Political Ecology of Tourism

Political Ecology of Tourism

Why has political ecology been assigned so little attention in tourism studies, despite its

broad and critical interrogation of environment and politics? As the first full-length treat￾ment of a political ecology of tourism, the collection addresses this lacuna and calls for the

further establishment of this emerging interdisciplinary subfield.

Drawing on recent trends in geography, anthropology, and environmental and tourism

studies, Political Ecology of Tourism: Communities, power and the environment employs a

political ecology approach to the analysis of tourism through three interrelated themes: com￾munities and power, conservation and control, and development and conflict. While geographi￾cally broad in scope—with chapters that span Central and South America to Africa, and South,

Southeast, and East Asia to Europe and Greenland—the collection illustrates how tourism￾related environmental challenges are shared across prodigious geographical distances, while

also attending to the nuanced ways they materialize in local contexts and therefore demand the

historically situated, place-based and multi-scalar approach of political ecology.

This collection advances our understanding of the role of political, economic and environ￾mental concerns in tourism practice. It offers readers a political ecology framework from which

to address tourism-related issues and themes such as development, identity politics, environmen￾tal subjectivities, environmental degradation, land and resources conflict, and indigenous ecolo￾gies. Finally, the collection is bookended by a pair of essays from two of the most distinguished

scholars working in the subfield: Rosaleen Duffy (foreword) and James Igoe (afterword).

This collection will be valuable reading for scholars and practitioners alike who share a

critical interest in the intersection of tourism, politics and the environment

Mary Mostafanezhad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the

University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

Roger Norum is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds School of

English and a researcher on the HERA-funded project Arctic Encounters: Contemporary

Travel/Writing in the European High North and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative

Training Network in Environmental Humanities. Trained in social anthropology, his

research focuses on sociality, temporality, travel and the environment.

Eric J. Shelton works with environmental NGOs in New Zealand and strives to situate

nature-based tourism within environmental philosophy.

Anna Thompson-Carr is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Tourism at the University

of Otago, NZ. She has conducted research and published in high-quality tourism journals

on visitors’ experiences of cultural values for landscapes in New Zealand with a focus on

integrating cultural values within interpretation.

Contemporary geographies of leisure, tourism and mobility

Series Editor: C. Michael Hall

Professor at the Department of Management, College of Business and

Economics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

The aim of this series is to explore and communicate the intersections and rela￾tionships between leisure, tourism and human mobility within the social sciences.

It will incorporate both traditional and new perspectives on leisure and tour￾ism from contemporary geography, e.g. notions of identity, representation and

culture, while also providing for perspectives from cognate areas such as anthro￾pology, cultural studies, gastronomy and food studies, marketing, policy studies

and political economy, regional and urban planning, and sociology, within the

development of an integrated field of leisure and tourism studies.

Also, increasingly, tourism and leisure are regarded as steps in a continuum of

human mobility. Inclusion of mobility in the series offers the prospect to examine

the relationship between tourism and migration, the sojourner, educational travel,

and second home and retirement travel phenomena.

The series comprises two strands:

Contemporary geographies of leisure, tourism and mobility aims to address

the needs of students and academics, and the titles will be published in hardback

and paperback. Titles include:

1 The Moralisation of Tourism

Sun, sand . . . and saving the world?

