The Global Tourism System

Governance, Development and Lessons from South Africa

Scarlett Cornelissen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754642503
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351888790
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Focusing on the political economy of the international tourism sector in the era of globalization and its impact in developing contexts, this book employs a case study analysis of South Africa to assess how international tourism as a global system of trade, production, exchange and governance plays out in developing countries. It also examines its benefits and disadvantages for these countries. Scarlett Cornelissen explores the nature and extent of global tourism production, consumption and regulation and how these bear upon developmental prospects, specifically in the South. She also highlights lessons for other developing countries about the limitations and possibilities for greater linkage to the global tourism system. The book is suitable for both scholars and practitioners interested in global tourism, international political economy, development, Africa and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction:
The Global Tourism System

Introduction

This book focuses on the political economy of the global tourism system in the era of globalisation, and its impacts in developing contexts. It uses case study analysis of South Africa, a country that has emerged as an increasingly popular international destination since the end of apartheid, but whose sector had been greatly shaped and often constricted by outside factors, to assess how tourism as a global system of trade, production, exchange and governance play out in developing countries and what its benefits and disadvantages are for them.

It is a truism that tourism has become one of the world’s major economic sectors. The scale of international tourism, the swift pace of growth it has seen over the past two decades and the economic benefits this sector is thought to carry has meant that tourism development has come to occupy the development policy agendas of most governments in the world. Yet it can be a very volatile sector, sensitive to disturbances caused by factors such as political instability, global economic shocks or even negative media portrayals, and as much as a country’s sector can expand briskly, it can also promptly suffer significant setbacks.

This volatility is perhaps best illustrated by two recent, global incidents. The first is the dramatic impact that the September 11^th attacks on the United States in 2001 had wrought on international tourism. Not only did world tourist arrivals decline for the first time in more than a decade, but the tourist sectors of major international destinations in North America, South Asia and the Caribbean contracted by large volumes. Given the nature of the September 11^th attacks the airline industry, one of the main components of the global tourism system, was particularly negatively affected and some of the world’s largest airlines were either forced to close down or to restructure.

Second, at the end of 2004 the South and Southeast Asian regions, whose sectors have already been battered by the stultifying SARS virus, experienced the catastrophic effects of the tsunami disaster. Perhaps most damaging for countries such as Thailand, and to a lesser extent, the Maldives and Seychelles was that the disaster had affected some of their prime international tourist locales. For these countries, where tourism is a vital element of their national economies, rebuilding not only means reconstructing infrastructure, but more importantly, restoring global confidence in them as tourist destinations. As such the effects of the disaster are likely to be particularly prolonged.

In contrast, other tourist areas may experience an expansion in their sectors, as tourists substitute one destination for another. In South Africa, for example, 9/11 brought brief growth benefits, as travellers simply redirected from the Americas. Like many other countries the South African government is placing a high policy premium on extending the country’s sector and using tourism as a pathway to development. Indeed, following the end of apartheid tourism has seen dramatic growth and the government has developed a number of initiatives, policies and projects to fully exploit the country’s emergence as a destination of international significance. Its prospects for successful tourism development are greatly influenced by a range of internal aspects (e.g. the nature of the tourism offer and how it fares against other competitor destinations) and external factors (such as the ‘positive’ consequences of 9/11). The country’s experience in attempting to develop a competitive sector, to use tourism as a means toward development and the obstacles it faces in the context of global conditions and structures is one commonly shared by many developing and developed countries.

Tourism growth has gained a particular momentum with globalisation and is of great economic significance. Yet the two events cited above starkly illustrate how intricate the global tourism system is. First, factors exogenous to the system can have severe and often detrimental impacts and events in one part of the world can shape the tourist sectors of many other countries. Second, the global tourism system is an interwoven compound: it consists of a multiplicity of actors involved in the production and consumption of tourism; it is made up of several different structures of governance, trade, finance, transport and marketing; and it is shaped by numerous forces, agents and factors.

It is an analysis of how these different structures, actors and forces interrelate and how this constrains and/or fosters tourism growth that constitutes the focus of this book. There are three main components to the book. The first examines the political economy of international tourism. It explores the building blocks of the global tourism system, consisting as it does of complex arrangements of production and consumption. The closeness of the producer-consumer interface is one of the most distinctive aspects of tourism, yet it can pose significant challenges for aspects such as production, destination marketing and tourism planning. Globalisation has brought significant changes to both the culture of consumption and the relationship between producers and consumers. It has also reshaped predominant modes of production and affected the nature of producer interaction.

