Tourism, Change and the Global South

Jarkko Saarinen, Jayne M. Rogerson, Jarkko Saarinen, Jayne M. Rogerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000399790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

This significant volume is the first to focus on both the changing nature of tourism and the capacity of tourism to effect change, especially in the Global South.

Geographically, this changing nature of tourism is based on the transforming relationships between demand, supply and location. While this is nothing new in tourism, recent decades have intensified the changing characteristics of global tourism. From another perspective, tourism represents a change, and nowadays many localities and regions aim to use tourism as a tool for positive change, i.e. development. However, this has turned out to be a challenging task in practice, especially in the Global South context where the relationship between tourism growth and local development has often been controversial. This book looks at a host of critical concepts in one volume, such as growth and development, adaptation and resilience, sustainability and responsibility, governance and planning and heritage and destination management strategies. By understanding the drivers of change, this book sheds new insight into the promise and role of sustainability and responsibility in tourism development.

This book will be of great interest to all upper-level students, academics and researchers in the fields of Tourism, Geography and Cultural and Heritage studies.

Part I

Introduction and frameworks

1 Tourism and change

Issues and challenges in the Global South

Jarkko Saarinen and Jayne M. Rogerson

Introduction

Change is a constant feature of tourism. For Wall and Mathieson (2006, p. 6), tourism represents “a forceful agent of change” that creates impacts in destination environments. Similarly, for Butler (1980, p. 5), “there can be little doubt that tourist areas are dynamic, that they evolve and change over time”. In Butlerian tourism evolution thinking, this change in tourist areas largely results from the nature of the tourism industry and how it operates in destinations. Furthermore, Page (2003, p. 29) considers tourism as an “ever-changing phenomenon” based on “interaction between the demand for and supply of tourism opportunities through time”, a process that needs to be managed for change by focusing on planning, organising, leading and controlling.

Tourism creates various changes in destinations and the overall tourism system (Butler, 1999; Leiper, 1979; Rogerson & Rogerson, 2021). These changes can be ecological, socio-cultural and/or economic. They can be positive or negative, depending on the perspective, and direct or indirect in time and space (Saarinen, 2019). All this makes tourism-related changes complex and constantly transforming entities, which take place on different scales. Perhaps the most typical scale and a concrete unit of analysis in tourism studies has been the destination level in which the change has been intensively studied and modelled for a relatively long time (see Butler, 1980; Keller, 1987; Miossec, 1977; Stansfield, 1978). This is understandable as destinations are the locations in which the tourism phenomenon takes place in the most visible ways (Saarinen, 2014).

While much of the focus of change in tourism has been based on a destination scale, there is an increasing understanding that tourism is a multi-scalar and relational phenomenon taking place simultaneously in different socio-spatial scales (see Hannam, 2002; Wieckowski & Saarinen, 2019). Although host and guest encounters, for example, may happen in very specific places in tourism destinations, they can bring many other scales of economy, politics, norms and values together. In addition, the role and dimension of change in tourism represent different matters for different actors and from different perspectives. For us, as individuals and members of a family or other social group, tourism is an activity offering relaxation and a potential break from everyday life, routines and norms, and a possibility to connect with new people and places. For entrepreneurs and companies working directly or indirectly with tourists, the tourism phenomenon and related consumption needs are a way of making a living, developing business operations and creating an economic surplus. Local communities can perceive tourism as an opportunity for employment or creating a business in the future (Rogerson, 2013). Similarly, regional authorities and developers, including many governments and supra-national organisations, use the tourism industry as a tool for creating employment and economic activity on a larger geographical scale (Saarinen, 2020; Sharpley, 2002).

Especially in the Global South, the tourism industry is used for economic growth and diversification (see Rogerson & Visser, 2004, 2007; Saarinen et al., 2020) and a potential instrument for sustainable use of natural and cultural resources (Stone, Lenao & Moswete, 2020). The term Global South is usually connected with emerging and developing economies or low- and middle-income countries, which were previously known as developing countries or Third World countries (see Carmody, 2019; Puri, 2010). In this respect, countries with a high UNDP Human Development Index (HDI) are considered as the Global North with the rest belonging to the Global South (see Greve, 2020). However, the division between the Global South and Global North is not geographical in the traditional sense. The edges can be blurred as culturally or economically peripheral, and marginalised parts of a Global North country can be interpreted as representing the context for issues and challenges typical for a Global South country. Similarly, countries in the Global South can have subregions and economies reflecting the wealth usually associated with Global North situations. As noted by Sparke (2007, p. 117):

the Global South is everywhere, but always also somewhere: accountable, embodied, and highly heterogeneous. It interrupts the flat earth, borderless world, and smooth space conceits of globalists, highlighting asymmetry and inequality amidst intensifying global interdependency.

