Inclusive Tourism Futures

Anu Harju-Myllyaho, Salla Jutila

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781845416867
• eBook ISBN: 9781845416898
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book combines studies of inclusivity in tourism with a future lens and provides timely insights into current research and discussions on social inclusion. The chapters examine a range of inclusivity issues and the different ways that inclusive tourism development can be enacted. The volume presents an opportunity to critically consider the different actors and voices in the field of tourism and how to channel these voices and who has the right to do so. It allows us to use our imaginations to consider a future that can be welcoming of different ways of being, doing and knowing to empower all participants in the planning and development of tourism and hospitality.

Part 1

Actors

1Hosts and Guests in Participatory Development

Emily Höckert, Outi Kugapi and Monika Lüthje

Introduction

During the past decades, the idea of local participation has played an important role in the search for more sustainable, responsible and inclusive ways of developing tourism. The basic idea behind the participatory approach is to guarantee local communities’ active involvement in their own development. In practice, the initiatives for inviting more tourists and enhancing tourism development quite often come from outsiders. Various examples indicate that despite, and even because of, the good intentions of enhancing inclusion and well-being, local communities tend to play the role of the guests in participatory projects hosted by researchers and development practitioners (see Butcher, 2007).

The participatory approach can be located at the core of ‘inclusive tourism’ as it aims to ensure that marginalised groups can take part in consuming, producing and sharing the benefits of tourism activities (Scheyvens & Biddulph, 2017). In Scheyvens and Biddulph’s (2017) view, the idea of inclusion consists of two basic aspects – first, who are included or excluded in tourism and, second, on what terms. These questions have been discussed in the context of inclusive business growth (Hall et al., 2012), accessible tourism (Buhalis & Darcy, 2011; Darcy, 2010), social tourism (Minnaert et al., 2011), labelling processes (de Bernardi et al., 2018), social justice (Aitchison, 2007; Jamal, 2019), social entrepreneurship (Haanpää et al., 2018) and digitalism (Minghetti & Buhalis, 2010). While searching for new ways to enhance inclusive tourism practices, these studies underline the importance of participating in tourism activities based on one’s own conditions, needs and interests (de Bernardi et al., 2018; George et al., 2009; Jamal & Dredge, 2014: 195–197; Müller & Viken, 2017; Schilcher, 2007: 59). In other words, the idea of inclusive and participatory tourism development should also contain the possibility of free choice to not participate; that is, to remain ‘excluded’ from tourism projects.

As a concept, project emphasises agency, plan, objectives, volition and accomplishment (Rantala & Sulkunen, 2006a: 8–9). Participation in projects is organised through collaboration, partnerships and agreements that structure the relationships of various project participants and are based on voluntary and mutual commitment, negotiations and trust (Sulkunen, 2006: 17–18; see also Lundin, 2016; Ren et al., 2018: 181). However, one of the persistent challenges in today’s ‘project society’ (e.g. Lundin, 2016; Sulkunen, 2006), where strategies and financing for participation often come from external actors, is what happens when the support ends and the projects are handed on to local stakeholders (see Zapata et al., 2011). ‘The project’ can also be seen as a neoliberal solution where individuals are expected to develop innovative and entrepreneurial solutions to structural problems (Rantala & Sulkunen, 2006b; Sulkunen, 2006; see also Lundin, 2016). Indeed, critical examinations of community-based projects indicate how the principle of participation does not automatically lead to more equal power relations between different actors (Butcher, 2007; Höckert, 2018; Wearing & Wearing, 2014). It seems that, despite the good intentions of enhancing people’s ownership in their own well-being, the ‘project society’ is in constant need of structural changes and tuning in order to secure partners’ commitment and ownership within participatory projects.

The purpose of this chapter is to approach inclusion by discussing the roles of hosts and guests in participatory tourism projects. Instead of drawing inspiration from the predominant understanding of host–guest relations within hospitality management (see Lashley, 2017), we call attention to the more ‘ancient’ idea of hospitality, where – in its simplest form – hosts have the responsibility to take care of their guests’ well-being for a limited amount of time (O’Gorman, 2010). Moreover, in the context of ‘project society’, we are not focused on host–guest relations that take place in different kinds of physical homes, but approach projects as metaphorical homes where different kinds of moments and relations of hospitality occur (see Germann Molz & Gibson, 2007; Höckert, 2018).