Jim Butcher

2 The Ethics of Tourism

Development

Mick Smith and Rosaleen Duffy

3 Tourism in the Caribbean

Trends, development, prospects

Edited by David Timothy Duval

4 Qualitative Research in Tourism

Ontologies, epistemologies and

methodologies

Edited by Jenny Phillimore and

Lisa Goodson

5 The Media and the Tourist

Imagination

Converging cultures

Edited by David Crouch, Rhona

Jackson and Felix Thompson

6 Tourism and Global

Environmental Change

Ecological, social, economic and

political interrelationships

Edited by Stefan Gössling and

C. Michael Hall

7 Cultural Heritage of Tourism in

the Developing World

Edited by Dallen J. Timothy and

Gyan Nyaupane

8 Understanding and Managing

Tourism Impacts

An integrated approach

C. Michael Hall and Alan Lew

9 An Introduction to Visual

Research Methods in Tourism

Edited by Tijana Rakic and Donna

Chambers

10 Tourism and Climate Change

Impacts, adaptation and

mitigation

C. Michael Hall, Stefan Gössling

and Daniel Scott

11 Tourism and Citizenship

Raoul V. Bianchi and

Marcus L. Stephenson

40 Scuba Diving Tourism

Edited by Kay Dimmcock and

Ghazali Musa

41 Contested Spatialities Lifestyle

Migration and Residential

Tourism

Michael Janoschka and Heiko Haas

42 Contemporary Issues in Cultural

Heritage Tourism

Edited by Jamie Kaminski, Angela

M. Benson and David Arnold

43 Understanding and Governing

Sustainable Tourism Mobility

Edited by Scott Cohen, James

Higham, Paul Peeters and Stefan

Gossling

44 Green Growth and Travelism

Concept, policy and practice for

sustainable tourism

Edited by Terry DeLacy, Min

Jiang, Geoffrey Lipman and

Shaun Vorster

45 Tourism, Religion and

Pilgrimage in Jerusalem

Kobi Cohen-Hattab and Noam

Shoval

46 Trust, Tourism Development

and Planning

Edited by Robin Nunkoo and

Stephen L.J. Smith

47 A Hospitable World?

Organising work and workers in

hotels and tourist resorts

Edited by David Jordhus-Lier

and Anders Underthun

48 Tourism in Pacific Islands

Current issues and future

challenges

Edited by Stephen Pratt and

David Harrison

49 Social Memory and Heritage

Tourism Methodologies

Edited by Stephen P. Hanna,

Amy E. Potter, E. Arnold Modlin,

Perry Carter, and David L. Butler

50 Affective Tourism

Dark routes in conflict

Dorina Maria Buda

51 Scientific Tourism

Edited by Susan L. Slocum,

Carol Kline and Andrew Holden

Routledge studies in contemporary geographies of leisure, tourism and

mobility is a forum for innovative new research intended for research students

and academics, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include:

52 Volunteer Tourism and

Development

The lifestyle politics of

international development

Jim Butcher and Peter Smith

53 Imagining the West through

Film and Tourism

Warwick Frost and Jennifer Laing

54 The Practice of Sustainable

Tourism

Resolving the paradox

Edited by Michael Hughes, David

Weaver and Christof Pforr

55 Mountaineering Tourism

Edited by Ghazali Musa,

James Higham and

Anna Thompson

56 Tourism and Development in

Sub-Saharan Africa

Current issues and local realities

Marina Novelli

57 Tourism and the Anthropocene

Edited by Martin Gren and

Edward H. Huijbens

58 The Politics and Power of

Tourism in Palestine

Edited by Rami K. Isaac,

C. Michael Hall and Freya

Higgins-Desbiolles

59 Political Ecology of Tourism

Community, power and the

environment

Edited by Mary Mostafanezhad,

Eric Jacob Shelton, Roger Norum

and Anna Thompson-Carr

Forthcoming:

International Tourism and

Cooperation and the Gulf

Cooperation Council States

Developments, challenges and

opportunities

Edited by Marcus Stephenson

and Ala Al-Hamarneh

Protest and Resistance in the

Tourist City

Edited by Johannes Novy

and Claire Colomb

Women and Sex Tourism

Landscapes

Erin Sanders-McDonagh

Research Volunteer Tourism

Angela M Benson

Managing and Interpreting D-day’s

Sites of Memory

War graves, museums and tour

guides

Edited by Geoffrey Bird, Sean Claxton

and Keir Reeves

Co-Creation in Tourist Experiences

Nina Prebensen, Joseph Chen and

Muzaffer Uysal

Authentic and Inauthentic Places

Jane Lovell and Chris Bull

Political Ecology of Tourism

Community, power and the environment

Edited by

Mary Mostafanezhad,

Roger Norum, Eric J. Shelton and

Anna Thompson-Carr

First published 2016

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2016 selection and editorial matter, Mary Mostafanezhad, Roger Norum, Eric

J. Shelton and Anna Thompson-Carr; individual chapters: the contributors.

The right of Mary Mostafanezhad, Roger Norum, Eric J. Shelton and Anna

Thompson-Carr to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of

the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

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information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the

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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent

to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-85944-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-71722-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

