The New Responsible Tourism Paradigm: The UNWTO’s Discourse Following the Spread of COVID-19

Abstract

The UNWTO’s discourse has focused on managing the effects of COVID-19 on tourism mobility since the outbreak was taken over by the WHO, as tourism is prominent amongst the hardest hit sectors. Emanating from the UNWTO as one of the dominant stakeholders in tourism discourse construction, an interesting component is the new meaning attributed to ‘responsible tourism’, which coincides with severe sanitary measures in this moment. Through critical discourse analysis and the theoretical framework offered by Iris Marion Young on responsibility for justice, this article will first demonstrate how the reappropriation of the term is in line with the UNWTO’s neoliberal perspective on tourism. The result is the promotion of sanitary measures for the protection of tourism as a consumer industry, rather than for the protection of the individuals involved. It is also cementing the pedestal on which the UN agency places the tourist-consumer, namely through the International Code for the Protection of Tourists project. This paper closes with thoughts on how the emerging dominant discourse on responsible tourism is internalized by tourism stakeholders as the new normal, which would gain in being explored through the lens of Foucault’s work on the concept of biopolitics and the neoliberal subject.

Responsible tourists in the time of Covid-19?

“…Brown, 2015), such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Tourism Organisation (UNWTO). Tremblay-Huet and Lapointe (2021) argue that a neoliberal rhetoric dominated UNWTO’s communication on COVID-19. In this rhetoric, responsibility was central, addressing individual as well as collective responsibilities.…”

“…These responsibilities, however, can be hard to separate (Young and Nussbaum, 2011). Instead of banning tourism, UNWTO's aim was safe travel, thereby upholding 'the right to tourism' (Tremblay-Huet and Lapointe, 2021). This organisation adjusted arguments and methods to an ideology where everything is 'economicized' and growth is a virtue.…”

Planning Tourism in Protected Natural Areas: Safety, Soft Law and Conflict Management between Beach Users. The Case of Surf in Aljezur, Portugal

“…Some experts have argued in favor of adopting responsible tourism models as a form of tourism that assumes responsibility of its economic, social, and environmental impacts, with the path of achieving sustainability [26]. UNWTO as a major stakeholder in tourism assumes this way as a tourism paradigm not exempted of a neoliberal perspective and the protection of tourism as a consumer industry [27]. In this approach, tourists assume citizenship responsibilities [28], thereby "living and acting like the world is 'home'" [25] (p. 106).…”

Global tourism in crisis: conceptual frameworks for research and practice

“…Reordering is layered over existing lines of inequality and violence across gender, race and sexuality, among others. Apropos, national tourism destinations face a similar reorderingsome keeping their borders shut, subsidizing the domestic visitor economy, while others maintain open borders, risking an upsurge of COVID-19 cases to capture tourist expenditure (Tremblay-Huet and Lapointe, 2021). The pandemic crisis of 2020-2021 is reconnecting tourism to place-based roots, as Tomassini et al (2021) argue, leaving the paradigmatic tourist behind and reinscribing the tourist within citizenship and political responsibilityjoining the body touristic with the body politic.…”