Degrowing tourism: can grassroots form the norm?
Introduction
Tourism and degrowth are two notions that are being increasingly discussed together in terms of the wider debate on the need for limiting economic production and consumption for the sake of restored and improved well-being of socionatures (Andriotis, 2018; Fletcher, Mas, Romero, & Blazquez-Salom, 2020). Socio-natures in this formulation refer to the intrinsically social characteristics of environmental changes across different scales, which are determined by power and inequality as products of historical-geographical processes (Castree, 2001). These power differentials and inequalities are also the determinants of winners and losers from the rapid growth of global tourism. Lenzen et al. (2018) estimated that the global tourism industry’s carbon footprint is expected to grow at 4% per annum. Yet the global tourism industry, the source of millions of jobs and related contribution to GDP. is itself a highly vulnerable sector to the impacts of climate change (Scott, Hall, & Gbssling, 2019). This chapter approaches this issue by means of a more bottom-up focus that investigates winter tourism, related patterns of consumption and the interaction of these with the ongoing climate crisis. Degrowth is emerging as a popular pathway to the mitigation of the recreational greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global wanning. At the center of attention here is the climate activist and lobbyist groups within Nordic Europe's ski tourism community, and the main focus in this chapter is on the contents and the efficacy of their discourses on climate action. In particular, what and how are these groups communicating about climate change mitigation with what relevance to the idea of degrowth, and can the forms of action of such grassroots movements prove to be mainstream or not?
Degrowth and tourism through a climate change lens
The contemporary' quest for reaching a balanced sustainability (see Chapters 1 and 14, this volume) among its three pillars of economy, nature and society has become even more pronounced by the emergency of the climate crisis, and has led to the emergence of alternative discourses to the dominant economic growth paradigm mainly marked by neoliberalism and economism. The transition to
“green”, "bio-” or “circular" economies, as well as a “steady-state economy” and "degrowth”, have become a significant part of academic, business and political agendas to alleviate the chronic socio-natural problems of the status quo (D’Amato et al., 2017; D’Amato, Droste, Winkler, & Toppinen, 2019; Eaton & Sheng, 2019).
From a mainstream perspective the green economy has been defined as "one that results in unproved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities” (UNEP, 2011, p. 2), the circular economy as "mining goods that are at the end of their service life into resources for others; closing loops in industrial ecosystems and minimizing waste through material reuse, extended product life, repair, re-manufacturing or upgrading”, and the bioeconomy as “where the use of biological resources (plants, animals, microorganisms) plays a leading role and biotechnology has an important impact on economic output” (Eaton & Sheng, 2019, p. 1.15). A steadystate economy is construed as “constant stocks of physical wealth (artifacts) and constant population, each maintained at some chosen, desirable level by a low rate throughput” (Daly, 1974. p. 15), while degrowth is defined as “a process of political and social trans formation that reduces a society’s throughput [‘the energy and resource flows in and out of an economy’] while improving the quality of life” (Kallis et al., 2018, p. 4.2) as well as “a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet” (Research and Degrowth (R & D), 2020). In this context, the degrowth concept is seen by some (Hall, 2009; Kersclmer, 2010; Washington & Twomey, 2016) as a means to achieve (or recover) the steady states of economic, natural and social equilibria.
Both steady-state economy and degrowth deviate from the green, bio- and circular economies that partly fail to reject the growth imperative in then- essences. This is especially so with the concept of the green economy, which has increasingly been adopted or promoted by high-level organizations within the past decade (UNEP, 2011; OECD, 2011), which also has strong links to the notion of the circular economy in the case of the EU (European Commission, 2019). The idea of the green and circular economies have been contested for their relatively weak nonnative justification, especially in terms of environmental sustainability (Sandberg, Klockars, & Wilen, 2019), and even criticized for greenwashing as neoliberal business-as-usual (Turhan & Giindogan, 2017).
