Tourism and Degrowth

Towards a Truly Sustainable Tourism

Robert Fletcher, Ivan Murray Mas, Asunción Blanco Romero, Macià Blázquez-Salom, Robert Fletcher, Ivan Murray Mas, Asunción Blanco Romero, Macià Blázquez-Salom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000066364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Développement durable

Tourism and Degrowth develops a conceptual framework and research agenda for exploring the relationship between tourism and degrowth.

Rapid and uneven expansion of tourism as a response to the 2008 economic crisis has proceeded in parallel with the rise of social discontent concerning so-called "overtourism." Meanwhile, despite decades of concerted global effort to achieve sustainable development, socioecological conflicts and inequality have rarely reversed, but in fact increased in many places. Degrowth, understood as both social theory and social movement, has emerged within the context of this global crisis. However, thus far the vibrant degrowth discussion has yet to engage systematically with the tourism industry in particular, while, by the same token, tourism research has largely neglected explicit discussion of degrowth.

This volume brings the two discussions together to interrogate their complementarity. Identifying a growth imperative in the basic structure of the capitalist economy, the contributors contend that mounting critique of overtourism can be understood as a structural response to the ravages of capitalist development more broadly. Debate concerning overtourism thus offers a valuable opportunity to re-politicise discussion of tourism development generally.

Exploring of the potential for degrowth to facilitate a truly sustainable tourism, Tourism and Degrowth will be of great interest to scholars of tourism, environmental sustainability and development. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Tourism and degrowth: an emerging agenda for research and praxis

Robert Fletcher, Ivan Murray Mas, Asunción Blanco-Romero

and Macià Blázquez-Salom

ABSTRACT

This article outlines a conceptual framework and research agenda for exploring the relationship between tourism and degrowth. Rapid and uneven expansion of tourism as a response to the 2008 economic crisis has proceeded in parallel with the rise of social discontent concerning so-called “overtourism.” Despite decades of concerted global effort to achieve sustainable development, meanwhile, socioecological conflicts and inequality have rarely reversed, but in fact increased in many places. Degrowth, understood as both social theory and social movement, has emerged within the context of this global crisis. Yet thus far the vibrant degrowth discussion has yet to engage systematically with the tourism industry in particular, while by the same token tourism research has largely neglected explicit discussion of degrowth. We bring the two discussions together here to interrogate their complementarity. Identifying a growth imperative in the basic structure of the capitalist economy, we contend that mounting critique of overtourism can be understood as a structural response to the ravages of capitalist development more broadly. Debate concerning overtourism thus offers a valuable opportunity to re-politicize discussion of tourism development generally. We contribute to this discussion by exploring of the potential for degrowth to facilitate a truly sustainable tourism.

Introduction

On 22 May 2019, Nirmal Purja, a mountaineer and former British soldier, published a photograph of his view from the rear of a long queue of climbers snaking towards the summit of Mt. Everest. This image quickly went viral (see Hill, 2019), prompting – combined with the fact that this congestion led to the death of at least five other climbers in the days surrounding the photo’s publication – widespread complaints that the peak had become dangerously overcrowded (e.g., Beaumont, 2019). This event crystallized several years of increasingly vocal critique in popular destinations worldwide concerning a phenomenon now commonly labelled “overtourism”, which the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) defines as “the impact of tourism on a destination, or parts thereof, that excessively influences perceived quality of life of citizens and/or quality of visitors experiences in a negative way” (2018, p. 4). How had it reached the point, critics now complained, that such overcrowding had come to affect even the highest point on Earth?

At the heart of this discussion stands the sustained yearly increase in growth the global tourism industry has experienced since at least 1950, which the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) (2019) claims averages 4% per annum. Critique of overtourism thus calls into question this growth itself and the extent to which it can remain sustainable in the face of a mounting range of negative impacts. In this way, the critique touches the heart of discussion concerning the potential for sustainable tourism more generally. As we demonstrate further below, the bulk of this discussion takes as its starting point the necessity of sustaining tourism growth. Yet if this growth is itself an essential obstacle in the face of sustainability then this perspective may need to be questioned in its entirety.

In this way, the overtourism discussion dovetails with longstanding critique of a similar growth imperative at the heart of sustainable development policy more generally (e.g., Escobar, 1995; Wanner, 2015). An increasingly popular response to this imperative has been a call to move away from a growth-based economy altogether and instead pursue “degrowth.” Emerging from a conjunction of activist social movements and critical scholarship, degrowth is a proposal for a radical socio-political transformation, for a “planned economic contraction” (Alexander, 2012) intended to shift the societal metabolic regime towards a decabornized one based on lower material throughput. In contrast to proposals for “decoupling,” “dematerialization” or “green growth” (see e.g., Fletcher & Rammelt, 2017; Parrique et al., 2019; Smil, 2013), degrowth advocates a re-politization of sustainability discourse and radical transformation of the political economy within which sustainability is pursued (Asara, Otero, Demaria, & Corbera, 2015). It includes calls to (re)build societies and economies around principles of commons creation and governance, care and conviviality (see esp. D’Alisa, Demaria, & Kallis, 2014).