Instead of celebrating all the participants as ‘the hosts’, we draw explicit attention to structural challenges of our project worlds and to the ways in which the host–guest roles keep changing during the project processes. To visualise and demonstrate our approach in practical terms, we wrote this chapter side by side with a development project called Culturally Sensitive Tourism in the Arctic (ARCTISEN). Our aim was to weave together the literature on participatory development and hospitality with our own experiences in preparing this project. In addition to our reflective memory work, the analysis draws on a wide range of documentation from the preparatory phase, such as meeting memos, email correspondence, and reports and documents from the funding authority.

Preparation of the ARCTISEN project was driven by our interest to enable small and medium-size tourism enterprises to visit and learn from each other and to co-create culturally sensitive tourism products (ARCTISEN, 2018). The very first step of our project journey was taken in 2015, when Monika Lüthje proposed the idea of an Indigenous tourism project to the rest of us. From the very first stages, she opened the door for shared hostessing (see also Veijola & Jokinen, 2008) of all the new ideas that began to arrive. We decided to apply for funding from the EU’s Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme (NPA, 2018). During the preparatory phase of the ARCTISEN project, our role was to learn and follow the conditions set by our NPA ‘host’. We acknowledge that our affiliation with the University of Lapland made us look like mature guests with a well-established reputation for being able to ‘follow the rules’ (Germann Molz, 2014; Lundin, 2016). Nevertheless, while being the guest knocking on NPA’s doors, our university team was also taking on the role of the host, who began to welcome tourism entrepreneurs, destination management organisations (DMOs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs), municipalities and other university partners to join the preparation phase of the project. By doing this, we wished to form a new ‘tourism knowledge collective’ (Ren & Jóhannesson 2018: 24): a gathering around culturally sensitive tourism.

The next section guides the reader along the streams of discussions on participatory development within tourism studies. From there, we move to our theoretical take on host–guest relations. The next section describes how we then laid our hopes on the NPA as the host for our transnational project idea. In the final section, we conclude this chapter and suggest that the idea of hosts and guests can be used as a fruitful approach when envisioning and promoting alternative, more inclusive, sensitive and responsible tourism futures.

Participatory Development in Tourism

While the history of ‘participation’ – of being, doing and knowing together – is as old as humanity, it has become both a keyword and a buzzword in the contemporary search for sustainable development (Berkhöfer & Berkhöfer, 2007; Cornwall, 2006; Stiefel & Wolfe, 1994). Originally, the emphasis on active local participation emerged as a response to the numerous tourism impact studies and resident attitude surveys, which indicated that few positive impacts accrued to host communities (Cohen, 1979; Keogh, 1990: 450; Tosun, 2000: 616). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the tourism sector was still marked by little public involvement in tourism planning and it was noticed that public concerns should be incorporated into decision-making processes (de Kadt, 1979; Mathieson & Wall, 1982). Ever since, the idea of local participation has been connected, most of all, to small-scale tourism development that uses cultural and environmental resources in responsible and sustainable ways (Jamal & Getz, 1995; Scheyvens, 2002; Tuulentie & Sarkki, 2009).

Researchers have since been formulating alternative development approaches, such as community-based tourism, which focuses on the well-being of local host communities (see Höckert, 2011; Höckert et al., 2013; Jamal & Dredge, 2014; Saarinen, 2006, 2010; Telfer, 2009; Tuulentie & Sarkki, 2009). The term Indigenous tourism has also been seen as a form of tourism that actively involves Indigenous communities in activities and decision-making and/or acting as an attraction of the area (Hinch & Butler, 1997: 9; Hinch & Butler, 2009: Müller & Viken, 2017; see also Kugapi & de Bernardi, 2017). It has been argued that, for many Indigenous people, tourism is an opportunity to earn extra income, show others part of their culture, disseminate knowledge (Tuulentie, 2006) and gain community control and ownership of tourism. Good examples of previous projects in tourism that have been planned and led by Indigenous and other local communities include the cultural and environmental Sápmi Experience that was created by VisitSápmi in Sweden (see de Bernardi et al., 2018) and the guidelines for responsible and ethically sustainable ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Actors
• Part 2: Methods
• Part 3: Practices
• Index