Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 298

approach to its economic interventions in poor states, switching from the
harsh language of structural adjustment to the softer discourses geared
towards 'poverty alleviation' (see Harrison, 2005; see Chapter 4). By the time
of the publication of the World Bank's flagship 2000/2001 World Development
Report , 'poverty reduction', along with sustainable development, had become
firmly established within official aid and development-related discourse,
including of course the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However,
such programmes belie their underlying neoliberal emphasis on the integra-
tion of subordinate sectors of the population into capitalist markets, rather
than national economic development (Rowden, 2010). Similar contradictions
surround the much-touted 'pro-poor tourism' programmes which, despite
signifying a notable shift towards incorporating the interests of the poor into
tourism development policy, may nonetheless be undermined by an inherent
neoliberal emphasis centred on economic liberalisation and market-led
growth (see Giampiccoli, 2007; Schilcher, 2007; see Chapter 4).
Technocratic models of tourism master planning constituted one compo-
nent amongst a cluster of tourism-related policies, which aimed to promote
a particular kind of tourism rooted in a Western economic rationality. A
particularly striking example of the paternalistic arrogance of Western devel-
opment agencies towards Africa is provided by the 1973 World Bank/UNDP
project to develop tourism in The Gambia (Harrell-Bond & Harrell-Bond,
1979). The plans included the facilitation of expatriate investment and the
provision of expertise which, it was assumed, would involve 'the wholesale
social reorganisation of Gambian society which was deemed necessary for
the tourism industry to flourish' (Harrell-Bond & Harrell-Bond, 1979: 78).
Although such explicitly ethnocentric language and inappropriate approaches
to tourism planning have to a certain extent given way to the language of
'participatory development', 'poverty reduction' and fair trade, albeit in a
rather limited way (see Tosun & Jenkins, 1998), the experience of many des-
tinations, including Eritrea (Burns, 1999a), Zanzibar (Honey, 1999), Jordan
(Hazbun, 2000) and Lombok in Indonesia (Kamsma & Bras, 2000), demon-
strates that much contemporary tourism planning advice is still driven by a
technocratic rationality, albeit articulated through a neoliberal vision of eco-
nomic liberalisation and deregulation. In a different context altogether, the
legacy of a Soviet bureaucratic political culture combined with the aggressive
eastward expansion of neoliberal capitalism, has reinforced the application
of top-down (supra-national) models of tourism spatial planning in the
Baltic region, despite paying lip-service to local and regional perspectives
(Jaakson, 2000).
The historical timing of insertion of many 'developing' countries into the
circuits of tourism trade was a key factor conditioning the 'success' of these
tourism development projects. As Curry (1982) has demonstrated that, in the
case of Tanzania, the twin effects of the oil shocks and declining commodity
prices during the 1970s, combined with a high proportion of investment