List of figures x

List of contributors xi

Foreword xvi

ROSALEEN DUFFY

Introduction 1

M A R Y M O S T A F A N E Z H A D , R O G E R N O R U M , E R I C J . S H E L T O N

AND ANNA THOMPSON-CARR

PART I

Communities and power 23

Introduction to Communities and power 25

ANNA THOMPSON-CARR

1 A gendered political ecology of tourism and water 31

STROMA COLE

2 Ngarrindjeri authority: a sovereignty approach to tourism 50

RON NICHOLLS, FREYA HIGGINS-DESBIOLLES

AND GRANT RIGNEY

3 Co-management of natural resources in protected

areas in ‘postcolonial’ Africa 70

CHENGETO CHADEROPA

4 ‘Few people know that Krishna was the first environmentalist’:

religiously motivated conservation as a response to

pilgrimage pressures in Vrindavan, India 92

TAMARA LUTHY

5 Festive environmentalism: a carnivalesque reading of

eco-voluntourism at the Roskilde Festival 108

METTE FOG OLWIG AND LENE BULL CHRISTIANSEN

viii Contents

PART II

Conservation and control 129

Introduction to Conservation and control 131

ERIC J. SHELTON

6 Unsettling the moral economy of tourism on Chile’s

Easter Island 134

FORREST WADE YOUNG

7 Rethinking ecotourism in environmental discourse in

Shangri-La: an antiessentialist political ecology perspective 151

JUNDAN (JASMINE) ZHANG

8 (Re)creating forest natures: assemblage and political

ecologies of ecotourism in Japan’s central highlands 169

ERIC J. CUNNINGHAM

9 Ecotourism or eco-utilitarianism: exploring the new

debates in ecotourism 188

STEPHEN WEARING AND MICHAEL WEARING

PART III

Development and conflict 207

Introduction to Development and conflict 209

MARY MOSTAFANEZHAD

10 Political ecologies and economies of tourism

development in Kaokoland, north-west Namibia 213

JARKKO SAARINEN

11 Cleaning up the streets, Sandinista-style: the aesthetics of

garbage and the urban political ecology of tourism

development in Nicaragua 231

JOSH FISHER

12 The political ecology of tourism development on

Mount Kilimanjaro 251

MEGAN HOLROYD

13 ‘Absolutely not smelly’: the political ecology of disengaged

slum tours in Mumbai, India 270

KEVIN HANNAM AND ANYA DIEKMANN

Contents ix

14 Composing Greenlandic tourism futures: an integrated

political ecology and actor-network theory approach 284

CARINA REN, LILL RASTAD BJØRST AND

DIANNE DREDGE

Conclusion: Towards future intersections of tourism studies

and political ecology 302

R O G E R N O R U M , M A R Y M O S T A F A N E Z H A D , E R I C J . S H E L T O N

AND ANNA THOMPSON-CARR

Afterword 309

JAMES IGOE

Index 317

Figures

3.1 Old Makuleke/Pafuri Triangle, now the location of the

26,500-hectare Makuleke Contractual Park (MCP) 72

3.2 Income earned by Makuleke community 79

3.3 Lodges operation in the MCP 82

3.4 Existing institutional arrangements 83

3.5 Proposed new governance arrangement 84

3.6 Makuleke residents as members of the Community

Property Association 86

4.1 The pamphlet cover: ‘Dham Seva, Save a Dham’ 102

5.1 Bicycle-powered Ferris wheel at the 2009 Roskilde Festival 115

5.2 2015 Roskilde Festival poster listing the organizations

that received donations in 2014 117

5.3 The fisk booth at Roskilde Festival 2009 120

5.4 Karen Mukupa being interviewed by MTV at the fisk booth.

Karen Mukupa is wearing clothing items from the SKIFt collection 122

7.1 Images of Shangri-La 152

8.1 Depiction of ‘Mountain Girl’ (yama gāru) 181

10.1 Sharing the benefits from tourism: distributing maize flour

to households after the tourist group has left the community 222

10.2 The Opuwo Country Lodge’s swimming pool and a view

to dry ‘Himbaland’ 223

12.1 Map of Tanzania’s protected areas 255

12.2 Population in 1988 261

14.1 Narsaq seen from the hillside 290

14.2 Children in the Narsaq museum 291

14.3 Screenshot of Greenland Minerals and Energy – Kvanefjeld 294

Contributors

Lill Rastad Bjørst is Assistant Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark and

holds a PhD in Arctic studies from the University of Copenhagen. Her doc￾toral research focused on the climate change debate in Greenland, and since

2012 she has explored the political debate about Greenland’s uranium. She is

assistant research coordinator at CIRCLA and academic coordinator for Arctic

studies – a specialization of the CCG programme at Aalborg University. Her

research interests include Inuit culture and society; climate change and sus￾tainability; mining and industrialization; postcolonialism and tourism.

