Political Ecology of Tourism : Community, power and the environment

Drawing on recent trends in geography, anthropology, environmental and tourism studies, the chapters in this anthology employ a political ecology approach to the analysis of tourism development and impacts on the community and environment.

The volume begins by chronicling interdisciplinary perspectives on political ecology of tourism as well as how the subject has been treated in tourism studies to date. It addresses why political ecology has been given so little attention, despite the widespread consideration of the environment and politics in tourism studies. As the chapters in this anthology make clear, political ecologies of tourism are mediated by a range of political, economic and cultural relations of power. As a result of these relations, some ecological concerns are privileged while others are marginalized. This book advances our understanding of the role of political, economic and environmental concerns in tourism development and impacts on the community and environment. It offers the reader a critical and empirically grounded understanding of the contemporary relevance of political ecology to address tourism related issues such as power, uneven development, environmentalism, globalization and political economy.

This book will be valuable reading for those interested in the intersection of geography, anthropology and tourism studies.

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 treatment 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: Communities and Power, Conservation and Control, and Development and Conflict. While geographically 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 environmental 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, environmental subjectivities, environmental degradation, land and resources conflict, and indigenous ecologies. 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