Polar tourism (research) is not what it used to be: the maturing of a field of study alongside an activity

In his editorial to the last issue of The Polar Journal (volume 5, issue 1), Gary Steel eloquently explored the difficulties we are faced with when attempting to define polar social sciences. At the heart of the social sciences, Steel argues, is the study of human interactions,¹ which give value to the social sciences while, at the same time, making social science inquiry a valuable endeavour in its own right. With respect to the Polar Regions, it is modes, intensities and characteristics of human engagement with the Arctic and the Antarctic, as well as the globe as a whole, that define our foreseeable futures, to some extent at least. Tourism is only one of a wide variety of modes of human engagement with the Polar Regions. It suffers from similar definitional ambiguities as the polar social sciences as a whole; actually, definitional ambiguities may even compound in tourism research, which is still in its teenage years compared to other well-established social-science disciplines such as anthropology, human geography, psychology or the political sciences, just to name a few. In fact, the study of tourism has not yet been recognised as an academic discipline² and floats somewhere in an academic netherworld where serious scholarly approaches to understanding phenomena around human interactions “away from home” meet descriptive accounts of tourism operations and travel writing. This might well be because what we nowadays commonly understand as tourism, i.e. travel for pleasure, does not have a long history. The word “tourist”, describing someone who tours or travels for recreation, culture or pleasure, was included in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary for the first time in 1800.³ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tourism was largely reserved for the upper classes, and in particular the “eldest sons of the wealthy and nobles [sic] businessmen families”⁴ who would travel away from home during what was later referred to as the Grand Tour era.⁵ This situation changed in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution allowed for enhanced mobility and when English entrepreneur Thomas Cook began packaging holidays to distant destinations, thus initiating what would bloom in the mid-twentieth century as mass tourism.⁶ Although pleasure cruising in the Arctic and more specifically Svalbard, can be traced back to the 1870s,⁷ more regular, organised tourism to the polar regions was a relatively recent phenomenon, with annual numbers of tourists to the Antarctic up to the mid-1990s in the low thousands and possibly more in the Arctic, although determining the numbers is a complicated task in the circumpolar north.⁸ Only in the last couple of decades have we seen a rapid increase in tourism to both Polar Regions, which has been matched by an intensification of scholarly focus as well as political debates on issues related to polar tourism.

When researchers began studying tourism in the Polar Regions, they could draw on a reasonably advanced body of knowledge that focused on tourism to other geographical regions. By the 1990s, when polar tourism research was gaining some traction, globally, tourism research had matured from being considered a rather curious topic for inquiry by adventurous sociologists, geographers and anthropologists to a serious study of tourism phenomena. When tourism research was still in its infancy, it “ha[d] sometimes been treated with derision in academic circles, perhaps because of its novelty, perhaps because of its superficial fragmentation, perhaps because it cuts across established disciplines.”⁹ However, by the 1990s, tourism research had pushed through its birthing pains, which had expressed themselves through lengthy discussions around the definition of tourism, tourist and tourist industry¹⁰ and around the best approach to the study of tourism, and was as rapidly diversifying as the tourism industry itself to offer more nuanced approaches to understanding different dimensions and forms of tourism.¹¹ Early arguments for the creation of a distinct discipline for tourism research, which had been opposed by those who saw the positive side of not being confined to the theoretical foundations and frameworks of a discipline was positive,¹² moved to the background, and tourism scholars embraced the promises of multi-, cross- and, more recently, inter- and trans-disciplinarity.

Despite having the opportunity to draw on a reasonably well-established body of research in tourism, polar tourism scholars seemed to be troubled by similar birthing pains to the ones experienced by early researchers of tourism elsewhere and struggled with difficulties around defining polar tourism which, as Steel highlighted, were also faced by polar social scientists in their early engagement with their fields of study.¹³ Defining the extent of the regions to which their research was to be confined represented a first hurdle, and dealing with the roles played by different stakeholders in the Polar Regions was a second. Indigenous peoples and permanent settlements in the Arctic allowed researchers to reflect on host-visitor interactions studied elsewhere in the world and contribute Arctic perspectives to issues experienced by other host communities. However, the Antarctic continent, devoid of indigenous peoples and permanent residents, whose place was taken by scientists, support personnel and other staff manning permanent and semi-permanent research stations, represented a conundrum for scholars searching for clear-cut definitions on who was a tourist and who was not. Furthermore, researchers were confronted with a multitude of actors and geographical differences, not only from a global perspective (despite all that is commonly said, the Arctic and the Antarctic are quite different) but also intra-regionally (tourism being concentrated at specific sites in the Arctic and Antarctic and not evenly distributed across these regions).