Chengeto Chaderopa is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Tourism and

Hospitality Management at Waiariki Institute of Technology, New Zealand.

He lectures in tourism, hotel management, and services marketing. Chengeto

has also taught tourism at universities in South Africa and Zimbabwe. His

research interests include sustainability in the tourism and hospitality indus￾try, transnational parks and local communities, power, political ecology and

local communities’ environmental narratives. Finally, Chengeto has an inter￾est in service quality and tourism destination marketing.

Lene Bull Christiansen holds a PhD in international development studies from

Roskilde University, Denmark, where she is an Associate Professor at the

Institute of Culture and Identity. Her PhD research dealt with gender in

Zimbabwean cultural politics. Her current work deals with development com￾munication, celebrity and nationalism in Denmark. She is a core member of

the Research Network on Celebrity and North-South Relations and heads the

Research Cluster on celebrities as new global actors at Roskilde University.

Stroma Cole is a Senior Lecturer in tourism geography at the University of the

West of England. Stroma combines her academic career with action research

and consultancy, most recently looking at tourism and the abuse of water rights

in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia with a grant from the British Academy. She was the

Chair of Tourism Concern (2007–2011), and is now a Director of Equality in

Tourism. With research interests in responsible tourism development in less

developed countries, and the link between tourism and human rights, Stroma

is an activist researcher critiquing the consequences of tourism development.

xii Contributors

Eric J. Cunningham is Assistant Professor in the Japanese Studies and Environ￾mental Studies programmes at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. His

research focuses on intersections between capitalism and other life projects

within highland ecologies in Japan.

Anya Diekmann is Professor of Tourism at the Université Libre de Bruxelles

(Belgium). Her research and publications include work on social tourism

and cultural tourism with a particular focus on heritage, urban, (slum and

ethnic) tourism in India and Europe. Among others, she co-authored with

Kevin Hannam Tourism and India: A Critical Introduction and co-edited

with Melanie Smith Ethnic and Minority Cultures as Tourist Attractions.

Dianne Dredge is Professor in the Department of Culture and Global Studies,

Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark and Chair of the Tourism

Education Futures Initiative. Originally trained as an environmental and urban

planner, Dianne has 20 years of practical experience working with communi￾ties, government and non-government organizations, and industry stakeholders

in a variety of locations including Australia, Mexico and China. Her research

interests include tourism development processes, collaborative governance,

tourism policy networks, policy knowledge dynamics and tourism education.

Rosaleen Duffy is Professor of Political Ecology, in the Department of

Development Studies, SOAS University of London. Her research takes an

interdisciplinary approach, drawing on international politics, geography and

development studies. She focuses on global environmental governance, neo￾liberalism and nature, tourism, ecotourism and biodiversity conservation.

Her most recent books are Nature Crime: How We’re Getting Conservation

Wrong and Nature Unbound: Conservation, Capitalism and the Future of

Protected Areas with Dan Brockington and James Igoe.

Josh Fisher is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and serves as Director of both

Environmental Studies and Anthropology at High Point University, North

Carolina. He researches and writes on questions of how different forms of

‘value’ are produced in development, alternative development, urban envi￾ronmental policy and employment generation in Central America. He has

served as the technical director of the employment-generation project called

the Organization Workshop in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, and he is also

a member of the board of directors for a Nicaragua-based NGO called the

Center for Development in Central America.

Mette Fog Olwig is a human geographer and an Assistant Professor in International

Development Studies at the Department of Society and Globalisation,

Roskilde University, Denmark. In her research she has applied a multi-sited,

multi-level ethnographic perspective on the social and power dimensions of

the political ecology of development policy in relation to climate change dis￾course in Ghana. Her current research focuses on land grabbing in Tanzania,

natural disasters, community dynamics, power relations and climate change

in Vietnam as well as development communication and consumption through

fair trade, benefit events and eco/social tourism globally.

Contributors xiii

Kevin Hannam is Professor of Tourism Mobilities at Leeds Beckett University,

UK. Previously he was Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of

Business and Law at the University of Sunderland, UK. He is founding

co-editor of the journal Mobilities, co-author of the books Understanding

Tourism and Tourism and India (Routledge) and co-editor of the Routledge

Handbook of Mobilities Research and Moral Encounters in Tourism. He has

a PhD in geography from the University of Portsmouth, UK and is a Fellow

of the Royal Geographical Society.

