Tourism Geographies Podcast

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2423155AbstractThis commentary reviews the state of island tourism literature with specific reference to publications in the journal Tourism Geographies. Despite over 44 years of literature about island tourism, the field remains underdeveloped, with several under-researched critical areas, including adaptation, investment, proximity, and small islands. The Western Hemisphere, except the Caribbean, is the most under-researched area for island tourism. Some important island tourism topics include community, culture, disaster, governance, and tour operators. A focused compendium about island tourism is needed to support the sustainability and resilience of these vulnerable and fragile landscapes that are perhaps the most constrained in terms of economic opportunities for viability. A recommendation has been made for the furtherance of island tourism as a separate field within the tourism academy.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2446355AbstractToday’s multiple crises call for alternative approaches to tourism and nature contemplation. Neoliberal conservation proposes the commodification of nature as a solution to these crises, for instance, through tourism development in private protected areas (PPA). PPAs combine privatisation with the commodification of nature for tourism, illustrating neoliberal conservation. Critics of neoliberal conservation question these practices, claiming that they foster inequality, enclosure, and people’s alienation from nature, leading to displacement. Alternatively, post-capitalist convivial conservation strives to overcome the human-nature dichotomy entrenched in market-based instruments of mainstream conservation. This study analyses tourism management in PPAs in the Serra the Tramuntana, a protected mountain range in the tourist hotspot Mallorca (Spain). The objective is to clarify whether PPAs can align with convivial conservation by supporting decommodification and commons management. A qualitative method based on interviews and participant observation is used to conceptualise decommodification based on the commons. The results demonstrate that PPAs can contribute to the decommodification of nature contemplation and tourism when responsibility and decision-making are shared through commoning. This paper argues for rethinking tourism through a convivial conservation lens, offering a post-capitalist alternative to mainstream conservation and tourism practices by emphasising commoning as a pathway to decommodify nature.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2381061AbstractThis state-of-the art review provides an overview of feminist analyses of tourism that have been published in Tourism Geographies since 1999. The review first introduces feminisms as political projects, forms of activism, diverse theories, and as ways of knowing that have critically informed tourism knowledge production. It then offers reflections on the development of feminist tourism geographies over the past two to three decades, before outlining several trends that have more recently contributed to feminist understandings of tourism spaces and places. Our review then identifies avenues for future research and for cross-fertilisation between tourism geographies scholarship and scholarship relating to indigenous and decolonial feminisms, feminist political ecologies, and feminist economic geographies.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2446356AbstractTourism development can significantly affect the environment and communities in popular travel destinations, often overpowering Indigenous peoples by the sheer dominance of this economic sector. However, the local population can regain control over tourism development in a destination. This paper addresses the research question of how Indigenous peoples can protect themselves as well as their land from the pressures of mass tourism. More specifically, it analyzes the example of the Kanak from the Isle of Pines in New Caledonia, who play a key role in the island’s tourism development, ensuring it aligns with their cultural values and norms. For example, no hotel can be built on the Isle of Pines without the consent of the customary authorities and the Indigenous community. This presents challenges to external investors like Club Méditerranée, the pioneer of the all-inclusive resort model, an innovative approach in hospitality. This paper explores the Kanak community’s resistance to Club Med’s resort establishment in the 1970s, despite pressures from foreign investors and the local government. To answer our research question, we used ethnographic research methods and archival data analysis. Our findings reveal that customary land tenure allows Indigenous communities to maintain ownership of their land while preserving autonomy and control over resources and decision-making processes. The Kanak opposition to Club Med was successful due to three empowerment factors: the broader recognition and adherence to customary law, the emergence of the Kanak independence movement and land restitution claims, and the active involvement of Indigenous peoples in the implementation of tourism projects. This ‘NOvative’ approach – marked by the opposition towards Club Med – allowed the Kanak community to maintain control over tourism development. By adapting it to suit their insular pace and scale, they have demonstrated how Indigenous peoples can shape tourism in ways that respect their customs and lifestyles.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2395469AbstractAdvancement of Indigenous rights through tourism requires practitioners and researchers to think carefully about the roles and responsibilities of Indigenous methodologies and decolonising work. In adopting a stance of refusing colonisation, reflections on tebrakunna country are aimed at introducing ways for Indigenous scholars to accommodate both cultural protocol and western scholarship requirements without compromise.