tourism; extinction tourism; voluntourism; development tourism; and, increasingly, self-consciously Anthropocene tourism as well. Via such strategies, Anthropocene tourism exemplifies capitalism’s astonishing capacity for self-renewal through creative destruction, sustaining itself in a “post-nature” world by continuing to market social and environmental awareness and action even while shifting from pursuit of nonhuman “nature” previously grounding these aims.     

Entanglements in multispecies voluntourism: conservation and Utila's affect economy

Abstract

Through a case study of conservation voluntourism this article brings together critical political ecology, multispecies ethnography, and studies of humanitarian tourism to advance a political ecology of multispecies conservation voluntourism. The article presents multispecies conservation voluntourism as a field that produces and is produced by an “affect economy”, or an economy based on the exchange or trade in the relational. Since the mid-1990s, life on Utila, Honduras, a popular discount backpacker scuba destination located along the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, has been deeply transformed by the growth of dive tourism, the ecological destruction it has produced, and now the conservation voluntourism industry emerging in its wake. Seventy percent of Utila is comprised of mangroves and associated wetlands, home to several endangered and endemic species. Using examples of whale shark tourism, lionfish hunts, and iguana tracking, this article shows how conservation organizations operate as affect generators, enabling the privilege of engaging in multispecies encounters. Engaging in multispecies conservation voluntourism produces value in the form of cultural capital which is then exchanged for material outcomes by volunteers in the global economy; at the same time, this form of voluntourism obscures local relationships to nature and alters multispecies assemblages from past configurations.     

Tourists and researcher identities: critical considerations of collisions,collaborations and confluences in Svalbard

ABSTRACT

Svalbard is an “edge-of-the-world” hot spot for environmental change, political discourse, tourism and scientific research in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research, I use this context to critically explore the identity-categories of “researcher” and “tourist”. Through the lens of political ecology, I draw out the uneven power relations of knowledge production that are attached to these labels and their consequences for ongoing efforts for managing sustainable tourism. By considering the experiences of tourists, researchers and “scientific tourists”, both practically and from an embodied experiential perspective, I challenge the distinctions typically made between these roles. I bring to light several common aspects, goals and experiences these practices share. In doing so, I aim to disrupt the existing hierarchies of knowledge that champion an impersonal, rational scientific approach and call for a more varied array of knowledge and practices to be taken into account when considering the future ecologies of Svalbard and the broader Arctic region.     

Post-growth in the Tropics? Contestations over Tri Hita Karana and a tourism megaproject in Bali

Abstract

This study looks at a socio-environmental conflict over a tourism megaproject in the Benoa Bay in Bali, Indonesia. This conflict is interesting because it crystallizes key questions about the future of the island. Intriguingly, all the conflicting groups of actors mobilize the same philosophy of Tri Hita Karana (THK), which can be translated as the “three causes of well-being” and which is said to guide the development policies of the island. Our objective is to investigate how THK relates to the conflict and to what extent some of its interpretations are growth-critical. Using political ecology as a theoretical lens and qualitative methods, we find that the conflicting groups do not oppose each other through different languages of valuation, but within them. Likewise, THK is only superficially “one” idiom of valuation. In reality, THK covers different visions of development, depending on the actors involved. We identify three broad ways of interpreting THK in this conflict: (i) a marketable way, (ii) an equity-oriented way, and (iii) a radical-integral way, which bears similarities with post-growth views. This article is a contribution to the emerging debates on post-growth thinking from the “global South” and to the radical critique of tourism industry in developing regions.     

What are wilderness areas for? Tourism and political ecologies of wilderness uses and management in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

In global imaginaries, wilderness areas are considered to represent the last parts of “original” nature, untouched by civilization and modernization. In most cases, this is misleading as wilderness environments have been exploited, explored and also converted into administrative units in various protected area networks. Indeed, most wilderness areas have been a part of human–environment interactions for a long time and they have been influenced and modified in that interaction. As a result, wilderness is constitutively a cultural and politically loaded idea. While the Western notion of wilderness as a place where “man himself is a visitor who doesn't remain” represents the global hegemonic conservation thinking, it does not necessarily work with different local realities, meanings and use values of “the wild”. In addition, in recent decades, the tourism industry has placed an increasing interest on nature-based and adventure tourism products creating new kinds of ideas and use needs for the remaining wilderness environments. This paper analyzes empirically how wilderness environments and their roles are seen in the context of new and traditional anthropogenic uses and meanings of wilderness areas. More specifically, the paper uses a political ecology approach to evaluate the use and management priorities in the Finnish Wilderness system.     

Space tourism in the Anthropocene

There is growing acceptance that we are living through a transition between geological ages, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. This paper examines the burgeoning space tourism industry in relation to the Anthropocene. The development of outer space has significant implications for Earth's inhabitants, yet only a small cadre of individuals, companies, and governments are involved in this process. Space tourism provides a germane context for conceptualising the ongoing debates regarding the extent to which Anthropos - humankind as an undifferentiated, unitary geological force - is responsible for the impacts that have culminated in the Anthropocene. We apply the Capitalocene framework to elucidate how the factors that brought the Anthropocene to fruition are now extending beyond Earth.     