Polar tourism and its research: then and now

In its infancy, polar tourism research was initiated in polar-focused research institutes where there were pockets of interest, often spearheaded by individuals with considerable polar travel experience themselves, who could see the academic merit of understanding this growing activity. For example, early research on Antarctic tourism originated from the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge in the UK and centred around the eminent ecologist Bernard Stonehouse and his group in the late 1970s through to the 1990s. At this time, researchers made first tentative forays into studying tourism to the Antarctic where a handful of Stonehouse’s Polar Studies students examined the impact and development of tourism on the Antarctic continent (see, for example, Reich¹⁴ and later Enzenbacher¹⁵).

In the Arctic, the late 1980s saw the publication of the seminal text by Valene Smith¹⁶ on tourism as an agent of cultural change in communities in Northwest Alaska; a theme that was later developed by a conference hosted by Margaret Johnston and Wolfgang Haider at Lakehead University’s Centre for Northern Studies (Ontario, Canada) in 1993, and then again in 1998.¹⁷ Johnston was able to achieve for the Arctic what Stonehouse had achieved in the Antarctic, and as testament to both these individuals, their students have gone onto make significant contributions to the growing body of polar tourism research in more recent times, confirming their significant impact and legacy.

By the mid-1990s, a series of scholarly editions built on these early research endeavours and established polar tourism as an area of legitimate research activity grappling with definitions, outlining geographic boundaries and identifying a body of issues to investigate.¹⁸ For example, Smith, switching her focus to the Antarctic, published a special issue of one of the top tourism journals, the Annals of Tourism Research¹⁹ specifically on Antarctic tourism. The journal had earlier on made significant contributions to the epistemological, ontological and methodological studies around tourism research in general. The issue bought together, for the first time, a series of papers by social scientists, biologists and government planners with an emphasis on how their combined expertise could address the multi-faceted challenge of balancing the needs of the environment, science and Antarctic tourism. Shortly after, Michael Hall and Margaret Johnston (1995) published the first edited book on polar tourism²⁰ representing the first comprehensive overview of tourism across both polar regions, addressing issues such as monitoring environmental tourism impacts, tourism regulation, patterns of tourism, the impact of Arctic tourism on aboriginal peoples, issues related access to the polar regions, and the search for sustainable management regimes. Not surprisingly, other work emerged which contributed to understanding the growing momentum of polar tourism.²¹

Overall, these foundational research efforts were largely descriptive in nature, an observation confirmed by Stewart et al.²² in the first review of polar tourism research in 2005. This review identified four existing and growing clusters of research: tourist demand and behaviour, their effects, the policies and management that surround tourism, and the development issues that tourism presents. The review concluded that, despite emerging research clusters, scholarship appeared to devote little time and effort to collecting and communicating empirical evidence or developing and discussing theoretical underpinnings for polar tourism phenomena and research. At the time of this first review, tourism was emerging as a major commercial activity, and Stewart et al. concluded that there was a need for more empirical research designed in better coordinated and focused manner.²³ The review outlined a research agenda that stimulated the further development and maturing of polar tourism research within the four existing clusters as well as by adding two new complementary research areas: the tourist experience and the implications of global and large-scale change on tourism. In the 10 years since the 2005 review, there has been an explosion in the quantum of polar tourism research, building on traditional research clusters but also extending into new realms such as the implications of global change for tourism (and cruise-ship tourism in particular) and the need to build robust governance structures, again particularly in relation to the phenomenal growth in the polar cruise sector. We suggest that polar tourism research has now emerged from its infancy and is maturing to a point where scholarship is now more likely to be underpinned by empirical research, to be theoretically situated and to connect to a wider disciplinary base than in the past.²⁴ This maturing phase aligns with the growing momentum in the polar social sciences in general, but importantly, it has been ably nurtured and supported by the emergence of the International Polar Tourism Research Network (IPTRN) starting in 2007.

