The end of tourism? A Gibson-Graham inspired reflection on the tourism economy

Tourism continues to grow, with international arrivals now over one billion annually (UNWTO, 2012). Cities, towns, rural and peripheral communities all experience tourism to a greater or lesser extent. The tourism economy is important to many communities but remains a contested realm. Tourism development is not a unilinear process and the complex interactions between stakeholders require careful unpacking. In this article, I draw on feminist economic geographies and evolutionary economic geographies in order to open discursive space for rethinking tourism development. The renowned work of J.K. Gibson-Graham (feminist economic geographies) offers an alternate perspective through which tourism development may be explored. I present a brief reflection on their work to encourage further discussion of community economic development research within studies on the economic geography of tourism. Some epistemological reflection is always needed in order to keep tourism research meaningful to the communities whose space is occupied by it. To better plan for tourism development a more holistic, inclusive understanding of stakeholder agency and stakeholder dissonance is required even if this leads us to ‘the end of tourism’.

In this short reflection I discuss the main topics simplistically (admittedly!) and ask the reader to bear with me as this article is not intended as a review piece but rather as a preview of where I believe research on the tourism economy is most likely to gravitate towards in the years ahead. Here, I simply make the connections from the key works on the political economy of tourism (Mosedale, 2010, 2012) and the economic geography of tourism (Brouder, Anton Clavé, Gill, & Ioannides, 2017; Debbage & Ioannides, 2004) to Gibson-Graham’s thesis on the epistemology of capitalism.

In their influential book The end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy, Gibson-Graham set out a clear critique of the traditional Marxian view of capitalism: it is a behemoth, expansive and self-reproducing, and capable of conferring identity and meaning on all it consumes (Gibson-Graham, 1997); the critique being that its image as an invincible force has limited Marxian attempts to overcome it. Their book deconstructs the epistemology of traditional political economy thought in order to liberate spaces of economic difference and allow them to flourish. While some tourism scholars have made inroads by listening to the previously unheard voices in tourism development in order to critique the power relations at play (Reed, 1997), it is also true that the dominant discourse in tourism development has been one in which the inevitability of both tourism and capitalism is assured, for better or worse!

The burgeoning tourism opportunities of recent decades have led to tourism becoming a near ubiquitous element of regional development discourse in a great many places. Government planning documents speak of bed nights and increased tax receipts and tourism promotion documents are near carbon copies of each other while each extols the uniqueness of its own particular region! Much of this has taken place in a ‘boosterist’ discourse focussing on the joys of growth rather than the pangs of growing (Marcouiller, 2007) and many tourism entrepreneurs who have fallen outside the boosterist line of thinking have found themselves ostracised from decision-making processes, alienated from local networks, and often overlooked by tourism researchers who focus on the centrally-networked stakeholders. This has created a challenge for communities, planners, and researchers, many of whom have found their voice in promoting competing development discourses (Saarinen, 2004) and, ultimately, by developing alternative tourism paths (Brouder & Fullerton, 2015).

I will not belabour (at risk of overdrawing) the parallel between pervasive capitalism and growth-centric tourism but suffice it to say that tourism research today is replete with examples in the spirit of Gibson-Graham (e.g. community-based tourism, etc.) while less research has attempted to bridge the gap between traditional economic approaches to tourism studies and more epistemologically-peripheral approaches to tourism economics (Brouder, 2014a, 2014b; Ioannides, 2006; Mosedale, 2012). While Gibson-Graham’s concern that ‘economic evolution has become a story of the progressive emergence of ever more efficient, more competitive, and therefore dominant forms of capitalist enterprise, technology, and economic organization’ (Gibson-Graham, 1997, p. 115) was accurate at the time of writing, it is not representative of where economic geography is today (Barnes & Sheppard, 2010). Even though evolutionary economic geography, for example, is still burdened by its neo-Schumpeterian (high-growth sector focus) heritage, this has been challenged conceptually (cf. Essletzbichler, 2012; MacKinnon, Cumbers, Pike, Birch, & McMaster, 2009) and even empirically in tourism (Brouder & Eriksson, 2013a, Larsson & Lindström, 2014; Randelli, Romei, & Tortora, 2014). Alternative (tourism and non-tourism) development paths brought forth through community dissonance can be a creative, positive force for community development and need not be subsumed by a boosterist doctrine of economic development in places experiencing increasing tourism opportunities. Basically, there are economic movements that may go unnoticed because of their subtlety or difficulty in measuring them or because they are not growing rapidly. However, there is limited integrated conceptualisation of this in tourism economic studies while case studies of successful dissonance abound. Feminist economic geographies could open this space and therefore lead to new avenues of research of what ‘had until now been relatively “invisible” because the concepts and discourses that could make them ‘visible’ have themselves been marginalised and suppressed’ (Gibson-Graham, 1997, p. xi). The challenge which remains is a question of pluralism—how will these new avenues fit with community-based cases and conceptual studies of tourism evolution (Brouder & Eriksson, 2013b; Sanz-Ibáñez & Anton Clavéé, 2014)?

Gibson-Graham asked us to rethink capitalism to achieve its ‘death by a thousand cuts’ (Gibson-Graham, 1997) and we must ask ourselves, is this what we want for tourism too? I will not conclude by answering that question but by simply noting that a fresh conceptual approach combining (as well as contesting) feminist economic geographies and evolutionary economic geographies will further open the space for alternative perspectives on tourism development.

Patrick BrouderVancouver Island University Ringgold Standard Institution,
Nanaimo, British Columbia V9R 5S5, Canada University of Johannesburg Ringgold Standard Institution,
Auckland Park, Gauteng 2006, South Africa

Acknowledgement

This reflection is based on a conference presentation (with Suzanne de la Barre) at the Canadian Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada (June, 2015) and a number of research discussions with Suzanne de la Barre and Kajsa G. Åberg.