Tourism and community resilience in the Anthropocene: accentuating temporal overtourism

Abstract

Global tourism growth is unprecedented. Consequently, this has elevated the sector as a key plank for economic development, and its utility is deeply embedded in political, economic and social-ecological discourse. Where the expansion of the sector leverages natural and cultural landscapes, this applies pressure to social and ecological underpinnings that if not reconciled, can become problematic. The way this plays out in Australia’s Shipwreck Coast and the wider Great Ocean Road region, especially the implications for community resilience, is the focus. Emphasis is placed on the vulnerability of peripheral coastal areas to development that withdraws from destination endowments, yet fails to provide commensurate economic yield as a suitable trade-off. This is obvious where tourism intensification has led to concerns about the breach of normative carrying capacities. Temporal overtourism driven by seasonal overcrowding is countenanced as emblematic of tourism in the Anthropocene where focus tends to be largely growth-oriented, with much less attention given to bolstering social-ecological resilience, especially community resilience. At stake is the resilience of regional areas and their communities, who in the absence of garnering commensurate economic returns from tourism expansion find themselves in social and ecological deficit.     

对旅游产业生态过程的研究

本文在传统的旅游划分基础上进行功能和价值的扩展研究，对旅游的主要过程-旅游产业的生态内涵进行阐述，并阐明了生态效应如何构建新的环境行为，区别了旅游产业生态与生态旅游产业二者的概念，运用功用主义和伦理学思想建立与经济产业说相关的关系结构，在此基础上运用社会生态学观点探讨了旅游产业生态过程对社会进程的功用。     

Territorial tourism planning in Spain: from boosterism to tourism degrowth?

Abstract

Tourism saturation and unsustainability have been studied in urban political ecology. Both of these problems are inseparable from tourism planning and they have resulted in proposed solutions based on growth containment and even degrowth. These types of measures have been applied to varying degrees in mature coastal destinations in Spain since the 1990s, and they are currently being used for the country's main urban destinations due to problems generated by tourism saturation. This study examines the progressive incorporation of these measures in territorial tourism planning in Spain and it points out that the traditional emphasis on urban-tourism growth is declining and that more restrictive policies are now being implemented. This shift is illustrated through the analysis of three innovative territorial tourism planning instruments in Barcelona, the Balearic Islands and the Autonomous Region of Valencia. These ostensibly progressive processes suffer from crippling contradictions due to their inability to directly confront the capitalist accumulation model underlying the tourism growth they address. Consequently, much stronger measures capable of transcending this accumulation model in pursuit of genuine, and fair degrowth without systemic constraints are needed.     

The influence of the political environment and destination governance on sustainable tourism development: a study of Bled,Slovenia

In the context of sustainable tourism development, there are many studies about the exchange process between residents and tourism, yet this issue is practically unexplored with respect to the political environment of tourism. Therefore, this paper introduces and posits that the political environment is a necessary enabler for implementing sustainable tourism. The authors extend the established three-pillar sustainability concept by adding in the political dimension. Then they surveyed how residents' positive and negative perceptions of tourism impacts determine their satisfaction with life in the tourism destination and thus their support for tourism in their community. The model was empirically tested within the context of the long-established Alpine destination of Bled in Slovenia. The findings confirm the importance of the political environment and question the sustainability of Bled's tourism development. It is suggested that the community has relatively weak destination governance due to the underdeveloped political environment. The survey expands and deepens the tourism sustainability debate by adding in the political environment and how it relates to the emerging growth of research on destination governance. The proposed model can be adapted and applied to any destination in order to improve its governance, including the implementation of sustainable tourism development.     

The Batek's dilemma on indigenous tourism

This article explains how a rainforest tribe in Malaysia negotiates their indigeneity, shaped on the one hand by global imaginaries held by tourists, and on the other hand by their quest for development and modernity. The Batek are traditionally hunter-gatherers and practice semi-nomadism. They face a dilemma on how to best maintain their agency while remaining ‘authentic’ and attractive to tourists. This paper builds on Bruner's (2005) argument that cultures and indigeneity evolve with modernity, and discusses the contemporary meanings of authenticity from the perspective of the indigenes. A conceptual model to understand the ‘authenticity gap’ in indigenous tourism is offered as we suggest ways in which tourism development may be harnessed, rather than rejected, to resolve this cultural dilemma.     