The second component of the book focuses on governance of and within the global tourism system. The different producer spheres and economic sectors that make up tourism have particular means of organisation and self-regulation. Tourism is an elaborate economic activity that as a system of production is formed by series of competitive and collaborative interactions among different producers. Mechanisms such as subcontracting, the provision of trade commissions and marketing cooperation help to order relations. Overarching tourism-specific institutions of regulation also fulfil the function of maintaining stability in what is otherwise a fractious system. Often, however, governance regimes can act as constrictions on tourism growth. This particularly pertains to the global aviation regime that, structured through bilateral agreements among states, can constitute institutional barriers to expansion. In the era of globalisation, furthermore, economic and trade liberalisation and their concomitant institutions of governance can have major tourism implications. Under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), global tourism and its various production components will be liberalised. Developing countries tend to be locked into the global tourism system at unequal points of exchange. Provisions such as the GATS can be more disadvantageous to their tourist sectors.

Following from the above, the third major component of the book is an exploration of how tourism production, consumption and governance relate to development. Using the example of South Africa it investigates how changed global consumption patterns, different forms and relations of production and global institutions of regulation can impact on tourism’s economic and social benefits. Tourism policy-making is often premised on even patterns of global expansion and stable environments. South Africa, like many countries has invested much in establishing a progressively expanding sector that can contribute to national development. Yet, tourism is shaped by many factors affecting how it functions as a global system of trade, transport and finance and dissemination. This book is a comprehensive study of South African tourism and its linkage to the wider international sector. It examines the nature and extent of global tourism production, consumption and regulation and how these bear upon developmental prospects, specifically in the South. It aims to draw out lessons for other developing countries about the limitations and possibilities for greater linkage to the global tourism system.

The International Political Economy of Tourism

International Political Economy as an Approach

At its most rudimentary, International Political Economy may be defined as the study of the intersection between states, markets, and societies, the interaction among actors predominant in each sphere, and the consequences of such interaction (Gilpin, 1987; Stiles and Akaha, 1991). Strange (1988: 18) defines international political economy as that which involves ‘the social, political and economic arrangements affecting the global systems of production, exchange and distribution, and the mix of values reflected therein’.

The study of international political economy has long theoretical antecedents, and stems from the eighteenth century works of Adam Smith and others on the relationship between economic activities and authority, and the role of the nationstate in the market. As it has evolved, three broad theoretical traditions predominate the academic discipline of international political economy. These are liberalism (embodied in the works of Adam Smith, and characterised by its emphasis on the primacy of the market over all other spheres); realism/statism/mercantilism (which holds that economics should be subordinate to, and directed by state interests), and the Marxist, or critical tradition (which, broadly, offers a critique of prevailing economic and political structures) (Gilpin, 1987). The international political economy framework draws attention to the fact that events are the consequences of actions undertaken by a range of actors present at a number of levels, whose (often conflicting) interests intersect to produce certain outcomes.

Global tourism is a highly complex system. It consists of a multitude of actors who interact at crosscutting levels to produce certain outcomes and is built around overlapping structures of trade, finance, production, marketing and consumption. To understand tourism’s economic outcome in a given location requires an understanding of the structure of this system, and of the events, forces and agents that shape it. This means analysing the linkage(s) between the domestic and international sectors, in terms of the prevailing patterns of production, diffusion, consumption and regulation, and the economic and social relations evolving from these. Given the nature of global tourism, which is made up of a disparate number of producing and consuming bodies stemming from locales across international boundaries, an International Political Economy framework is particularly well suited to analyse the international tourism system and its economic outcome in given locations (Clancy, 1999; Yamamoto and Gill, 2002).

The Nature of Tourism

Tourism refers to the movement of people from one geographical location to another for the purpose of engaging in leisure and/or business acts, and the economic transactions that accompany this. It is essentially a service activity, and involves the flow of capital, finance, goods, knowledge and humans (Britton, 1991). Tourism has both a production and a consumption component. As a form of production, tourism is multisectoral and multifaceted, drawing upon the activities of a wide range of actors from a number of economic sectors (Debbage and Daniels, 1998). As an activity of consumption tourism is distinct in that the consumer has to travel some distance to a destination in order to consume the product. This feature of tourism means it is referred to as an invisible sector (Mathieson and Wall, 1982). It also means that tourism is the nexus between systems of production and systems of consumption. The tourist product is varied. It consists of both tangible (e.g. flights, hotel accommodation) and intangible (e.g. customer satisfaction or perception) elements (S. Smith, 1994). Given its ephemeral nature, the tourist product can be viewed as a highly perishable item (Mathieson and Wall, 1982).

The standard and most widely accepted definition of what constitutes tourism is that utilised by the World Tourism Organisation (WTO, Basic References on Tourism Statistics). A tourist is a person who travels to and stays in a place outside his/her usual environment for at least one night and less than one year, and whose primary purpose of travel is not remunerated from within the place visited. Tourism is defined as the set of activities engaged upon by a tourist. Domestic tourism refers to the movement of residents within their national borders, whilst international tourism involves people travelling to another country.

