Tourism and Responsibility

Perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean

Martin Mowforth, Clive Charlton, Ian Munt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415423649
• eBook ISBN: 9781134097890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Umweltwissenschaft

This book discusses the responsibility, or otherwise, of tourism activities in Latin America and the Caribbean. It considers issues such as the reduction of poverty through tourism and the conflict between increasing volumes of air travel spent in our continuing search for pleasure and the resulting contribution to global warming.

The authors believe that tourism can only be adequately assessed through a consideration of how it fits into the structure of power. It is also argued that tourism cannot be analyzed without a consideration of its impacts on and links with development. This relationship between tourism, responsibility, power and development is explored in chapters covering both the macro and the micro level of responsibility. The authors look at methods of practising tourism responsibly or irresponsibly at the personal, company, national and international levels. The questions and dilemmas of "placing" responsibility in the tourism industry are examined throughout.

Widely illustrating all these themes and issues with examples and case studies from throughout the sub-continent, this book will be of importance to students and academics and to the work of practitioners of development and tourism-related projects run by both governmental and non-governmental aid and development agencies.

1 Introduction

This book is a mixture. We try to pull together various themes relating to tourism and development in the continental context of Latin America and the Caribbean – from this point on referred to as the LAC countries. It is intended partly for those who have already visited or who wish to visit these countries – but it is not a guide book. It is an issues-based book, examining particularly those themes relating to the responsibility and appropriateness of travelling to the LAC countries and the role of tourism in the broader field of development. In this sense, it should also be of interest to a wide range of academics – those in development studies, anthropology, geography, sociology, economics, politics and the recently emerged study of tourism itself. But it is not an academic text. Additionally, it should be of interest to members of the governmental, non-governmental and supranational agencies which proactively plan and promote tourism developments in the LAC countries and elsewhere – but it is not a manual on how to practise or develop tourism.

In fact, we would not wish to promote the idea that there is a ‘correct’ way to tour, to service tourists, or to develop tourism. Yes, tourism can be practised in a relatively responsible, sustainable and ethical way. But the important word here is ‘relatively’, for the notions of responsibility, sustainability and ethics are relative to the values and perspectives of all those who participate in the activity of tourism. And these values and perspectives differ according to the respective roles played by participants. Members of indigenous groups, for example, are unlikely to perceive the behaviour of tourists in the same way as hoteliers or service providers in nonindigenous communities. Different groups of tourists perceive the responsibility of their tourist activities in differing ways. Some will claim that nature tourism is responsible even though some of the areas protected specifically for this activity may exclude local people. Others claim that all-inclusive resorts are responsible because they have minimum social and cultural impact on the local populations. The ‘pure’ nature tourist may scoff at the meanness of the low-budget backpacker, who in turn may scoff at the rich conventional tourist whose money is perhaps more likely to generate employment in the host country. Which of these types, and other types, is the most responsible? We do not offer an answer to this question. Rather, we simply wish to highlight these different perspectives and the fact that these notions are hotly contested.

Rather than declaring the actions and practices of different groups to be responsible, sustainable or ethical, it would probably be wiser to see these notions on a continuum: some activities may be more responsible than others, but nowhere and at no time are the actions of tourists, tourism developers or service providers without impacts. And all such impacts can be both negative and positive, these counterbalancing each other in varying degrees. To claim that a given activity is 100 per cent economically sustainable does not mean that sustainability has been achieved, for the notion of sustainability has many facets: not just economic, but also social, ecological and cultural. These different facets of sustainability are often traded off against each other. We believe, however, that these notions should be seen in their entirety, all elements integrated with each other in complex ways.

Additionally, it is important to state that the book is not just a collection of best case scenarios or good examples. Many of the examples here included can be seen as good in our judgement. But our judgements are made from the standpoint of white, middle-class professionals from a wealthy country. As such, we are members of the proportionately small (but growing) group of the planet’s population who are able to travel relatively freely to most parts of the globe and on whose custom the growing phenomenon of international tourism is pretty much dependent. It is highly unlikely that our judgements and perceptions are shared by many other individuals and groups who experience tourism from different angles. And what is seen as benign by some may well be seen as malign by others. So the book includes a range of examples and discussion of the other side of these notions, namely irresponsibility, unsustainability and unethical behaviour or development.