Buen Vivir: Degrowing extractivism and growing wellbeing through tourism

Abstract

Buen Vivir (BV) is a holistic vision for social and environmental wellbeing, which includes alternative economic activities to the neoliberal growth economy. This article looks at how tourism initiatives under a BV approach can lead to degrowth by drawing on a case study of how BV is put into practice through tourism in the Cotacachi County in Ecuador. We argue that by degrowing socially and environmentally damaging extractive sectors and growing alternative economic activities like community-based tourism, a BV approach could increase social and environmental wellbeing. We refer to LaTouche’s notion of degrowth as a matrix of multiple alternatives that will reopen the space for human creativity. This complements the notion of BV as a plural approach, and in turn works to decolonise the parameters of how we might understand degrowth. In the case of Cotacachi, the vision for tourism is based on the needs of the community, rather than to satisfy a Eurocentric ideal of development supported by a policy of extractivism. BV is key to how this community conceptualises the potentialities of tourism because it considers the wellbeing of the people and the environment. In this case, degrowth is a consequence of BV, rather than the objective.     

Fueling ecological neglect in a manufactured tourist city: planning,disaster mapping,and environmental art in Cancun,Mexico

Abstract

This article explores how tourism urban governance fuels patterns of ecological neglect. It turns a critical eye on Cancun, a leading Caribbean beach tourist destination and battered epicenter of anthropogenic climate change. First, the article contextualizes Cancun’s design and construction as a state development project and manufactured tourist city. It describes the city’s socio-spatial segregation and highlights the role of hurricanes in processes of beach enclosure. Second, it explores a series of risk maps elaborated as responses to international demands on coastal disaster mitigation and beach erosion. I show how local authorities, academics, and the Mexican state are bound to disregard risk maps to further enclose the Caribbean beach and keep the city productive for tourism. Finally, I look at the adoption of anthropogenic narratives on climate change as tourist attractions in Cancun’s Underwater Museum of Art, a unique coalition between conservation, art and tour-operators in the city. I show that turning sea level rise and ocean acidification into tourist spectacles through copyrighted art, this attraction depoliticizes tourism’s responsibility in patterns of environmental degradation. The article serves to reflect on the tacit paradoxes that plague efforts to imagine alternative environmental politics and sustainable tourism urbanisms outside neoliberal trends.     

Public involvement and tourism planning in a historic city: the case of the Old City of Jerusalem

One of the most widely discussed parameters in the field of tourism management and development concerns the issue of the cooperation and involvement of the public in decision-making processes. In regions characterized by various types of conflicts, questions regarding tourism management and development and the role of the local populations in these processes are political and ethical issues of the highest degree for the society and culture of that location. The aim of this article is to present the tremendous political sensitivity regarding the status of the Old City of Jerusalem, since there is no consensus on its political status which is one of the major stumbling blocks to finding a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The purpose of this article is not to propose a solution to the political conflict of which Jerusalem is part, but rather to argue for the central place that should be devoted to tourism in a future solution, and within that, to emphasize the involvement and cooperation of the public in the processes of tourism management and development and how in the case of Jerusalem it should be implemented in East Jerusalem and particularly in the Old City.     

Running Havana: Observations on the Political Economy of Sport Tourism in Cuba

Abstract

Sport tourism is a booming global business that has different costs and benefits for distinctive societies depending upon both global and local socio‐cultural, political and economic factors. With more than 130 officially sanctioned events worldwide, marathon running has developed to become a key feature of the international sport tourism calendar. This paper provides an ethnographic account of the 2005 Marabana – the Havana Marathon. After consideration of some of the central conceptual and historical issues pertinent to sport tourism in relation to the marathon in general, it uses this race and the events surrounding it as a critical window into Cuba’s complex contemporary political economy. Detailed consideration is given to the special conditions that have led to the development of the Island’s sport tourism industry and the consequences of that development in terms of Cuba’s political heritage. What sets Cuba apart from the tourist economies of its Caribbean neighbours is its continued commitment to the economic and political principles of communism and its strained and tense relationship with the United States. The paper concludes by pointing to the social and economic contradictions associated with the development of a tourist economy that is essentially capitalist within a society that is avowedly communist.     

Community-owned tourism and degrowth: a case study in the Kichwa Añangu community

Abstract

Tourism is a booming global industry, seemingly at odds with a degrowth movement seeking to challenge the profit-maximizing model embedded in capitalist expansion. However, the tourism industry is not a homogenous entity, but is instead characterized by diverse forms of distinct tourisms. In Ecuador, the Kichwa Añangu Community has chosen to dedicate their livelihood to community-owned tourism. Añangu owns and operates two lodges, whose management and oversight are administered through communal governance. As a result, tourism is locally embraced as a vehicle for livelihood wellbeing, cultural reclamation, and environmental stewardship. Community-owned tourism will not provide a cure-all answer to the critiques levied against tourism or to the vulnerabilities inherent in the practice of tourism. However, Añangu’s project offers a compelling case study for considering how certain tourisms could become a vehicle for developing a localized degrowth society. The Añangu have decentralized the value placed upon profit in the practice of tourism, replacing it with Kichwa forms of communal organizing guided by their goal for Sumak Kawsay, or the “good life.” For the Añangu, the sustainability of their project cannot be separated from its economic viability, however, success is also measured by how tourism contributes to a number of community-defined goals.