Based on the perspectives of some of the leading researchers on sustainability transition, D’Amato et al. (2019, p. 460) have found that the most favored synergic remedies to growth paradigm would be “circular solutions towards economic-environmental decotrpling in a degrowth perspective”, followed by “a mix of circular and gr een economy solutions” and "a green economy perspective, with an emphasis on natural capital and ecosystem services, and critical towards growth”. Greater collaboration between the proponents of circularity and degrowth for a mutually beneficial synthesis was also encouraged by Schroder et al. (2019), drawing on, among others, opportunities for degrowth principles to guide the circular economy’s goal of driving creative industries to replace extractive ones. A number of other researchers (Hobson & Lynch, 2016; Valenzuela & Bohm. 2017; Corvellec, Bohm, Stowell, & Valenzuela, 2020) also maintain critiques against the circular economy concept for its economic growth orientation, technocentrism, rebound effects and over-ambitious waste management proposals. Degrowth, however, is based on sound philosophical underpinnings but is still and, perhaps even meant to be. short of practical tests (Burkhart, Schmelzer. & Treu, 2020) and proposals consistent with its manifesting bottom-up approaches (Kerschner, 2010; Cosme, Santos, & O'Neill, 2017). Instead, it has been cast more as a potential gateway than a pathway for the sustainability transition efforts. The latter contradiction is even more relevant for this chapter as we deal with the engagement of grassroots movements with the degrowth discourse for the decarbonization of tourism.
While the introductory and concluding chapters of this book give hill accounts of the present and anticipated degrowth and tourism debates, here we briefly reintroduce the subject from a climate change perspective to set the framework for understanding the engagement and efficacy of grassroots movements. To our knowledge, the relatively recent literature on tourism and degrowth (see Chapter 1, this volume) has so far not directly studied the issue within an explicit climate change context, attracting the foci of only a handfill of studies (Hall, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015; Hollenhorst, Houge-Mackenzie, & Ostergren. 2014; Gascon, 2019; Menton et al., 2020; Sun, Lin. & Higham. 2020), as well as Prideaux (this volume), who foresees the challenges of degrowth as a potential adaptation means for destinations negatively impacted by climate change. Among the earlier studies, only Gascon (2019) has approached the issue from a demand perspective, which is also the scope of this chapter, criticizing efforts of the World Tourism Organization towards positioning tourism mobilities as a human right, as acknowledged in Article 7 of the Global Code for Ethics in Tourism (UNWTO, 2001), and thereby implicitly setting the stage to passivize radical mitigation and calling for sustainability such as those of the degrowth discourse.
Tourism is one of the largest sectors of the global economy, constituting roughly 10% of the Gross World Product and employment, when its indirect and induced effects are taken into account (WTTC, 2020). In doing so, however, it also makes up at least 5-8% of global emissions (UNEP & UNWTO, 2005; Lenzen et al., 2018). From degrowth and other sustainability transition perspectives, where less working time is advocated both to downscale production and to improve life quality (see also Chapter 4, this volume), the tourism and recreation industries become even more critical areas of analyses as they directly relate to the consequences for increased leisure time, where "man the worker". Homo Faber, would be inevitably faced by the rise of "man the player”. Homo Ludens (Huizinga, 1949), who is more associated with the creative destructions needed for the sustainable transition (Rojek, 2005).
The complexities of the tourism-climate-degrowth relationship extend to a framework (Figure 13.1) that goes beyond the impact-emissions reciprocality and the tourism system’s adaptation and mitigation responses, in addition to the aforementioned lesser-known leisure dimensions of degrowth. By indicating a
Figure 13.1 Au extended framework of tourism system and climate change inter-relationships
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rebound effects context that recognizes “maladaptation” and “malmitigation” consequences as well (Aall, Hall, & Graven, 2016), sustainability transition alternatives can be better exemplified. The tourism system pollutes the climate through emissions, especially in its transit (e.g. fossil fuel consumption of air and car travel) and destination (energy use and loss of sinks for accommodation, shopping, entertainment, food and beverage) spaces. However, what is usually missing in this equation regarding a net forcing effect is the compensation of domestic emissions at the origins, i.e. the carbon footprints of work and alternative backyard leisure and recreation options.
