Tourism, Land Grabs and Displacement

The Darker Side of the Feel-Good Industry

Andreas Neef

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367356262
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000381559
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Economics

This book examines the global scope of tourism-related grabbing of land and other natural resources.

Tourism is often presented as a peaceful and benevolent sector that brings people from different cultural backgrounds together and contributes to employment, poverty alleviation, and global sustainable development. This book sheds light on the lesser known and much darker side of tourism as it unfolds in the Global South. While there is no doubt that tourism has been an engine of economic growth for many so-called developing countries, this has often come at the cost of widespread dispossession and displacement of Indigenous and non-indigenous communities. In many countries of the Global South, tourism development is increasingly prioritised by governments, businesses, international financial institutions and donors over the legitimate land and resource rights of local people. This book examines the actors, drivers, mechanisms, discourses and impacts of tourism-related land grabbing and displacement, drawing on more than thirty case studies from Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Southwest Pacific. The book provides solid grounds for an informed debate on how different actors are responsible for the adverse impacts of tourism on land rights infringements, what forms of resistance have been deployed against tourism-related land grabs and displacement, and how those who have violated local land and resource rights can be held accountable.

Tourism, Land Grabs and Displacement will be essential reading for students and scholars of land and resource grabbing, tourism studies, development studies and sustainable development more broadly, as well as policymakers and practitioners working in those fields.

1 Introduction

Tourism in the Global Land Grab Debate

Purpose of the book

Tourism has arguably become one of the most important economic sectors globally and has been particularly hard hit by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic which has wiped out millions of jobs in the tourism and hospitality industry around the globe. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), the tourism sector in 2019 accounted for 10.3 per cent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and one in ten jobs worldwide (WTTC, 2020). The World Tourism Organization (UNTWO) reported that 393 million more people travelled internationally for tourism between 2008 and 2017 (UNWTO, 2018). In 2019, international tourist arrivals reached the mark of 1.5 billion (UNWTO, 2020).

Tourism is often depicted as an activity that provides enormous benefits to host countries and local communities in the form of employment, foreign exchange, preservation of natural and cultural heritage, and intercultural exchange. The World Tourism Organization claims that tourism has the potential to contribute directly or indirectly to all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agreed upon by United Nations members states in 2015 (UNWTO, 2018). Tourism has been specifically included as targets in SDG 8 “Decent Work and Economic Growth”, SDG 12 “Responsible Production and Consumption”, and SDG 14 “Life Below Water: Sustainable Use of Oceans and Marine Resources” (UNWTO, 2015). The tourism sector has even been labelled as the world’s ‘peace industry’ (D’Amore, 2009; WTTC, 2016), hence it also lays claim to addressing SDG 16 “Peace, Security and Strong Institutions”.

Recently, the Chengdu Declaration on Tourism and the Sustainable Development Goals made the bold statement that

tourism is a vital instrument for the achievement of the 17 SDGs and beyond as it can stimulate inclusive economic growth, create jobs, attract investment, fight poverty, enhance the livelihood of local communities, promote the empowerment of women and youth, protect cultural heritage, preserve terrestrial and marine ecosystems and biodiversity, support the fight against climate change, and ultimately contribute to the necessary transition of societies towards greater sustainability.

(UNWTO, 2018, p. 37)

This glamorous representation of tourism omits the fact that the industry has also played a major role in the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous communities, ethnic minorities and the urban poor, entrenched resource conflicts, ecological destruction, and socio-economic inequality in many host countries, particularly in the so-called ‘developing world’, hereafter referred to as the Global South (e.g. Gurtner, 2016; Farmaki, 2017; Neef and Grayman, 2018). Contemporary tourism practices have been traced back to colonialism and imperialism, while tourism’s controversial entanglements with class, gender, race, and even war and militarism have also been highlighted (Pritchard et al., 2007; Weaver, 2011; Kahrl, 2012; Gonzalez, 2013; Lisle, 2016).

This book examines the global scope of tourism-related grabbing of land and other natural resources and its diverse expressions and mechanisms, for instance, by enclosing territories, displacing communities and destroying livelihood opportunities. It tries to explain why tourism has often remained ‘under the radar’ in the global land grab debate and will argue that it is time to consider tourism as an extractive industry and to acknowledge that tourism practices can adversely affect the rights of legitimate owners and users of land and resources in a variety of ways. It aims to expose the most important drivers, actors, mechanisms and impacts of tourism-related land and resources grabbing. The book does not claim that tourism-related land grabs have been non-existent in countries of the so-called ‘Global North’. In his fascinating book The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South, Andrew W. Kahrl (2012) provides a rich archival portrait of the racialised struggles over black-owned beaches and coastal resort ownership and how these transformed property relations, communities and ecosystems along the southern seaboard of the United States. Yet the major focus of the studies presented in this book is the tourism sector in the ‘Global South’, where most of the contemporary empirical studies on tourism-related land and resource grabbing have been conducted and where local communities – both Indigenous and non-indigenous – have proven to be particularly vulnerable to infringements on their customary and/or legally acknowledged land, resource and housing rights.

