Political Ecology and Tourism

Sanjay Nepal, Jarkko Saarinen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317528067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Gastgewerbe, Reise- & Tourismusbranche

Political ecology explicitly addresses the relations between the social and the natural, arguing that social and environmental conditions are deeply and inextricably linked. Its emphasis on the material state of nature as the outcome of political processes, as well as the construction and understanding of nature itself as political is greatly relevant to tourism.

Very few tourism scholars have used political ecology as a lens to examine tourism-centric natural resource management issues. This book brings together experts in the field, with a foreword from Piers Blaikie, to provide a global exploration of the application of political ecology to tourism. It addresses the underlying issues of power, ownership, and policies that determine the ways in which tourism development decisions are made and implemented. Furthermore, contributions document the complex array of relationships between tourism stakeholders, including indigenous communities, and multiple scales of potential conflicts and compromises.

This groundbreaking book covers 15 contributions organized around four cross-cutting themes of communities and livelihoods; class, representation, and power; dispossession and displacement; and, environmental justice and community empowerment. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in tourism, geography, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, and natural resources management.

Part I

Communities and livelihoods

Editors’ introduction

The tourism literature has had a strong focus on community-centered issues since Murphy (1985) produced a seminal text examining tourism from a community perspective. Much of the early literature on tourism did not have exclusive focus on livelihoods, but research conducted in the developing world did imply that tourism development had a profound impact on augmenting local income and employment thereby creating opportunities for better livelihoods. The post-2000 literature saw dramatic growth in number of papers linking tourism to issues of persistent underdevelopment of rural communities and consideration for pro-poor strategies. However, there have been many criticisms of these strategies (Harrison, 2008). Literature specific to community-based tourism, rural tourism and ecotourism has grown both in volume and geographical reach. More recently, a “livelihood framework” has been applied in understanding the capacity of rural communities to effectively mobilize various forms of human, social and economic capital to further tourism interests (Tao & Wall, 2009). This strand of research continues to grow as researchers raise critical questions about the ability of tourism to advance social and ecological well-being for rural communities.

The four chapters in Part I collectively address questions of community values and considerations for sustainable livelihoods associated with tourism development. Chapter 1, by Thornton and Wanasuk, examines the political ecology of sustainable tourism among indigenous peoples of Southeast Alaska, a major tourism destination hosting some ten million visitors a year. Sustainable tourism, the authors argue, is ultimately a question of what values a community or institution chooses to maintain through this sector in relation to its broader cultural model of well-being and portfolio of livelihood assets. What is to be sustained, for whom, and by what means is the key political ecology question for any economic activity. The dominant model of tourism in Southeast Alaska is by cruise ship travel through ports in the Alexander Archipelago. The cruise ship industry controls space, time and the metanarrative of Southeast Alaska’s history and culture for its passengers. Alaska Natives in Ketchikan-Saxman, the gateway to Southeast Alaska, have partnered with cruise ships for several decades to offer onshore excursions to their totem park, tribal house and other attractions through Cape Fox Tours, a subsidiary of Cape Fox Corporation, a Tlingit village corporation created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. Alaska Native corporations control significant natural and financial capital, but struggle to profit from tourism, in part because an alternative model of tourism is needed to counter the hegemony of the cruise ship industry and devolve more control and benefits to local communities, including Native villages and their corporations. In their analysis, Thornton and Wanasuk apply a Sustainable Social-Environmental Enterprise, designed to deliver sociocultural and environmental benefits on an equitable and enduring basis.

Chapter 2 shifts the focus from the north to the south, as Karrow and Thompson examine how a valuable fish species in the Bahamas has been transformed into a high-end global recreational tourism resource. The Bahamas, like many small island developing states is highly dependent on tourism. A small, vital and rapidly expanding recreational angling industry has developed focused on Bonefish (Albula vulpes). While providing employment to Bahamians on many Family Islands where little employment opportunity exists, inequities in access to resources have developed as a result of diverging stakeholder interests. Historical race-based issues, alleged contemporary corruption, unemployment, poverty, social stratification and cultural divides have exacerbated tensions between several interest groups. However, recent efforts toward co-management between local NGOs, governmental organizations, angling groups and private lodge establishments illustrate successes working to alleviate resource conflicts. Although developmental pressures continue to cause friction across the Bahamas, the future of the industry appears bright and management of the industry may provide a model for other similar situations.

In Chapter 3 Gray, Campbell and Meeker focus on volunteer ecotourism associated with turtle conservation. Political ecologists have critiqued ecotourism as a form of neoliberal conservation that commodifies nature and negatively impacts local people. In contrast, volunteer ecotourism has been described as an ‘ideal’ form of decommodified ecotourism that overcomes these problems. Using a case study of volunteer ecotourism in Costa Rica, the chapter interrogates this ideal. Perceptions of volunteer ecotourism are explored through in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders. Results show that while all stakeholders share positive views of volunteer ecotourism, subtle but important differences exist in relation to aesthetic, economic and ethical values. The implications of these for neoliberal conservation are considered.