It is important at the outset that we also give the reader an idea of our understanding of the notion of development, for our analyses of many examples, problems and issues relating to tourism are informed by this understanding. The word ‘development’ is imbued with ideas of progress and it is widely, almost universally, understood as a good thing. It is also imbued with a sense of inevitability. It has been this way since President Truman declared it so in 1949 and designated much of the world as ‘under-developed’ and in need of development. As Esteva (1992)¹ and Escobar (1995)² have it, on that day, 20 January 1949, two billion poor people were discovered and became under-developed. But it seems to us that the question of what form this development should take is rarely asked. Instead, it is widely presumed that it should be in our own image, that image being one of western capitalism. This may or may not be a good and wise form of development – the only game in town as Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The end of history?’³ would have us believe – but it needs to be understood as only one model of development, albeit complex, rather than the only model of development. This implies of course that we should question the general notion of development and not accept it as automatically meaning something that is benign, nor as being inevitable. The current trend in Latin American democracies to register a popular distaste for such neoliberal policy measures as the privatisation of public utilities and cutbacks in public sector funding may not yet represent a fundamental questioning of the notion of development, but it does at least show signs that history may not yet have ended after all.

This idea of questioning the general notion of development does not necessarily mean that we view these issues from the standpoint of the maturing antiglobalisation movement. But it does mean that we accept that such issues are intrinsically political. As Cheryl Shanks puts it, however, in the field of tourism studies:

Tourism pretends to be apolitical, but it encapsulates problems of power and worth on a grand and global scale; it pretends to be passive, yet it is produced by an encounter between host and guest in which anything is possible. When tourists encounter local people, they bring with them the weight of their expectations, their leisure and their power. Locals see this, and respond: they react against it, make a counter offer, or adapt to expectations. This seemingly trivial exchange can have profound economic, environmental, cultural and political effects, not only on individuals but on the global political economy.⁴

Acceptance of the political nature of development means that any analysis of development, and of tourism development, must be informed by an examination of the structure of power and privilege relating to decisions made about that development. And this can be taken as an implicit acknowledgement that these decisions will be made according to the values of those making them.

Put more simply, we see development, and tourism development and developments, as political and value-laden. We therefore try to examine the issues and examples in this book in this light. Who makes the decisions will determine, at least in part, who are the beneficiaries.

Given, then, that general development and tourism development are political in nature, what is the relationship between the two – tourism and development? As Caroline Ashley of the Overseas Development Institute suggests in referring to the effects of the Indian Ocean tsunami, ‘the contribution of tourism to development is never so widely recognised as when tourism collapses’.⁵ So, does tourism bring development? Or does development bring tourism? These questions underlie our examination of many of the examples and issues discussed in this book, and we find at times that we cannot avoid the relevance and importance of the question of whether tourism can ever be sustainable and responsible where the prevailing model of development is unsustainable and irresponsible. Efforts to develop tourism sustainably and responsibly face an uphill struggle in such an environment.

One further general issue associated with the notion of development that requires a little more discussion at the outset is its relationship with poverty and inequality. As awareness of globalisation and economic integration has grown, so has the idea that the beneficiaries of development will be or should be the poor. The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals make it explicit that, essentially, all development roads lead to the need to eliminate poverty. And it has been a recent feature of the field of tourism that relevant government agencies (such as the UK’s Department For International Development, DFID) are now promoting tourism as a means of alleviating poverty and reducing inequality. We therefore also attempt to examine the issues and examples discussed in this book in this context, and where appropriate we ask if tourism is a mechanism for genuine poverty alleviation in the LAC countries. This theme is taken further particularly in Chapter 3.

Our introductory discussion of these very general issues of responsibility, sustainability and development has been necessarily brief. Our bibliography and the appendix of relevant websites include some works which the reader can use to investigate these issues further. We now move on to introduce the modern phenomenon of international tourism.

There are now so many works covering the international tourism industry, all introducing themselves with evidence of the recent and burgeoning nature of international travel, that it hardly seems worth repeating what can be found in so many places. But there are three important reasons for doing so here. First, flows of international visitors specifically to the LAC countries, as opposed to all Third World countries, are not so widely covered in the literature. Second, we wish to place these flows of tourists in the context of the processes of economic globalisation which have provoked counterbalancing flows of economic migrants from the LAC countries. And third, in the LAC countries, as elsewhere, there is an increasing incidence of national tourism associated with a growing professional class within these countries.