The IPTRN and its conferences

The seed of the idea for a research network to support and develop tourism research across the Polar Regions germinated at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Geographers held at Lakehead University in 2007. A disparate group of polar researchers meet at the conference and reflected on the fact that there was no forum for polar tourism researchers to share concerns, interests and research projects. As a consequence Alain A. Grenier, who initiated the idea, was given a mandate to build the IPTRN with funding support from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Within a year, the new network was born and Grenier hosted the first of the IPTRN’s biennial conferences in Nunavik, Arctic Quebec. At that first gathering, 16 researchers in addition to consultants and government delegates discussed and experienced some of the most pressing issues facing Arctic communities in their endeavour to develop tourism.²⁵ From these humble beginnings, IPTRN has grown in membership, formalised an executive committee and hosted three further conferences in the following polar locations or gateways: Abisko, Sweden in 2010; Nain, Canada in 2012; and Christchurch, New Zealand in 2014. The latter was the first IPTRN conference to be hosted in the southern hemisphere and also the first conference not held in the higher latitudes as such but rather in a city that brands itself as an Antarctic gateway city. Consequently, this fourth IPTRN conference, held 29 August–4 September 2014, was dedicated to the theme “Polar tourism gateways: past, present and future” (see Figure 1). This theme was chosen because Christchurch is one of the five gateway cities to the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic, and with the numbers of tourists to the Polar Regions increasing and tourism operations diversifying, gateway communities have to deal with greater numbers of visitors from different cultures and, necessarily, gateways assume an increasingly important role in the management of polar tourism. Local representatives of the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic community as well as of the Christchurch City Council and a range of businesses could relate to this theme and indirectly or directly contributed to the success of the conference.

Figure 1. The participants in the IPTRN conference in Christchurch (© Emma Stewart, 2014).

In this issue

With the exception of one paper (Holly Deary and Tina Tin’s “Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties’ Engagement in Wilderness Protection at Home and in Antarctica”), all papers in this issue have been presented at the IPTRN conference in Christchurch. All contributions published in this issue, including Deary and Tin’s, nicely converge around the concept of polar gateways in the broad sense – be it as tourism gateways per se or gateways to thinking about polar politics, environmental management, risk assessment or stakeholder engagement.

Michael Hall’s conceptual piece on the notion of polar gateways beautifully sets the tone and pace in this issue by offering a thoughtful, philosophical and provocative examination of the term gateway. Approaching the topic from a human geographical perspective, Hall teases out the meaning of the concepts of gateway ports versus those of hubs and entrepôts. He challenges the gateway terminology cherished by the local governing bodies of the self-proclaimed “Antarctic gateway cities” and argues that these cities technically represent hubs rather than gateways. However, Hall concedes that further research is needed to gain a better understanding of these cities’ positionality in wider polar networks to enable a thorough analysis of their characteristics.

In the way Capetown, Christchurch, Hobart, Punta Arenas and Ushuaia consider themselves as gateways to the Ice, and the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties see themselves as gatekeepers to the Antarctic and its environs. The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Protocol) has been heralded as a key to protecting Antarctica’s intrinsic and wilderness values. However, to what extent are the values that are promoted in the Protocol actually embraced by the Parties in decision-making at the highest level? Holly Deary and Tina Tin’s insightful review of 2800 documents retrieved from the website of the secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty indicates that the answer to that question would be “… only to a very limited extent”. Deary and Tin argue that those few Parties that do engage with the concept of Antarctic wilderness largely view wilderness from an anthropocentric utilitarian perspective and that such a perspective cannot effectively protect wilderness values in the Antarctic.

Antarctic politics and the Antarctic Treaty System are also the focus of Jane Verbitsky’s contribution. Verbitsky explores the Parties’ engagement with tourism matters and offers a discerning assessment and critique of the laissez-faire approach taken by the Parties towards Antarctic tourism regulation and management. As a potential solution, Verbitsky examines the idea of a tax imposed on Antarctic tourism to enable policy makers to generate funding, which could then be used towards research or education related to Antarctic tourism matters.

Sira Engelbertz, Daniela Liggett and Gary Steel examine the political discourse of ship-borne tourism in the Antarctic Treaty area, with particular emphasis on the 2009 Antarctic Treaty Meeting of Experts, to examine and identify values underlying and shaping this discourse. Drawing on Schwartz’s set of basic human values, the authors identify the values driving Antarctic tourism discourse as universalism, security, power and conformity.

Situating their work in a global commons framework, Jason Swanson, Daniela Liggett and Gabriela Roldan, examine port state control in the Antarctic gateway states. The research confirms the need for standard regulations of tourist vessels among gateway states that should include inspection of equipment, engines, crew and hygiene conditions for crew and passengers as well as publically available information about all ship inspections.