The focus of Chapter 4, by Karst and Gyeltshen, is on a recent tourism initiative focused on an integrated conservation and development program in a remote wildlife sanctuary in eastern Bhutan. Bhutan is one of the countries where significant tourism projects are underway which explicitly target linking conservation with community well-being. The Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary officially opened as a community-based ecotourism destination in 2010 to provide alternative livelihood activities and benefits for local indigenous people. However, socio-economic, environmental and political impacts of tourism and development activities to date have been mixed. The case of the Sanctuary offers insight on possibilities for future direction and growth as it progresses from the early trial stages of ecotourism development. The study raises interesting questions about the capacity and limits of centrally considered tourism development initiatives in remote locations. Overall, the four chapters provide a complex narrative of how expansion of global tourism, with a decidedly neoliberal orientation, posits challenges in incorporating community well-being and values into local development programs.

References

Harrison, D. (2008). Pro-poor tourism: A critique. Third World Quarterly, 29, 851–868.

Murphy, P. (1985). Tourism: A Community Approach. New York, NY: Methuen.

Tao, T. & Wall, G. (2009). Tourism as a sustainable livelihood strategy. Tourism Management, 30, 90–98.

1 Indigenous tourism as a sustainable social-environmental enterprise

The political ecology of tourism in Southeast Alaska

Thomas F. Thornton and Paphaphit Wanasuk

Indigenous tourism and the political ecology of sustainability

Tourism is often held out as a sustainable development pathway for indigenous peoples living in areas of high conservation value, as it allows them to participate in the regional and global economy through a relatively low-impact industry (Stonich, 1998; Honey, 1999; Stronza, 2001; Gössling, 2003; Cerveny, 2008). Tourists are viewed as low-impact because they come primarily to “gaze” (Urry, 1992) and appreciate the exotic local natures and cultures, visually consuming and capturing them in souvenirs without seeking to transform the landscape and its constituent relations through settlement or resource extraction. Especially in remote areas – the peripheries of the world system (Wallerstein, 1974) – tourism has emerged as an alternative form of development to an economy based predominately on subsistence or natural resource exploitation. Subsistence activities may be viewed as a cultural foundation but inadequate for meeting the economic needs of contemporary indigenous peoples, whereas dependence on natural resource development often brings economic dependency on one or a few volatile and exhaustible economic commodities (e.g., timber, oil and minerals) and potential environmental degradation, thus increasing economic and ecological vulnerability. At the same time, both indigenous subsistence economies and extractive industrial natural resource development may pose conflicts for conservation paradigms and goals, while tourism, especially ecotourism, has been considered more compatible with international conservation ideologies of protection and governance (Brockington et al., 2008; Dowie, 2009; Stevens, 2014).

Political ecology has been defined in various ways (Robbins, 2012). Broadly it can be characterized as the study of power relations among various human-nature ideologies and interactions. A political ecology of sustainable tourism, then, must consider power relations and contingencies among competing ideologies, actors and institutions underlying sustainability, tourism and conservation that emerged with the advent of sustainable development and globalization paradigms in the early 1990s. While sustainable development has put a premium on moving away from unlimited growth and non-renewable extractive industries (Meadows et al., 1972), globalization and the phenomenon of “time-space compression” (Harvey, 1989) have made phenomenal growth in mass tourism possible by accelerating the speed and lowering the (relative economic but not ecological) costs of transport and exchange of goods, services, information and people around the globe. Consequently, the supply of and demand for tourism products expanded dizzyingly (Reid, 2003).

However, the terms of engagement for mass tourism tend to be dictated by the major controllers of capital in the industry, namely multinational corporations that transport, house and otherwise organize participants in mass tourism. As the big players, these corporations dictate the “rules of the game” in many spheres in terms of how visitors may construct their tourism experience in space, time and types of interactions. Few of them are controlled by indigenous people, though the number of small and medium scale indigenous tourism enterprises is increasing, especially in developed countries with empowered indigenous nations, such as Canada, New Zealand/Aotearoa and the United States (Butler & Hinch, 2007). As Cerveny (2008) shows in her political-ecological analysis of the development of mass tourism in Southeast Alaska, the lure of large cruise ship tourism is a mixed bag, bringing not only the intensive tourist gaze but many other significant impacts to and expectations of the local community (Klein, 2011). At worst, such tourism can lead to a double marginalization (Rossel, 1988), whereby indigenous people may be made to feel like inferior members of a human “zoo,” catering to the tastes and expectations for exotic “otherness” of wealthy visitors while those same visitors flaunt their superior wealth and worldliness, and compete for local resources and services.

