The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Impacts

Theoretical and Applied Perspectives

Dogan Gursoy, Robin Nunkoo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351025089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This handbook explores and critically examines both positive and negative impacts of tourism development focusing on the past, present and future issues, challenges and trends from a multidisciplinary global perspective. Through a comparative approach involving international case studies, this book explores our understanding of tourism impacts and contributes to the theoretical development on relationships between tourism impacts and community support for tourism development.

This handbook focuses on a variety of geographical locations, drawing from the knowledge and expertise of highly regarded academics from around the world. Specifically, it explores the adoption and implementation of various tourism development and impact management approaches in a wide range of global contexts, while identifying their trends, issues and challenges. It addresses strategies relating to innovation, sustainability and social responsibility, and critically reviews the economic, sociocultural, environmental, political and technological impacts of tourism. The text also identifies future trends and issues, as well as exploring the methods used to study tourism impacts.

Conveying the latest thinking and research, this handbook will be a key reference for students, researchers and academics of tourism, as well as development studies, geography, cultural studies, sustainability and business, encouraging dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study.

PART I

Tourism impacts

1

TOURISM PLANNING AND TOURISM IMPACTS

Donald G. Reid

Introduction

This chapter sets out the foundations of planning and alerts the reader to the common pitfalls that the proponents of tourism encounter when planning for tourism development, particularly at the local and community levels. To accomplish this goal, I will review, to a limited but sufficient extent, the major negative impacts tourism development often generates today and the positive outcomes through planning that are possible in the future. Although this entire text deals with impacts, both positive and negative, there are some specific issues that impinge directly on the planning process. This chapter views planning in the context of a complex and fast-changing society. For these reasons, it will stress the human interactions in, and the community educational value of, planning. This type of planning is commonly referred to as ‘transactional planning.’ Simply put, transactional planning, as the name implies, stresses inclusiveness and the processes of human interaction in the plan activity, rather than focusing solely on the tangible outputs produced by it. It is thought that, by emphasizing the planning process, the appropriate outputs will follow naturally. Additionally, and perhaps just as important as the outputs of the plan, is the education of those involved in its construction. Transactional planning is community-centered and places great value on the dialogue among the participants in the exercise, and on the issues most pertinent to them. The chapter will draw on previous work by this author, mainly from Tourism, Globalization and Development: Responsible Tourism Planning (2003) and Social Policy and Planning for the 21st Century: In Search of the Next Great Social Transformation, (2017).

Tourism planners often make the mistake of believing their activities are largely benign and that they are engaging a typical, undistinctive social, ecological, and cultural environment and need only concentrate on the primary task at hand, which is setting out an attractive project that will accomplish the goals of their client. This is an erroneous notion. Communities are dynamic and ever-changing assemblies of unique people. They possess a deep and rich collective history that constrains and sets the stage for future development. To ignore these unique features is to place the success of the potential tourism project in peril. The importance of the planning agent and their project proponent becoming intimately involved with, and developing a high level of understanding of, the community in its totality cannot be stressed enough. They must come to understand it deeply and not superficially as a tourist might. Primary in this task is the realization that the project is just as much about the community in which it will be eventually located as it is about accomplishing the goals of the primary client.

Preplanning considerations

There are specific fundamental conditions that must be present in the community in order for a sound and successful planning process to be conducted that will result in a plan that can be embraced by all interested parties. I have laid out these conditions in what I have termed the ‘preplanning phase’ (see Figure 1.1).

If each of these items is attended to prior to engagement in the actual planning of the project, the community’s capacity to participate in the planning process with knowledge and confidence will be greatly enhanced. This confidence will allow the participants to create and review a proposed project without fear of being asked to approve something they truly do not understand and which may not be in their best interests. People will naturally oppose something they either do not truly comprehend or fear because of a lack of information. Planners often lack faith in the community’s organizational capacity to analyze and utilize technical information in a sophisticated decision-making process. To overcome these fundamental issues, preplanning activity may be necessary.

Building the community’s capacity to engage fully in the process will increase the probability of success in designing a mutually beneficial tourism project that the community feels speaks to their needs as well as to the aspirations of the project proponent. Building capacity in the community not only to undertake a planning exercise, perhaps in partnership with the project’s proponent, but also to build the community’s expertise in planning generally, is a positive benefit to the community beyond the specific project in question. For the project to succeed in the long term, some of the required skills for ensuring the sustainability of the project can be built during the preplanning phase. This not only assists the community but might also produce an increased payoff for the tourism industry as well.

Figure 1.1 Preplanning phase

Understanding the context in which tourism development occurs is critically important to the success of any project. There are several fundamental areas to highlight when considering the setting in which tourism gets played out. The first is the complexity of the social setting beyond those aspects critical to, or influenced by, tourism, which often goes unrecognized and unaccounted for when considering tourism development. It is critically important to appreciate and acknowledge the unique history of the social relations in the area undertaking a tourism development plan, particularly as it relates to previous experiences in the locale. The proposal of a potential tourism project will be injected into a social, cultural, and political history, and not simply into a pristine context.

