Degrowth and tourism destinations
Diverse tourism: a poststructural view on tourism destination degrowth transition
Introduction
As I have experienced it. doing research as a critical tourism geographer means being aware of the growth logics of the tourism economy and adapting a critical stance towards such development. When reading about tourism development plans, I have a constant doubtfill stance on then- positive impact. Do local actors actually support this development? Are there individuals and groups whose voices have been left out from the development plans? If realized, how will tourism growth increase well-being in the destination community? Furthermore, any claim made about advancing sustainability or acting responsibly is met with suspicion; what is the sustainability they refer to? Is the aim to sustain growth or the natural environment?
The critical take is of course much needed and increasingly urgent due to the dominant, growth-focused capitalist tourism economies. Fletcher (2011) explains that over the course of history, tourism and capitalism have co-evolved. with the former often serving the needs of the latter. Such structural critiques on tourism have pointed out that rather than local communities and their resources being used for the benefit of the capitalist system, it is necessary to look in more detail at how to better work towards conditions where the transnational tourism economy enables socially just and ecologically sustainable livelihoods (Bianchi, 2009; Fletcher, 2011). Concerns over the impact that increasing international air travel has on global wanning also gives another strong justification for questioning the ideal of economic growth in tourism.
Growing interdisciplinary scholarship of degrowth focuses on studying and enacting cultural and institutional changes within capitalist economies to move away from the growth rationale (D’Alisa, Demaria, & Kallis, 2015). D'Alisa et al. (2015) emphasize that to achieve changes towards societies where economy is not in conflict with social justice or environmental sustainability, it is necessary to seek new economic structures and modes of economic organization. They state “our emphasis here is on different, not only less” (Kallis, Demaria, & D’Alisa, 2015, p. 4). As the degrowth movement has its roots in critical theory and activism, the needed economic transitions refer not only to a decrease in the levels of economic activity but also to social change (Schmid, 2019).
In this chapter, my aim is to explore the possibilities of a degrowth perspective in the study of tourism destination development and change. The chapter is based on an ethnographically oriented case study that I conducted in the sparsely populated but tourism-intensive area of the Finnish North in 2015. Via semi-structur ed in-depth interviews with local tourism actors in the Yllas tourism destination, I gained an understanding of everyday tourism realities of those individuals who produce tourism via then- economic agency. Drawing on this empirical study, I build a bottom-up perspective on socio-economic change in tourism production and degrowth transitions.
In this chapter I refer to degrowth as a project of social change and not only as a project of defining a limit for tourism growth (Fletcher, Murray, Blanco-Romero, & Blazquez-Salom, 2019). It may seem unrealistic to apply such an approach to degrowth within the field of tourism economy that is capitalist and operates with a global reach. How to suddenly create a new tourism system? To seek answers for such questions. I draw on feminist economic geography that has advanced poststructural perspectives to socio-economic change (e.g. Gibson-Graham. 2006.2008; North, 2016; Schmid, 2019). This scholarship shares the ami of moving away from growth-focused economic processes. However, to do so, they see it as necessary to rethink whether there even now actually exists the internally coherent capitalist economy that can be altered only by creating something that is alternative or new in relation to it. This scholarship asks to pay attention to the forms of economic practice that already deviate from the growth rationale. Within the degrowth literature, such grassroots possibilities have been identified as crucial in socio-economic change (e.g. D’Alisa et al., 2015; Fletcher et al., 2019).
My interest now is to examine destination gr owth aims and degrowth transitions by attending to the possibility of economic difference. In this chapter, I suggest that while maintaining the ty'pical critical viewpoint that started this chapter, it is necessary to also allow for seeing the diversity in economic rationales and practices in the tourism economy. In addition, it is crucial to recognize then potential in larger-scale sustainability transformations, such as tourism destination degrowth.