Table 1.1 shows the flows of international tourists to Central American, South American and Caribbean countries, separately, from 1985 to 2005, and compares them with global flows of international tourists for the same period. The high rate of growth for Central America reflects the low base on which the figures are calculated and the region’s emergence from a period of military violence during the 1980s and earlier when it was largely shunned by visitors. The higher growth rate of South America over that of the Caribbean reflects the increasing ability and desire of foreign tourists to reach far-flung shores and environments and perhaps to extend their holiday experience beyond the simple hedonistic pleasures of sun, sand and sea, for which the Caribbean is closer to Europe and North America, the two major generating regions of international tourists.

Table 1.1 International tourist arrivals to the Caribbean, Central America and South America

Tourism is a form of migration, normally short-term in duration, temporary and often seasonal. Internationally, the direction of movement is generally from rich countries to poor countries – the top fifteen tourism-spending countries are all deemed high-income countries in the World Bank’s World Development Report,⁶ with the exceptions of China and the Russian Federation. The numbers following this migration pattern are counterbalanced by a migration flow in the mostly opposite direction, namely the flow of economic migrants from poor countries to rich countries. Describing this migration flow as in the ‘opposite’ direction is too simple – the flows of economic migrants from the LAC countries are highly complex. There is no straightforward balance between ‘tourists in’ and ‘locals out’, and their durations of stay are normally very different. But this does not mean that there is no relationship between the two flows. The prevailing free trade model which enriches the rich countries and their populations, allowing so many of them the wealth to travel to other corners of the earth, is the same model that is responsible for impoverishing rural areas of developing countries and for creating poverty-ridden urban slum areas. This leaves many rural workers no option but to migrate and also prompts urban residents to try their luck elsewhere. The European Union’s Executive Commission has explicitly acknowledged the link between poverty, development and migration in a statement issued in June 2006: ‘Managing migration for the benefit of development is a new priority of EU development assistance,’ said the statement announcing a 35 per cent increase in development aid.⁷

There are clearly many factors which have driven both the rise in international tourism and the increasing incidence of emigration of all types from the LAC countries. The two phenomena do not exactly counterbalance each other: tourists in general are short-term migrants; many of the emigrants from the LAC countries, on the other hand, are long-term. Both forms of migration, however, offer sources of income for the LAC countries, in many of which remittances sent home by emigrants form a large portion of the national earnings (as measured by Gross Domestic Product, GDP). Indeed, in some LAC countries, remittances and the tourism industry rival each other as major sources of inward investment, and Giles Tremlett argues that in most Latin American countries the money sent home in tiny individual sums adds up to more than both foreign aid and foreign direct investment put together.⁸

Equally, however, it would be misguided to assume that there is no association, however weak, between the two sets of flows. The growing numbers of visitors to the LAC countries reflect the increasing levels of wealth in the rich world of the north, the so-called First World, or the West, or the developed nations.⁹ On the other hand, the growing flows of emigrants from the LAC countries to the rich countries reflect the increasing levels of poverty and inequality in the LAC countries. In Figure 1.1 we have represented the statistics for the three sub-regions of the LAC countries given in Table 1.1 along with data on international migration from the LAC countries; and it is clear that the growth rates of both are not dissimilar. To deny that the increasing levels of wealth in the rich world are unrelated to the increasing levels of poverty and inequality in the Third World is to bury one’s head in the sand. Of course there is often a geographical distinction between those areas from which emigrants leave and those areas which receive tourists; again, however, equally there are also many and an increasing number of areas which serve as both generators of emi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables, Boxes and Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Global Politics, Power and Play: The Macro Level of Responsibility
• 3. Local Politics, Poverty and Tourism: The Micro Level Of Responsibility
• 4. Tourism and the Environment: Eco By Name, Eco By Nature?
• 5. Indigenous Peoples and Tourism In Latin America and the Caribbean
• 6. Urban Tourism: The Heart of Darkness?
• 7. Sexual Exploitation Through Tourism
• 8. Power and Responsibility In Tourism: Know Your Place
• Appendix: Websites Related to Travel and Tourism
• Bibliography