The objective of this book is to raise awareness among experts and practitioners in the field of tourism and land rights, including Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), international Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), political decision makers, national tourism services, and tourism businesses along the supply chain (from international travel advisors, national tourism offices and local travel agencies to tour operators and hoteliers). The publication shall provide solid grounds for an informed debate on how different actors are responsible for the adverse impacts of tourism on land rights infringements, how they can proactively avoid land grabs and displacements and how those who have violated local land and resource rights can be held accountable. The book also examines some of the existing international human rights frameworks as well as voluntary guidelines and corporate codes of conduct.

The following section will discuss tourism-related land grabs in the context of the global rush for land and natural resources. Then, gaps in the study of land grabbing and displacement in the wider ‘tourism and development’ and ‘critical tourism studies’ literature will be examined, followed by an exploration of the global scope and local contexts of tourism-related land grabs and displacement. The chapter will also explain the research design, discuss the case selection and provide the analytical framework. The final section will give an overview of the book’s structure.

Tourism-related land and resource grabbing within the global land grab debate

Land and resource grabbing is not a recent phenomenon, but has re-emerged as an international issue of concern following the 2007/08 financial crisis which – in conjunction with a number of other crises, e.g. around food, fuel and climate – triggered a new global rush for land and other natural resources (Borras and Franco, 2010; Kugelman and Levenstein, 2011; Hall, Hirsch and Li, 2011; Pearce, 2012; Neef, 2014). The international limelight – from media, civil society and academia – has focused on large-scale transnational land acquisitions and leases for (1) agro-industrial plantations for food, feed and biofuels, (2) logging, mining and unconventional extraction of oil and gas (e.g. fracking), and (3) various forms of green grabbing, e.g. appropriation of forest areas that could be used to earn carbon credits under international climate mitigation regimes. While in many circles, land grabs are defined as large-scale land acquisitions and leases and often have a transnational dimension, the 2011 Tirana Declaration (see Box 1.1) adopted a broader perspective, denouncing all forms of land grabbing, whether international or national and whether perpetrated at the local level (e.g., by powerful local elites, within communities or among family members) or in the form of large-scale land deals (e.g., by multinational corporations, international hotel chains or state-owned enterprises) (International Land Coalition, 2011).

Box 1.1 Definition of land grabbing in the Tirana Declaration (2011)

Acquisitions or concessions that are one or more of the following:

1. in violation of human rights, particularly the equal rights of women;
2. not based on free, prior and informed consent of the affected land-users;
3. not based on a thorough assessment, or are in disregard of social, economic and environmental impacts, including the way they are gendered;
4. not based on transparent contracts that specify clear and binding commitments about activities, employment and benefits sharing; and
5. not based on effective democratic planning, independent oversight and meaningful participation.

Source: International Land Coalition, 2011

Tourism has been conspicuously absent from the global land grab debate, for a variety of reasons: first, in contrast to the agricultural, forest and mining sectors, the tourism sector tends to be regarded as a non-extractive industry with negligible adverse impacts on people and environments. Second, tourism businesses are often assumed to be smaller in scale than agro-industrial plantations or large mining operations and therefore regarded less as a threat to the land rights of local communities. Third, tourism development has been promoted by governments, donors, development practitioners, tourism scholars and even many NGOs as a pro-poor strategy, hence critical reporting on tourism-related land grabs and displacement is not encouraged and sometimes actively impeded. Fourth, international watchdogs (e.g. the Land Matrix, an independent monitoring initiative for global land deals) have often focused on the transnational dimension of land and resource grabbing, while the myriad domestic investors in tourism businesses that routinely infringe on the land rights of local communities receive less attention. Finally, many corporate land deals and state-led land grabs are attributed to other sectors, such as infrastructure (airports, roads, railways, etc.) or conservation (private wildlife conservancies, national parks, etc.), although the major driver behind the land grab may in fact be the tourism sector or at least expectations by governments and businesses that visitor numbers will rise as a result of the infrastructure or conservation project (cf. Chapters 7 and 9).

For the purpose of this book, the answer to the question of whether a tourism-related land transfer is in fact a land grab is not simply determined by its size or by the degree of legality under existing national laws or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Tourism in the Global Land Grab Debate
• 2. Tourism-related land grabs: Actors, drivers and discourses
• 3. State-led tourism development, tourism zoning and customary land rights
• 4. Corporate resort development, residential tourism and resource grabbing
• 5. Tourism expansion, land grabbing and resistance in post-disaster contexts
• 6. Tourism, dispossession and erasure in conflict zones and post-conflict contexts
• 7. Wildlife tourism, fortress conservation and green grabbing
• 8. Cultural heritage tourism: Beautification, gentrification, eviction
• 9. The displacement effects of sports mega-events and large-scale tourism infrastructure development
• 10. Tourism-related land grabs: Mechanisms, practices, impacts and resistance
• 11. Instruments and guidelines for land governance and protection from dispossession and displacement: Potential applications in the field of tourism
• 12. Conclusion and outlook
• Index