Any new proposal will be viewed and treated in the historical context of the community. It is likely that many projects, be they of a tourism nature or otherwise, will have preceded the present tourism project under consideration. How these projects were organized and carried out will have given local residents some idea about how decisions of this type get made, and, in many cases, past experiences will not necessarily provide a positive blueprint. Historically, input from local citizens may have been ignored, not necessarily out of malice but simply because the proponents of plans have not felt these individuals could add anything of benefit to the discussion. Often, community members have been viewed as being an impediment to getting the project approved and launched in a timely fashion. This occurs when the benefits of the project are simply meant to enrich the proponent of the project or the politicians of a state or community and not necessarily the local inhabitants of the area. It is this type of development that gives rise to the populist politics that seem to be gathering momentum across the globe. Participation by citizens in the plan is often seen as a statutory hurdle that needs to be accomplished as quickly as possible and not as an integral part of the development process. This type of approach will only give rise to community resistance to the project at the development stage and likely in the long term as well. Unfortunately, for most people, a negative planning process has been the norm in tourism development and not the exception, and so communities are naturally skeptical of planning in general.

The area with which I am most familiar is the Amboseli region in Kenya. Originally, the Amboseli National Park was constructed as a game preserve for European colonialists. Following independence, the Kenyan government turned it into a national park. Little, if any, consultation with the local Masai was undertaken at that time, and so the grazing and water needs of the locals were not taken into consideration, which resulted in a long-festering problem. Needless to say, the Masai eventually erupted and threatened to shoot the large animals that provided the main attraction to the tourists who visited the area. Eventually, the Kenya Wildlife Service, under the direction of a progressive director, launched an inclusive process that resulted in an agreement between the tourism sector and the local communities surrounding the park. This agreement has not settled the problem completely, but it has gone a substantial distance in providing some benefits to the locals from the tourism in the park. Transactive planning at the beginning of the project would have gone a considerable distance in averting the problem in the first place, but unfortunately that course was not in keeping with the ideology of colonialism. Although this is just one example of the types of difficulties that are inevitable unless the planning process is constructed on a solid and transactive basis, many similar to this one will be experienced in the future. Although colonialism throughout the world has been greatly reduced, we still plan on a top–down basis too often.

To avoid such negative impacts as described above, the proponents of a project, be they corporations or governments, must lay out how decisions affecting the project will be made, and the entire process must be seen to be transparent by all who will be affected by the outcome of those decisions. This transparency will also include providing details of the project, including a realistic assessment of the positive and negative benefits to the community. It must incorporate the feelings and concerns of the local people and not simply dismiss them as being obstructionist. Often, information is not shared by the proponent of the project for so-called proprietary reasons. Given that the lives of the locals will be affected considerably by any project that may materialize from the plan, there is no justification for not divulging proprietary information that directly affects community life. Often, tourism industry officials feel that local people should not have equal weight in the decision-making process because they do not have any capital at risk in the scheme. Although they may not have capital in the venture, they do have their everyday lives at risk of being severely disrupted, which is equal in value to any capital that a company may have in the project.

The tourism project does not occur in a static environment but in a very complex set of community relationships that affects the totality of community life. As Appadurai tells us,

[T]his is a world of flows. It is also, of course, a world of structures, organizations, and other stable forms of social life. By this I mean that the paths or vectors taken by these kinds of things have different speeds, axes, points of origin and termination, and varied relationships to institutional structures in different regions, nations or societies.

(Appadurai, 2001, p. 14)

Tourism planners need to take these realities into account when conceptualizing and planning a tourism project. In fact, they must be guided by them. The individuals, groups, ideologies, and social classes that make up a community are not homogeneous but extremely variable. We should not speak of community as if it were a single entity, but rather as multidimensional and ever changing. Community alliances often shift form depending on the issue at hand. Some community groups may align with other groups on some issues but be opposing forces on other proposals. A community is made up of many groups with diverse agendas, and they do not always speak with a single voice.

Critical to this discussion is the identification of the power relationships and conflicting interests that permeate tourism planning and the community generally. The power relationships that inevitably arise during the planning stage of development have the potential to create a process that strives for a win–win condition for all the parties involved, or a winner-takes-all approach. Naturally, the former is preferred over the latter.

Large-scale tourism is often a multi-jurisdictional matter. Much of the capital and infrastructure required for development is supplied by multinational corporations located in affluent countries, whereas the project is often situated in unique, natural, and sensitive, environments. Tourism development by outside forces often intrudes into traditional cultures and fragile environments, frequently set in far-flung and sometimes exotic and fragile locations. Tourism’s technical expertise frequently comes from outside the destination country and is supplied by outsiders who may not possess sufficient knowledge of the culture into which they are embedding their projects. Tourism can easily disturb the sense of place in the destination site, creating diverse types of impacts, both positive and negative. The notion of distance in cultural patterns between the ‘industry and its clients’ and the ‘tourism destination’ (host–guest) and how planning can help smooth out this difference will be analyzed and addressed further on in this chapter. But make no mistake, cultural differences can have a profound and long-lasting effect on tourism projects and the communities in which they reside.

It is important to understand who is fundamentally in charge of the planning process and driving the proposed tourism development project. In many cases, it is the industry that initiates and controls the development, in the sense that the outside agent offers a significant project that will increase the economic flows to the community from outside. But, it is also likely to attract substantial numbers of people to the area, which has the potential to disrupt community life. The tourism agent may correspondingly entice the state to make decisions on their behalf that may not always be in the best interest of local people by promising a significant increase in foreign currency for an o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction to Tourism Impacts
• Part I Tourism Impacts
• Part II Economic Impacts of Tourism
• Part III Sociocultural Impacts of Tourism
• Part IV Environmental Impacts of Tourism
• Part V Political Impacts of Tourism
• Part VI Technology and Tourism Impacts
• Part VII Methods Used to Study Tourism Impacts
• Index