Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
presence at local community events. The mobilities that have shaped
Canmore over the past four decades have also raised challenges for commu-
nity-based action and participation in sustainable development and resource
conservation initiatives such as being initiated by the Biosphere Institute.
The example of Canmore, a mountain community in Canada with a
large proportion of well-educated and well-to-do residents, illustrates a range
of commonalities with community development and tourism issues in
emerging as well as lesser developed countries, for instance: (i) mediating the
effects of mass tourism, or rapid destination growth due to amenity migra-
tion and second home investors - justice issues abound in both cases;
(ii) building capacity to address climate change (and climate justice); and
(iii) conflict and resistance to neoliberal agendas and striving to enable struc-
tural transformation towards more sustainable, alternative tourism forms
that offer greater opportunity for societal, community and environmental
health and well-being. Some of these issues are addressed below, along with
a look at several forms of tourism that are perceived to be conducive to com-
munity development, social well-being and local empowerment.
Tourism and Community Development: Approaches
and Forms
Alternative tourism and the pro-poor agenda
Dependency critics and political economists have long argued that the
logic of capital penetrates and regulates the economy of periphery countries,
creating dependency on external stakeholders in 'core' tourism generating
regions (usually in the industrialized West). Britton (1982a), for instance,
describes how core areas in the Western, developed world (primary visitor
generating regions) control the periphery (receiving countries). The control-
ling and integrating forces in international tourism are primarily the large
multinational 'First World' companies that control airlines and hotel chains
that facilitate and manipulate the movement of large numbers of travelers
(hence 'mass tourism'). Under neoliberal market conditions, national, trans-
national and global economic policies and regulations are set up in ways that
facilitate the profitability and success of these organizations, while the des-
tination countries end up depending on them for visitors, expertise and
financing. The results might include high levels of vulnerability to currency
exchange rates, shifts in airline capacity and route changes, extreme dispari-
ties and inequities in the distribution of costs and benefits of development,
and high leakage of tourist expenditures back to the core generating regions
(see Chapter 10). Early studies, such as Hills and Lundgren's (1977) core-
periphery analysis of Caribbean tourism, showed these impacts of mass tour-
ism, and led to a growing call for alternative approaches to and forms of
Search WWH ::
Custom Search