Political Ecology of Tourism : Community, Power and the Environment

Why has political ecology been assigned so little attention in tourism studies, despite its broad and critical interrogation of environment and politics? As the first full-length treatment of a political ecology of tourism, the collection addresses this lacuna and calls for the further establishment of this emerging interdisciplinary subfield.

Drawing on recent trends in geography, anthropology, and environmental and tourism studies, Political Ecology of Tourism: Communities, Power and the Environment employs a political ecology approach to the analysis of tourism through three interrelated themes: Communities and Power, Conservation and Control, and Development and Conflict. While geographically broad in scope―with chapters that span Central and South America to Africa, and South, Southeast, and East Asia to Europe and Greenland―the collection illustrates how tourism-related environmental challenges are shared across prodigious geographical distances, while also attending to the nuanced ways they materialize in local contexts and therefore demand the historically situated, place-based and multi-scalar approach of political ecology. This collection advances our understanding of the role of political, economic and environmental concerns in tourism practice. It offers readers a political ecology framework from which to address tourism-related issues and themes such as development, identity politics, environmental subjectivities, environmental degradation, land and resources conflict, and indigenous ecologies. Finally, the collection is bookended by a pair of essays from two of the most distinguished scholars working in the subfield: Rosaleen Duffy (foreword) and James Igoe (afterword).

This collection will be valuable reading for scholars and practitioners alike who share a critical interest in the intersection of tourism, politics and the environment

Mary Mostafanezhad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

Roger Norum is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds School of English, where he is a member of the HERA-funded project Arctic Encounters: Contemporary Travel/Writing in the European High North and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network in Environmental Humanities. Trained in social anthropology, his research focuses on sociality, temporality, travel and the environment.

Eric J. Shelton works with environmental NGOs in New Zealand and strives to situate nature-based tourism within environmental philosophy.

Anna Thompson-Carr is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Tourism at the University of Otago, NZ. She has conducted research and published in high quality tourism journals on visitors’ experiences of cultural values for landscapes in New Zealand with a focus on integrating cultural values within interpretation.