Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
systems, whether under conditions of capitalist production or centralised
planning systems, are inherently political insofar as they serve to mobilise
resources and organise people into hierarchical arrangements of power for the
purpose of extracting surpluses from a given population (Lummis, 1991).
Historically, notions of scarcity have been invoked by those at the apex of any
given economic system as a powerful means of legitimising the centralised
control of resource allocation. This applies as much to centralised systems of
planning as it does to the capitalist free market. As demonstrated by Lummis
(1991) and Rowbotham (1998), the free market is nothing of the kind but,
rather, constitutes a clever means of manipulating consumerist desires whilst
simultaneously obfuscating the sources of inequality which arise from the
apparent affluence it creates. Thus, the 'free' market traps us in the illusion of
choice in so far as we see our assimilated values reflected back at us through
a glittering array of consumer items presented to us for our gratification
(cf. Williamson, 1978).
Notions of scarcity are articulated through tourism in many different
ways, as evidenced in Urry's (1995: 133-140) discussion of the socially con-
structed and contested nature of tourism carrying capacity. It is also particu-
larly relevant in light of today's conventional wisdom amongst governments
and international agencies, that competitiveness, innovation and diversifica-
tion are the cornerstones of sustainable tourism (Yunis, 2000). The value
assumptions which underpin such views involve the implicit acceptance of
the prevailing political-economic framework (i.e. the logic of the capitalist
free market) within which tourism operates. Furthermore, they ignore the
fact that such proposed 'solutions' to unsustainable tourism based on, for
example, low volume/high spending so-called 'quality' tourists, may repro-
duce the systemic inequalities which characterised previous forms of 'mass'
tourism development whilst doing little to alleviate pressure on the environ-
ment (see Bianchi, 2004). Such views coalesce with a market-based concep-
tion of scarcity which serves to conceal underlying arrangements of power
whereby different social groups are struggling for control over the ability to
ascribe 'value' to different types of resources.
The approach to the political economy of tourism adopted here can be
summarised as the examination of the systemic sources of power which both
reflect and constitute the competition for resources and the manipulation of
scarcity, in the context of converting people, places and histories into objects
of tourism consumption. The questions which need to be posed can be sum-
marised as follows: what are the systemic sources of power which condition
and reproduce uneven access to the economic, cultural and political means of
production in tourism; how are the relationships between universal mecha-
nisms of change and inequality on the one hand, and historical-geographic
specificity on the other, manifest within these processes, and, to what extent
is it possible to identify alternative structures of tourism development which
challenge the prevailing institutional and economic hegemony of existing
Search WWH ::




Custom Search