Johnny Groneng Aase and Julia Jabour turn to the more technical side of ship-based operations in the Arctic and assess the potential of satellite-based Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) to create a precise profile of the vessels operating in the European High Arctic, both from a temporal and spatial perspective, thus enhancing search and rescue capabilities. Their research shows that, whilst suffering from some shortcomings AIS can improve generally situational awareness in the Arctic and might strengthen the potential of the International Maritime Organization’s International Code for Ships Operating in Polar Waters, which has been approved in November 2014 and is expected to enter into force in January 2017. However, Aase and Jabour also caution that AIS should not be used as a stand-alone system.

With a focus on cruise tourism to three small Inuit communities in Arctic Canada, Emma Stewart, Jackie Dawson and Margaret Johnston apply a systems’ framework to their assessment of the risks and opportunities associated with the development of the cruise tourism sector in this region of Arctic Canada. Stewart et al. highlight that the greater the exposure of a community to cruise tourism, the more nuanced community responses to tourism development will be. They show that communities have a lot to contribute to what should be a dialogue between communities, policy-makers and representatives of the cruise industry itself, with the goal to responsibly address the implications brought along by cruise tourism to such remote Arctic locations.

In their study of the impact of tourism on Svalbard’s cultural heritage sites, specifically in the vicinity of London where visitor numbers have increased dramatically since the 1990s, Alma Thuestad, Hans Tømmervik and Stian Solbø use high-resolution remote sensing images in combination with ground-based surveys to (a) map wear on vegetation caused by recent human activity, and (b) to assess changes in the cultural environment. They conclude that, as a dynamic site, London’s cultural environment is changing, and that tourism has played a key role in the transformation of the site.

Reporting on the experiences of New Zealand teenagers who participated in the 2014 Young Blake Expedition to the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands, Mark Orams evaluates experiences of the adolescents on the programme. Utilising the novel technique of auto-driven photo-elicitation, the findings reveal that experiential learning, uniqueness of the setting and of the experience, sharing with others, adventure and sense of accomplishment all indicate success of the expedition.

In summary, the papers included in this issue build on the legacy of Stonehouse, Johnston and others and highlight the importance of polar tourism research, not only because of the growing significance and prominence of tourism operations in the polar regions but also because of the effects – positive and negative – polar tourism can have on communities, on the environment and on international politics. At the same time, the papers that follow provide evidence of the broadening and maturing of polar tourism studies, and they themselves expand the theoretical and empirical evidence base that will help further advance the study of polar tourism in the future.

Daniela Liggett and Emma J. Stewart

Acknowledgements

This issue would not have come together if it had not been for the IPTRN conference. Our thanks go to the University of Canterbury and Gateway Antarctica for hosting the conference, to Lincoln University for offering considerable support and to our many sponsors. Of course, any conference is only worth as much as the value its participants contribute. We were very fortunate in this respect and thank all contributors for presenting inspiring papers, some of which are showcased in this issue.

Our heartfelt thanks go to the many reviewers whose insight and dedicated comments greatly improved the papers: David Fisher; Kees Bastmeijer; Paul Berkman; Pete Dawson; Suzanne De La Barre; Aant Elzinga; Stephen Espiner; Alain Grenier; Kevin Hilmer-Pegram; Edward Huijbens; Julia Jabour; Margaret Johnston; Machiel Lamers; Michael Lück; Patrick Maher; Victoria Metcalfe; Dieter Müller; Erin Neufeld; Mark Nutall; Jessica O’Reilly; Robert Powell; Rasmus Ole Rasmussen; Juan Francisco Salazar; Rhian Salmon; Frank Sejersen; Michael Shone; Andrew Stuhl; Tina Tin; (in alphabetical order).

We also wish to thank Claire Mossman and her team at Taylor & Francis, who were always available with advice and instant feedback, and were incredibly patient.

Notes

¹ G. Daniel Steel, “Polar, Social, Science: A Reflection on the Characteristics and Benefits of the Polar Social Sciences,” The Polar Journal 5, no. 1 (2015): 1–7.

² John Tribe, “The Indiscipline of Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 24, no. 3 (1997): 638–657.

³ Luis Fernández Fuster, Teoría y técnica del turismo, 2nd ed., Mundo Científica, Serie turismo (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1971).

⁴ Alexandre Panosso Netto, “What is Tourism? Definitions, Theoretical Phases and Principles,” in Philosophical Issues in Tourism, ed. John Tribe, 43–61 (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009), 53.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Erkan Sezgin and Medet Yolal, “Golden Age of Mass Tourism: Its History and Development,” in Visions for Global Tourism Industry – Creating and Sustaining Competitive Strategies, ed. Murat Kasimoglu (Rijeka: InTech Europe, 2012), 74.