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2412551AbstractThemed spaces and theme parks constitute of significant human-based desires and linguistic discourses that stabilises/destabilises their social identities and materialities. This paper draws on a relational materialist perspective to examine Singapore’s longstanding themed space, Haw Par Villa, to offer insights into its social and material stability and instabilities. Relational materialism facilitates observations and analysis of interactions of humans and their material worlds on the same ontological plane where human’s agencies are de-centred. Social and material objects are seen to operate in mutually constitutive fashions. The development of a site/theme park and its larger country context are conceptualised here as ‘assemblages’ using DeLanda’s brand of assemblage theory to reveal the operations of human-based ‘desires’ alongside material agencies. Specifically, the desires of the founder and the key discourses related to the founder’s name helped constitute and stabilise the social identity and materiality of the Haw Par Villa through its eventful history of physical destruction, reconstruction, rebranding and reimagining. Despite his eventual non-involvement with Haw Par Villa’s management due to his passing, the founder’s desires and discourses linger on in various forms, resulting in subsequent attempts to rework the identity and materiality of this themed space failing if the attempts are not congruent on some level with the founder’s desires and discourses. This resulted in the failure of first, the state and, subsequently, private endeavours in re-constituting the themed space. In doing so, this paper contributes to a socio-material understanding of the resilience and sustainability of themed spaces.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2381062AbstractDisasters, resulting from natural hazards, have a profound impact on communities and places, revealing vulnerabilities while shaping unique identities. Regenerative tourism offers promise in aiding recovery and revitalization, supporting local economies, and fostering a transition to alternative development approaches. Drawing on emerging conceptual frameworks in regenerative tourism, this paper proposes their application in post-disaster contexts. It explores walking itineraries as potential regenerative practices, embodying spiritual and political acts of re-signifying place. Using the Cammino nelle Terre Mutate case study, which traverses rural villages in central Italy struck by violent earthquakes in 2009 and 2016–2017, the study examines the application of regenerative thinking in post-disaster tourism practices. It illustrates how walking itineraries, when guided by regenerative principles, can facilitate the coexistence of humans and the environment, which includes natural hazards as intrinsic components of a dynamic living system. This study highlights the role of communities in enhancing system capacity, revealing the inherent potential of affected areas beyond recovery, and paving the way for tourism as part of a regenerative process. However, tourism’s effectiveness depends on nurturing a regenerative mindset and harnessing transformative capacities to stimulate local economies and imaginaries, prompting a re-evaluation of tourism’s role in local development.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2372114AbstractJustice is integral in transformative tourism approaches that call for a complete restructuring of the travel and tourism sector worldwide. While justice through alternative tourism models promotes responsible, sustainable transitions in the tourism sector, these models are frequently informed by a perceived binary between the social and the environmental and long-held patterns of West-centric thought and West versus ‘the rest’ power dynamics, found both in tourism theory and practice and within justice frameworks. In this article, we explore the potential of the regenerative development paradigm to bridge these divides and adopt a pluriversal lens to devise a more just practice of tourism. The holistic, transformative tenets and pluralistic perspective of regenerative development and tourism are used to build a novel framework for justice. The framework’s capacity to analyse, unlock and catalyse place regeneration in different knowledge systems and restore just relationships has been leveraged in two rural areas in Colombia and Ecuador. Collecting data through mixed qualitative methods that combine reflexive ethnography with in situ and online interviews, we identified actions taken to address local inequalities and challenges while fostering pathways to the systemic transformation of residents’ livelihoods. These place-specific actions inspired by ancestral traditions have revitalised the areas’ ecosystems, including local human communities and the latter’s tourism activities. The discussion of results examines the potential of pluriversal regenerative development and tourism principles grounded in diverse knowledge and ethics frames to guide actions for systemic social and environmental justice.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2417858#abstractAbstractThis commentary explains how backpacker research has been developed within and beyond tourism geography in the past 25 years. Based on a selective review of the backpacker literature, it identifies three enduring issues to form the basis for a future research agenda. Firstly, the question of how to define backpackers. Secondly, the methods used to understand backpacking. Thirdly, the debate regarding whether or not backpackers and working holiday makers are synonymous. The paper argues the lack of a shared definition of backpackers distorts perceptions of their impacts, particularly around the question of economic benefits. There are implications here for the tourism industry, the agriculture industry, the academy, and all who depend upon backpackers and/or working holiday makers for their livelihoods.