Thus, the categorisation of the Global South and North is much more complex than it first implies. It involves various issues such as power relations, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental justice and unequal division of benefits and costs of global capitalism and tourism (see Olatunji & Bature, 2019). As such, it calls for highly nuanced analyses both in theory and practice, and this is very much the case in the change, management and development contexts of tourism in the Global South, as this volume fruitfully demonstrates.

Overall, change is truly a multidimensional element in tourism. If simplified, the issue of change has been approached by focusing on the impacts of tourism, the developmental aspects of tourism and changing characteristics of the tourism phenomenon. Obviously, these three perspectives are partly interrelated and they can be highly overlapping in certain cases. Although the impacts of tourism can be negative or positive, previous impact studies have had a main focus on the detrimental changes that tourism causes, especially in the tourism destination environments (see Hall & Lew, 2009; Wall & Mathieson, 2006). Recently, however, the scale of analysis has expanded to a wider system level in the studies on global climate change and tourism, for example (Gössling et al., 2021; Hall et al., 2015; Hall et al., 2012).

The developmental aspect of tourism highlights the positive side of the impacts of development. Thus, instead of mapping, describing or modelling the impacts of tourism, the emphasis is on the potential and active role of the industry as a tool for positive change. Typically, this has involved local or regional development needs, and, since the 1990s, an increasing interest has been given to the potential connections between tourism and sustainable development on a local or regional scale, namely destination level (Hall & Lew, 2009; Saarinen, 2014; Sharpley, 2000, 2009). Recently, this developmental focus has been integrated into the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (see Hughes & Scheyvens, 2016; Rasoolimanesh et al., 2020), which could and should include a wider scale than destination sustainability alone in tourism (Saarinen, 2020; Scheyvens, 2018). Based on this, the chapter will outline the general nature and perspectives of change with an emphasis given to the impacts of tourism. However, the developmental aspects and connections of tourism with sustainable development and the SDGs will be further discussed in Chapter 2. Finally, the contributions of the book are introduced.

Tourism: Impacts, development and changes

A traditional way to categorise the impacts of tourism is based on the division between environmental, socio-cultural and economic impacts (Mathieson & Wall, 1982; Wall & Mathieson, 2006). This general division is widely used, although the tourism impacts can involve a vast range of more specific issues such as local administration and politics (Getz, 1983; Hall, 1994; Hollenhorst et al., 2014; Mbaiwa, 2005). There are many excellent books and reviews on the impacts of tourism (see Hall & Lew, 2009; Holden, 2000; Mathieson & Wall, 1982; Wall & Mathieson, 2006). Briefly, physical impacts refer to changes in the ecological environment caused by tourism activities. These activities and changes are based on traffic, construction of tourism facilities (hotels, resorts, amusement parks, golf courses etc.) and related general infrastructure such as roads, airports and housing, for example. Many of these environmental impacts are considered negative, an outcome which is rather paradoxical as it often indicates that the growth of tourism destroys the attraction elements on which tourism development depends (Butler, 1980, 1999; Holden, 2003).

However, tourism also has the potential to benefit the environment, for example, by supporting financially and politically better environmental management and nature conservation in destination communities (Fennell, 1999). Somewhat surprisingly, these positive changes may be interpreted as creating outcomes that can be construed as negative from another perspective by another stakeholder: tourism activities supporting nature conservation are good for the environment and people working in nature-based or ecotourism sectors, but they may cause negative social and economic outcomes for local resource-extractive industries and people employed in those sectors and traditional livelihoods (Saarinen, 2019).

Although the environmental impacts of tourism are well identified and discussed in the literature, there are relatively few empirical studies and especially theoretical models on the overall tourism-environment connections (Dowling, 1993). This is not the case with socio-cultural impacts of tourism, which have been conceptualised and theorised in various ways (see Murphy, 1985), includin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• PART I Introduction and frameworks
• PART II Change in tourism
• PART III Tourism for change
• Index