The WTO definition is a demand-side description of tourism, defining the activity from the point of view of the tourist (S. Smith, 1998). In tourism literature there is a sharp division between scholars who promote a demand-side approach to tourism and those who advocate a supply-side approach (e.g. Crick, 1989). According to S. Smith (1989), for example, many researchers commit a methodological error by defining tourism from the perspective of the product and those who consume it, a fallacy, he claims ‘equivalent to defining the health care industry by defining a sick person’. Such an approach, he argues, leads to a disparate picture of what is essentially a collection of production activities. To many others (e.g. Ioannides and Debbage, 1998) a supply-side approach – focused on the producer facets of tourism and the firms and institutions responsible for this – should be adopted.

The process of defining tourism is therefore not without contestation. Part of the reason for this may be the definitional inadequacy of the key concepts related to tourist activities – leisure and leisure time. The conventional treatment of leisure sees it as that state or condition where no work is being carried out, and where there is no (tangible or intangible) product or commodity as outcome. Leisure is seen as the opposite of work or labour, as ‘free time’ with no economic value. Similarly, tourism as a form of leisure activity, is that action engaged in by people in their ‘free time’. The problem posed by such an understanding is that it treats labour, and the value of labour, in a minimal way; it is only true for some parts of some societies some of the time. As noted by Britton (1991) the concept of ‘free time’ (the condition of an absence of work) disregards the disparity in the value accorded to, for example, men and women’s work, and particularly labour in the domestic (household-level) sphere. Furthermore, ‘free time’ is a culturally-determined, context-specific concept – different societies orient themselves differently to time. A similar epistemological problem is the lack of distinction between a tourist and a traveller. As it has evolved, contemporary standard treatments of tourists see them as present-day reincarnations of the pioneering travellers from former times. While in one sense this is valid, particularly when one considers the psychological dimensions involved in the selling of tourist packages in the advent of cultural tourism¹ (see discussions below), in another it fails to distinguish between the very different economic origins and significances of touring and travelling: a business traveller is something different to a business tourist – the latter is set apart by his/her consumption of explicit tourist goods. How one draws a discrepancy between these has a very important impact on how one gathers information in tourism research.

A parallel and equally vigorous debate in tourism studies is on whether tourism constitutes a single industry. Several researchers argue that tourism should not be seen as a monolithic industry, but rather as a collection of industries that share similar functions and produce similar products (e.g. Tremblay, 1998). Leiper (1990), one of the most vehement proponents of this view, contends that tourist activities do not constitute an industry in the conventional sense since no single or standard product is produced. The outcome is rather an array of products; the fact that these are both tangible and intangible leads Leiper to conclude that tourism is in addition only partially industrialised. Specifically, Leiper argues, a large part of those economic sectors or functions involved in tourism can exist independent of any tourist activities, e.g. restaurants or retail stores whose primary market base comprise of households. This industrial duality precludes any logical typification of a single tourism industry (Leiper, 1990). This book’s analysis of global tourism uses the concept of sector, rather than industry.

Historically, scholarly analyses of tourism tended to be centred in the fields of Anthropology and Sociology, where works by authors such as Cohen (1972, 1974, 1979, 1984), MacCannell (1973, 1976), Lanfant (1980), and Urry (1990) provide a rich tradition. It is only over the last three decades that tourism has come to be more seriously treated as a research subject in other social science disciplines, most notably Geography, Politics and Economics (Ioannides and Debbage, 1998), and various sub-branches thereof (e.g. human geography, economic geography, environmental studies, marketing and management studies, development studies).

A broad categorisation may be made of demand-side and supply-side approaches to tourism. A simplified distinction is that the former is occupied with aspects and activities related to the buying and using (i.e. consumption) of tourist goods, while the latter is concerned with the creation (procurement and production) of those goods.

Demand-side studies by definition, are focused on the tourist consumer, and mainly on the behavioural aspects related to travel and tourism. Such studies seek to explain why it is that people (want to) travel, engage in leisure, or recreate, and the choices people make with regard to tourist destinations. These approaches are essentially motivation-based and delineate the psychological and psycho-social factors that cause people to undertake tourist activities – the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors of tourism (Uysal, 1998; Pearce, 1995). Motivational factors for tourism may be classed into personal characteristics (e.g. individuals’ need for self-esteem or social status); changes in the economic capability of persons (i.e. rising disposable incomes); and increased leisure time (Lea, 1988). Supply factors such as easier access to destinations through enhanced and cheaper transport also play a role. Tourism motivation is in addition influenced by tourists’ perception and evaluation of the physical, natural or tourist resources in particular destinations, and people’s perceptions of the social, economic or political conditions in destinations. Specific marketing factors, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: The Global Tourism System
• 2 Globalisation, Tourism and Development
• 3 South Africa’s Tourist Sector: Patterns, Parameters and Paradoxes
• 4 The Dynamics of the Global Tourism Production System
• 5 The Political Economy of Destination Marketing: Producing and Imaging ‘Place’ and ‘People’
• 6 The Global Governance of Tourism
• 7 New Global Niches: Tourism, Sport and Mega-Events
• 8 Conclusion: Tourism Development in the Contemporary Era
• Bibliography
• Index