Tourism Policy Values in Serbia—From Equity to Competition

ABSTRACT

This paper examines two Serbian strategic tourism documents in order to make explicit their underlying values. The methods used in this paper are corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. First, tourism policy values are derived from the disciplinary literature; these are growth, competitiveness, and development. Second, both of the Serbian tourism strategic documents are scrutinized for evidence of these values. The findings reveal that global neoliberal values underpin contemporary Serbian tourism strategic documents. By engaging with the recent literature on tourism planning, and by considering the once existing values underlying participative tourism planning in Yugoslavia, this paper adds to the emerging theoretical discourse on equitable tourism development. A more just development of tourism in Serbia would necessitate the inclusion of citizens in decision-making processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism planning
• values
• post-socialist country
• Serbia
• Yugoslavia

Acknowledgments

The author would like to express her gratitude to Xavier Matteucci for his insight into this work. Special thanks to Chris Rout for proofreading the manuscript. Sincere thanks also go to the reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 After the disintegration of Yugoslavia, six newly-formed states came into being—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, and Montenegro. Kosovo was an autonomous province of Serbia until 2008, when it unilaterally declared its independence. While the majority of the world’s countries recognize Kosovo as an independent state, a number of countries (some of which are EU members) still don’t recognize Kosovo’s independence. Therefore, whether there are six or seven ex-Yugoslavian states remains a disputed issue (Dolenec, 2013).