Research and advocacy concerning degrowth has developed rapidly over the last decade in particular (see Kallis et al., 2018). Yet to date this discussion has, with few exceptions (outlined below), largely neglected sustained attention to tourism specifically. Tourism is, however, one of the world’s largest industries and hence a main form of global economic expansion (Fletcher, 2011; United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), 2019). Moreover, the industry is forecasted to continue to grow dramatically into the foreseeable future as the basis of the development aspirations of many low- and high-income societies alike (United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), 2019). To seriously pursue degrowth at both global and most national levels would, therefore, likely require drastic transformation of the tourism industry and its metabolism.

By the same token, notwithstanding important initial explorations (also detailed below), widespread discussion of the potential for sustainable tourism has thus far neglected to seriously engage with the discourse of degrowth. This collection thus seeks to bring discussions of sustainable tourism and degrowth together as a foundation for future research and praxis. In this introduction to the collection, we describe the building blocks upon which this discussion is erected then explore how it is operationalized in the ten articles that follow. Our overarching aim is to contribute to exploration of the potential for degrowth to facilitate a truly sustainable tourism, promoting academic discussion particularly within the fields of political economy and political ecology of tourism.

We begin by outlining the mounting discussion of overtourism, explaining how it builds on yet also departs from a venerable tradition of critique concerning the myriad negative impacts of conventional tourism development. We then describe how “sustainable tourism” has been promoted as an antidote to these problems. Here we elaborate our previous assertion that this discussion has, like sustainable development writ large, generally taken sustained growth as its starting point ( as Michael Redclift pointed out already in the late 1980s; see Redclift, 1987, 2018). We identify this growth imperative in the basic structure of the capitalist economy, which demands continual growth in order to stave off internal contradictions that would otherwise threaten its survival. From this perspective, tourism growth can be seen to provide essential support to the global capitalist system as a whole (Fletcher, 2011). We show how this imperative has intensified since the 2008 economic crisis, after which stimulation of tourism growth has been increasingly relied upon as a mechanism for economic recovery more generally. This has been compounded by the rise of so-called platform capitalism in the same period, whereby “cyberspace” has been harnessed as a new arena for time-space displacement of excess accumulated capital (Harvey, 1982, 1989), in terms of which tourism development can be seen to function as an associated capitalist fix (Fletcher, 2011; Fletcher & Neves, 2012). In our analysis, consequently, critique of overtourism can be understood as a structural response to the ravages of capitalist development more broadly – a far cry from its frequent dismissal as a form of “anti-tourism” or even “tourism-phobia” ( for discussion see esp. Milano, 2017a, 2017b). Overtourism, we contend, must therefore provoke reconsideration of the political economy of tourism as a whole and not merely debate concerning the appropriate number of tourists (“carrying capacity”) within a given location. From this perspective, the question of overtourism and its proliferation offers a valuable opportunity to re-politicize tourism development within critical inquiry on the part of both academia and social movements.

From there we turn to degrowth, outlining a vibrant groundswell of research and practice concerning this theme that has proliferated over the past decade. Returning to discussion of capitalism’s growth imperative, we build on Foster’s (2011) early contention that degrowth within capitalism constitutes an “impossibility theorem” to argue that serious degrowth likely demands pursuit of post-capitalism. Moving back to tourism once more, we outline the small spate of previous research pointing to the potential for degrowth to facilitate a truly sustainable tourism. Here again we emphasize that this must go beyond capitalist development to pursue post-capitalist forms of production, consumption and exchange. We finish by outlining how other researchers can build on all of this to elaborate various aspects of the analysis further in the future and how the different articles in the special collection init...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Tourism and degrowth: an emerging agenda for research and praxis
• 2 Territorial tourism planning in Spain: from boosterism to tourism degrowth?
• 3 Growth machines and social movements in mature tourist destinations: Costa del Sol-Málaga
• 4 Overtourism, optimisation, and destination performance indicators: a case study of activities in Fjord Norway
• 5 Tourism as a right: a “frivolous claim” against degrowth?
• 6 Post-growth in the Tropics? Contestations over Tri Hita Karana and a tourism megaproject in Bali
• 7 Overtourism and degrowth: a social movements perspective
• 8 The social construction of the tourism degrowth discourse in the Balearic Islands
• 9 Community-owned tourism and degrowth: a case study in the Kichwa Añangu community
• 10 Buen Vivir: Degrowing extractivism and growing wellbeing through tourism
• 11 Degrowing tourism: rethinking tourism
• Postscript
• Index