Freya Higgins-Desbiolles is a Senior Lecturer in Tourism in the School of

Management, University of South Australia. She has researched and taught

on Indigenous tourism for more than a decade; she is a critical scholar

employing an Indigenous-rights approach based on Indigenous community

engagement and collaborations. Her work through the course Tourism and

Indigenous Peoples has received numerous awards for community engage￾ment, teaching and research, including an Australian national award – the

Australian Teaching and Learning Council’s Citation Award for Outstanding

Contributions to Student Learning in 2009.

Megan Holroyd is a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Kansas.

She has spent time working and researching in Tanzania. She holds a Master

of Arts in international studies from the University of Kansas and a Bachelor

of Science in sociology from Pittsburg State University. She has taught world

regional geography, human geography and African studies courses at the

University of Kansas.

James Igoe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the

University of Virginia. He is the author of Conservation and Globalization:

a Study of Indigenous Communities and National Parks from East Africa to

South Dakota. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork related to

the environment, identity, and community well-being in Tanzania, the Pine

Ridge Reservation (South Dakota) and New Orleans (Louisiana). He is one

of the key organizers of a network of scholars, practitioners and community

activists concerned with the commodification of nature and culture in the

context of global biodiversity conservation.

Tamara Luthy is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the

University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, working toward a concurrent MS in botany.

Mary Mostafanezhad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography

and a faculty affiliate in Thai Studies at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa.

Mary’s current research is situated at the intersection of critical geopolitics

and cultural and development studies and explores popular humanitarianism

in several contexts, including tourism, fair trade, celebrity humanitarianism

and corporate social responsibility. Additionally, Mary is a board member

for the Association of American Geographers Cultural and Political Ecology

and Recreation, Tourism and Sport Specialty Groups and a co-founder of the

American Anthropological Association Anthropology of Tourism Interest

Group and the Critical Tourism Studies Asia-Pacific Consortium.

xiv Contributors

Ron Nicholls is a Lecturer and Open Universities Coordinator in the David

Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research at the University

of South Australia. His research focuses on global and national Indigenous

issues, alternative worldviews, experiential learning, and peace studies. Ron

has also worked as a professional musician and from 1980-1995 held the

position of Lecturer in Music at the Centre of Aboriginal Studies in Music,

University of Adelaide. His recent publications and presentations have

focused on the necessity of forging innovative ways of being and the move￾ment toward a post-enlightenment world.

Roger Norum is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds and

Teaching Fellow in Norwegian at University College London. He is a

researcher on the HERA-funded project Arctic Encounters: Contemporary

Travel/Writing in the European High North and is also Research Director of

the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network in Environmental

Humanities (2015–2018). Trained in social anthropology, his research cur￾rently focuses on mobility, tourism and the global travel-writing industry. He

is the co-author, with Alejandro Reig, of Migraciones and is co-convenor of

ANTHROMOB, the Anthropology and Mobility Network of the European

Association of Social Anthropologists.

Carina Ren is Associate Professor at the Tourism Research Unit at Aalborg

University, Denmark. In her research, she ethnographically explores encoun￾ters, controversies and multiplicity in tourism taking inspiration from material

and relational approaches such as ANT. She is a co-editor of Actor-Network

Theory and Tourism: Ordering, Materiality and Multiplicity and Tourism

Encounters and Controversies Ontological Politics of Tourism Development.

Grant Rigney is a Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority Board Member at Ngarrindjeri

Regional Authority in South Australia.

Jarkko Saarinen is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oulu,

Finland and Distinguished Visitor Professor at the School of Tourism and

Hospitality, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research inter￾ests include tourism and development, sustainability management, tour￾ism-community relations, tourism and climate change, community-based

natural resource management and wilderness studies. He is currently the Vice

President of the International Geographical Union and Associate Editor of the

Journal of Ecotourism. Previously he has been Professor of Tourism at the

University of Botswana. His recent publications include the book: Tourism

and Millennium Development Goals (co-edited with Rogerson and Manwa)

Eric J. Shelton is a trustee of the Yellow-Eyed Penguin Trust, an environmental

NGO operating from Dunedin, New Zealand, and working to produce pro￾tected whole-of-ecosystem habitat primarily for sea birds. Also, Eric writes

about the craft of conservation within neoliberalism and the place of nature￾based tourism.