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(Brown, 1998: 240). Government investment incentives can also, however, be
directed towards the strengthening of a local capitalist class, as occurred in
Cyprus after partition in 1974 when refugee hoteliers from the north were
given incentives to invest in hotels in the south (Ioannides, 1992: 721).
Both the direct and indirect involvement of the state in tourism perform
an important role in the regulation of the conditions of public and private
accumulation of capital. Although it is increasingly rare to find places where
the state exercises almost complete control over productive capital in the tour-
ism sector, particularly since the transition towards market economies in
Eastern Europe (see Hall, 1991), there is clearly still scope for the state to guide
and regulate tourism economic development processes in accordance with
domestic political priorities. Thus, we need to go further than to merely label
particular states as either favourable or antagonistic towards tourism, but
rather, seek to identify how and why different factions within the state respond
and adapt to the market, and, in particular, the investment decisions of TTCs.
During the early 1990s, the municipal government of Calvià on the
Balearic island of Mallorca, which plays host to one of the densest concentra-
tions of tourism development in the Mediterranean, developed a strategy of
strategic local intervention into the tourism economy in order to alleviate
some of the worst excesses of over-construction and speculative, property-
driven tourism development (see Selwyn, 2000). At the same time, however,
the involvement of the conservative-led regional government in numerous
fraudulent practices and high-level corruption related to the construction of
roads and associated tourism infrastructure, a process mirrored across Spanish
resort areas during the 1990s and 2000s, culminated in the resignation, in
1995, of the region's long-standing prime minister on corruption charges
(Fidalgo, 1996). In 2001, a 'left-green' regional government coalition oversaw
the implementation of a levy on all overnight stays, which became popularly
known as the 'eco-tax', the revenues from which were then channelled into
a variety of environmental and cultural heritage projects. The eco-tax was
subsequently revoked in 2003 by a new conservative administration with
stronger leanings towards the private sector, and the eco-tax can be seen both
as a fiscal instrument to mediate the impact of international tourism on the
regional economy as well as a symbol of regional pride and as a means of
reinforcing autonomous control over sovereign Balearic territory in the face of
external 'interference' from both the conservative-led central government and
international tour operators (Morell, 2001: 56). Both this and the current con-
flict surrounding the potential opening up the resort-free beach of Es Trenc in
western Mallorca to tourism development (see Manresa, 2012) illustrate how
developmental outcomes are shaped by a complex and shifting alliance of
forces embracing a range of state, private and non-governmental actors.
In contrast, the failure of state-led development programmes in sub-
Saharan Africa has severely compromised their ability to secure even the
most basic conditions of economic development and facilitate even modest
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