Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tourism, going beyond the economic and including cultural and social issues (Urry, 2001),
and highlighting how tourism is a powerful way of representing the world, peoples and
places.
Post-development and postcolonialism have been criticised because of their alleged exces-
sive concern for theoretical issues at the expense of the material (Radcliffe and Laurie, 2006).
Both approaches have responded that language and meaning are key in the ways in which
interventions are understood and justifi ed, and that they therefore contribute to a better
understanding of development and its effects, and the reasons why it is so diffi cult to think
beyond it (Escobar, 2000; McEwan, 2009). Others have mentioned that post-development
offers an over-generalised and romanticised view of non-Western communities (Storey,
2000) as homogeneous and always in opposition to the dominant Western institutions (Watts,
2003), and that it overlooks ongoing struggles for access to development in many places
(Lawson, 2007). Finally, it has been acknowledged that post-development needs to move
beyond critique, or in the words of Gibson-Graham, that its 'challenge is to imagine and
practice development differently' (Gibson-Graham, 2005: 6).
Current issues in the geographies of tourism and development
Tourism is crucial for geographers researching issues of development, inequality and sustain-
ability, because it 'constitutes an important point of intersection within geography, and its
capacity to gel critical, integrative and imperative research appears to be increasingly realised'
(Gibson, 2008: 407). In the last three decades the geographies of tourism and development
have changed signifi cantly, by fi rst encouraging the placement of tourism in the current
context of capitalist development, balancing structure and agency to understand it as a trans-
actional process in which global and local processes are reworked and negotiated (Milne and
Ateljev ic, 20 01). Accord ing to Ma ssey (1991: 28 ), places are 'ar t icu lated moment s in net work s
of social relations and understandings . . . which includes a consciousness of its links with the
wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local'. Thus, through the
study of tourism we can recognise the ways in which it contributes to modify the relational
positions of places in economic, social, cultural and environmental networks, which have
developmental consequences (Gibson, 2008).
Second, it has been realised that tourism not only provides jobs and income, but also
produces and reinforces meanings and representations and actively infl uences the construc-
tion of place (Milne and Ateljevic, 2001). Tourism has become key in shaping our views of
the world, places and peoples (Mowforth and Munt, 1998), thus infl uencing our 'geograph-
ical imagination' or the 'way in which we understand the geographical world, and the way in
which we represent it, to ourselves and others' (Massey, 1995: 41). These representations are
partial, biased, contested and constructed through power relations, where some versions are
more infl uential than others. Therefore, by looking at the ways in which tourist destinations
are represented, power asymmetries can be revealed (Scheyvens, 2002).
Third, one of the main contributions of geographers to the study of tourism has been their
focus on issues of poverty (Hall and Page, 2009, also
Chapter 2
of this volume). In the last
decade, the so-called 'poverty consensus' has gained prominence as evidence has shown that
poverty and inequality have increased, and the Millennium Development Goals of the United
Nations have explicitly stressed the need to focus efforts on poverty alleviation (Mowforth
et al.
, 2008). Tourism has been identifi ed as an appropriate means to address it, and the emer-
gence of pro-poor tourism is crucial in refl ecting this emphasis (Goodwin, 2008). Participation
has been identifi ed as a key factor to ensure that benefi ts from tourism reach the poor.