⁷ Klaus Barthelmess, “The Commencement of Regular Arctic Cruise Ship Tourism: Wilhelm Bade and the ‘Nordische Hochseefischerei Gesellschaft’ of 1892/1893,” Tourism in Marine Environments 4, no. 2–3 (2007): 113–120.

⁸ Margaret Johnston, “Arctic Tourism Introduction,” in Polar Tourism: Human, Environmental and Governance Dimensions, ed. Patrick Maher, Emma Stewart, and Michael Lück (Elmsford, NY: Cognizant Communication Corporation, 2011).

⁹ Neil Leiper, “The Framework of Tourism: Towards a Definition of Tourism, Tourist, and the Tourist Industry,” Annals of Tourism Research 6, no. 4 (1979): 392.

¹⁰ We hasten to add that no unique definition of tourism was ever agreed upon.

¹¹ Honggen Xiao and Stephen L.J. Smith, “The Making of Tourism Research: Insights from a Social Sciences Journal,” Annals of Tourism Research 33, no. 2 (2006): 490–507.

¹² The lack of a discipline for tourism research was argued to encourage fruitful and creative interdisciplinary approaches to study tourism phenomena which, in turn, might lead to a swifter development of theory than when operating within the confines of one unique discipline. See Leiper, “Towards a Cohesive Curriculum in Tourism: The Case for a Distinct Discipline,” Annals of Tourism Research 8, no. 1 (1981): 73.

¹³ Steel, “Polar, Social, Science: A Reflection on the Characteristics and Benefits of the Polar Social Sciences,” The Polar Journal 5, no. 1 (2015): 1–7.

¹⁴ Rosamunde J. Reich, “The Development of Antarctic tourism,” Polar Record 20, no. 126 (1980): 203–214.

¹⁵ Debra J. Enzenbacher, “Tourists in Antarctica: Numbers and Trends,” Polar Record 28, no. 164 (1992): 17–22.

¹⁶ Valene L. Smith, “Eskimo Tourism: Micro-models and Marginal Men,” Hosts and Guests. The Anthropology of Tourism, 2nd ed., 55–82 (1989).

¹⁷ Margaret E. Johnston and Wolfgang Haider, eds., Communities, Resources and Tourism in the North (Thunder Bay: Lakehead University, Centre for Northern Studies, 1993); Margaret E. Johnston, G.D. Twynam, and Wolfgang Haider, Shaping Tomorrow’s North: The Role of Tourism and Recreation (Thunder Bay : Lakehead University, Centre for Northern Studies, 1998).

¹⁸ Patrick T. Maher and Emma J. Stewart, “Polar Tourism: Research Directions for Current Realities and Future Possibilities,” Tourism in Marine Environments 4, no. 2 (2007): 65–68.

¹⁹ Smith, “A Sustainable Antarctic: Science and Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 21, no. 2 (1994): 221–230.

²⁰ Colin Michael Hall and Margaret E. Johnston, eds., Polar Tourism: Tourism in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions (Elmsford, NY: Wiley, 1995).

²¹ Thomas Bauer, Tourism in the Antarctic: Opportunities, Constraints, and Future Prospects (New York: Haworth Press, 2001); Bernard Stonehouse, “Polar Environments,” in The Encyclopaedia of Ecotourism, ed. David Weaver (Wallingford: CABI, 2001); Pamela B. Davis, “Beyond Guidelines: A Model for Antarctic Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 3 (1999): 516–533; Richard A. Herr, “The Regulation of Antarctic Tourism: A Study in Regime Effectiveness,” In Governing the Antarctic: The Effectiveness and Legitimacy of the Antarctic Treaty System, ed. Olav Schram Stokke and Davor Vidas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Johnston, “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Visitor-Regulation Strategies for Polar Tourism,” Polar Record 34, no. 188 (1998): 25–30; Beau Riffenburgh, “Impacts on the Antarctic Environment: Tourism vs Government Programmes,” Polar Record 34, no. 190 (1998): 193–96; Smith, “Polar Tourism: Tourism in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions,” Annals of Tourism Research 23, no. 2 (1996): 493–95.

²² Emma J. Stewart, Dianne Draper, and Margaret E. Johnston, “A Review of Tourism Research in the Polar Regions,” Arctic (2005): 383–394.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Emma J. Stewart and Daniela Liggett, “Polar Tourism: Status, Trends and Futures,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Polar Regions, ed. Mark Nuttall, Torben Røjle Christensen, and Martin Siegert (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

²⁵ Alain A Grenier and Dieter Müller, eds., Polar Tourism: A Tool for Regional Development (Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2011).