Given this background, a set of queries can be advanced to guide political-ecological enquiries into questions of sustainable tourism. What is to be sustained and for whom in particular tourism enterprises? What cultural-ecological principles and cultural models underlie various “stakeholders’” notions of sustainable tourism? What frames and tools are used (or not used) to advance indigenous notions of tourism within a landscape largely structured by non-indigenous corporations? What possibilities exist for supporting indigenous models of tourism under what we term a sustainable social-environmental enterprise (SSEE) within the contemporary tourism industry?

We address these questions through an indigenous tourism case study involving the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska, who have been involved in numerous tourism activities over the past century, including as objects of the tourist gaze, interpreters of their own culture and history, and, most recently, as small and medium level entrepreneurs within the growing Alaska tourist industry. Our methods include literature review, participant observation of tourist operations and semi-structured interviews with indigenous and other tourism practitioners carried out as part of two larger research projects on Alaska Native corporations and sustainable indigenous tourism carried out between 2008 and 2014.

The paper begins with a review of the Alaska Native experience with tourism from a developmental and political-ecological perspective, focusing on relevant dimensions of sustainability that have constrained its development. We focus especially on the Cape Fox Corporation (CFC), an Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) village corporation comprised of approximately 200 shareholders, descendants of the Tlingit village of Saxman, the “gateway” to Alaska, which adopted tourism as a major avenue of economic development more than 25 years ago. We then turn to the notion of an SSEE, derived from our review of the literature on social enterprise and social-ecological sustainability, and analyze how such a model might apply to enhancing the sustainability and benefit flows for Cape Fox Tours and other indigenous tourism enterprises and communities in Alaska and beyond.

The Alaska Native experience with tourism

Given the political-ecological importance of control and power in designing and regulating tourism in particular cultural-ecological landscapes, the experience of Alaska Natives is perhaps unique. As the indigenous peoples of the “last frontier” of one of the world’s most developed countries, Alaska Natives and their lands have been the subject of tourism for more than 125 years, beginning with steamship cruises to the Southeast Alaskan archipelago in the 1890s (Dunning, 2000; Hinckley, 1965). The great travel writer, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, author of the first significant guide-book for tourists in Alaska (Scidmore, 1893, p. 1), introduced Southeast Alaska in the age before aircraft thusly:

Southeastern Alaska is the only portion of the vast [Alaska] Territory now accessible to tourists…and the Alaska mail and steamer routes include a tour through the archipelago fringing the Northwest Coast and sheltering an inside passage over a thousand miles in length… The scenery is sublime beyond description, and there is almost a monotony of such magnificence…. The mountains are covered with the densest forests, all undisturbed game preserves, the waters teem with hundreds of varieties of fish, and the northern moors are homes to great flocks of aquatic birds. The native people are the most interesting…and totemism in a living and advanced stage may be studied on the spot. Settlements are few and far between, mining and fish-packing the chief industries.

This may be compared to a more contemporary description found on the Cape Fox Tours (2014) website, which includes both video and text invitations.

[Video]: [Tlingit speaker amid images of culture and nature]: Gunalchéesh, welcome, and thank you for coming to Southeast Alaska. My people are the original settlers of Southeast Alaska. We have lived here, hunted and fished on these same shores for thousands of years. Today, this beautiful setting is still our home. We have not forgotten the ways of our past. We are working hard to preserve our heritage and we are happy to share it with you, your family and friends

[Text]: Visit Saxman Native Village and experience the rich living culture of southeast Alaska’s Native Americans. Get an exclusive look at the fascinating culture of SE Alaska’s original inhabitants. The Tlingits welcome guests in the traditional style that defines the culture of Southeast Alaska…You will then enter the Beaver Clan House where you are welcomed by song and dance by the Cape Fox Dance group. Visitors are encouraged to participate in the final dance, before moving on to the Saxman Totem Park, one of the largest gatherings of totems in the world. Your guide will help unravel the mysteries of these towering, majestic poles. At the Village Carving Center craftsmen pass on their skill to eager apprentices. Learn how modern day carvers differ from their ancestors and learn of their current projects around the world. Fine Alaska Native art and small mementos are for sale at the Native Faces store.

The contrast between the two messages is instructive. While both emphasize the outstanding natural beauty and deep cultural and totemic heritage of Southeast Alaska, the Cape Fox message has a distinct focus on what is to be sustained and who is to sustain it. In the Tlingit cultural model of tourism CFC shareholders are the keepers of their cultural heritage, interpreters of its meaning and significance, and caretakers of its geography and destiny, emphasizing both continuity and difference from the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: political ecology and tourism – concepts and constructs
• PART I Communities and livelihoods
• PART II Class, representation and power
• PART III Dispossession and displacement
• PART IV Environmental justice and community empowerment
• Conclusions: towards a political ecology of tourism – key issues and research prospects
• Index