Tourism in the Sustained Hegemonic Neoliberal Order

Abstract

Sustainable Development (SD) has become a unifying concept that transcends conflicting discourses. Over time it has become a fundamental political concept in the current world order. This paper explores the structures that (re)produce the world-system in which tourism is embedded. Following Fletcher’s (2011) demonstration of tourism as a force of capitalist expansion, we will refer to the concept of the International Political Economy (IPE) to discuss how the world-system has been structured and institutionalized. It appears fundamental to understand this path to face the actual IPE construct in which we see tourism grow year after year in scale and scope. The shift towards neoliberalism as a main narrative has been vastly discussed (Harvey, 2007; Brown, 2015; Mosedale, 2016) but we will turn to the Hardt and Negri’s Theory of Empire (2000). We will first consider the question of how sustainable development, within its virtuous global reach, is in fact, a primarily Empire-like discourse, especially when it is carried by International deterritorialized institutions. The second question we will address is the role of tourism in the moments of Empire processes of transformation and globalisation. We conclude that tourism is contributing to the main process of globalization and the market dominance of neo-liberalism expressed in Empire. If there is different strand of thought and research that advocates tourism and sustainable development as a locus of change in the economic and world system, it has only had limited success at the margins, while discourses of globalization and mass tourism keep going strong.

Reconsidering global mobility – distancing from mass cruise tourism in the aftermath of COVID-19

“…This kind of travel can be characterized as reversible global mobility, reversible because this kind of mobility is not necessary in a search for otherness. The economic and social forces linked to tourism seek to create highly publicized markers that push individuals to embark on journeys to a commodified elsewhere (Lapointe et al, 2018).…”

“…Returning to the pre-COVID-19 status quo will only perpetuate an intolerable situation in terms of sustainable tourism. In an era when Worldmaking can no longer be ignored (Lapointe et al, 2018) and when global mobility seems to have saturated receiving communities by favoring overtourism (Milano et al, 2019), a major shift is needed, and quickly. As Fletcher et al (2020) also noted, this window of opportunity to reflect on how tourism works -or should not work -is closing quickly, as evidenced by the actions of global stakeholders who are trying to implement the precepts of disaster capitalism (Klein, 2010).…”

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

“…Therefore, tourism acts as a 'world-making process' [12,13], which is especially accurate in the case of self-enclosed enclave tourism [14,15], but also for more interwoven tourism practices in place [12,[16][17][18]. On a larger scale, different stakeholders shape the discursive field of tourism, who in return shape the possible practices, which is especially true of international organizations within the hegemonic neoliberal project [19][20][21]. In this context, the UNWTO is one of the major discourse shapers in the global tourism system, its statements being relayed through various paths by NGOs, academia, nation states and local administrations in their decisions, actions and policies.…”

“…Other references to key concepts, such as growth, consumer-centric ideas, and health and rights of tourism workers, were also of significant interest for our analytical purposes. On the other side, we did not address the sustainability discourses that were associated with responsible tourism prior to the pandemic, nor the discursive field of sustainability, nor tourism and justice as carried by the transnational institutions already having been identified as now constitutive of the neoliberal market institutions [19,20,26].…”

From Sustainability to the Anthropocene: Reflections on a Pedagogy of Tourism Research for Planetary Attachment

“…It its most practical sense, sustainable tourism is thus about managing resources and governing destinations in a way to ensure the continuation of the industry in light of technical difficulties, not about findings solutions to shift towards a new socio-economic paradigm of planetary preservation (Hall, 2011;Hall et al, 2015b). Concurrently, Lapointe et al (2018) argue that the hegemonic tourism growth discourse has consolidated into a post-political phase of management, where citizens and critics alike do not question the development and propagation of tourism worldwide, but rather focus on achieving consensus over its management and governance. Political critics Slavoj Žižek (1999) and Chantal Mouffe (2005) describe post-politics as a socio-political arrangement that replaces ideological debates and social struggles with techno-managerial solutions.…”