The application of sustainability transitions concepts is most relevant to the mitigation responses in Figure 13.1 but is also highly related to impact-adaptation cycles due to inter- and cross- rebound effects between adaptation and mitigation (Aall et al., 2016). For example, trends such as “transformative tourism” claim increased environmental awareness (Walter, 2016), but fall short of anticipating what happens next with their visitors - do they stop travelling back to the “transformative” destination and even spread the word? What then are the socioeconomic consequences for the destination and even its competitors? How careful are visitors with then- emissions and other environmental footprints when engaged with staycations or other proximity tourism options?
Even without positioning themselves as transforming spaces, destinations' direct mitigation efforts such as greening practices, e.g. switching to renewable energies and recycling, are also precarious, as greener destinations may be more attractive to some customer segments but then increased travel emissions would lead to net increased emissions at the systematic scale - should travel to/from these destinations still be based on fossil fuels. Technological and policy interventions to such travel may either complicate the issue further or not be a viable option. For instance, introducing a carbon tax on air travel may hinder long-haul trips to exotic destinations, among which the least emitting but also the most vulnerable tourism nations exist. Gossling and Higham (2020) argue that air passenger duties may potentially reduce excessive growth rates while increasing lengths of stay, perhaps even contributing to slow tourism. On the technological side, efficiency improvements providing less per capita emissions do not necessarily translate into aggregate reductions in sectors such as tourism, where projected growth rates outscore efficiencies (Hall. 2011), which is just another example of why decoupling ideas with green and circular ambitions may end up as wishful thinking that may never deliver the much-needed absolute and fast decoupling on a global scale (Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Vaden et al.. 2020). Moreover, Hickel (2019) asserts that technocentrism, a major critique of bio-, green and circular economies, around yet-to-be-tested “miraculous” solutions such as Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) may increase the risks of the climate crisis, pushing reliance away from more radical political and behavioral transitions that are much needed in the short window of response to abrupt climate change.
Tire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; 2018, p. 470) acknowledges that strategies to reconcile low-carbon trajectories with sustainable development and ecological sustainability, including those of green growth and degrowth, show low levels of agreement among research. That being said, both the Low Energy Demand (LED), used in the Global Wanning of 1.5°C special report (IPCC. 2018), and SSP1 (van Vuuren et al., 2017) of the next-generation Shared Socio-economic Pathway (SSP) scenario family (Riahi et al., 2017), to be used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, do simulate green economy strategies with reduced energy consumptions but sustained economic growths (Hickel, 2019). Tourism is seen and proposed, at least by leading international bodies such as the UNEP and UNWTO (2012), as one of the critical sectors to drive green growth and lead the way to a green economy-based sustainability transition. However, many experts (Gossling, Scott, & Hall, 2013; Hall. 2013, 2015; Stroebel, 2015) object to this reasoning, especially from a climate change perspective:
The green economy framing sets the tourism industry on a controversial path towards future growth by promoting rules and norms of climate change mitigation that reflect an adjustment of neoliberal capitalism to the environmental crisis that has been criticised more broadly in terms of the green economy. The framing does not question the existing business model that causes environmental harm. Rather, it provides the legitimacy for tourism to grow by presenting tourism as a strategy for poverty alleviation, employment and income generation for communities in developing countries, and by highlighting the potential to reduce the negative impacts of tourism activity. However, if the tourism industry' fails to contribute to development and emissions increase, a direction that the researchers referred to in this paper expect to be likely as a result of growing demand, the impacts on the environment and societies in destinations could be detrimental.
(Stroebel, 2015, p. 2237)
Instead of the green economy-based approach, a more radical transformation such as those guided by degrowth principles may be required (Hall, 2011, 2015: Demiroglu, 2017) towards a steady-state economy with an environmentalist primacy that perceives the economy as a “subsystem of the earth ecosystem” (Daly, 1993. p. 811). At this stage, the engagement of and advocacy by grassroots movements towards degrowth and other sustainability transition alternatives for reasons of mitigation play a potentially central role in understanding the future pathways of decarbonization in tourism. In the remainder of the chapter, we present our initial findings on the climate change mitigation discourses of a grassroots organization that manifests itself at the intersections of environmentalism and winter sports recreation and tourism.
