Tourism Change And The Global South

This significant volume is the first to focus on both the changing nature of tourism and the capacity of tourism to effect change, especially in the Global South. Geographically, this changing nature of tourism is based on the transforming relationships between demand, supply and location. While this is nothing new in tourism, recent decades have intensified the changing characteristics of global tourism. From another perspective, tourism represents a change, and nowadays many localities and regions aim to use tourism as a tool for positive change, i.e. development. However, this has turned out to be a challenging task in practice, especially in the Global South context where the relationship between tourism growth and local development has often been controversial. This book looks at a host of critical concepts in one volume, such as growth and development, adaptation and resilience, sustainability and responsibility, governance and planning and heritage and destination management strategies. By understanding the drivers of change, this book sheds new insight into the promise and role of sustainability and responsibility in tourism development. This book will be of great interest to all upper-level students, academics and researchers in the fields of Tourism, Geography and Cultural and Heritage studies.

This book examines and addresses the particular character of urban tourism occurring in the global South. It presents research essays on tourism in urban areas of South Africa, a country which is associated with big 5 nature tourism but where urban areas are also major tourism destinations. The book contextualizes urban tourism in South Africa as part of ‘the other half of urban tourism’, an overlooked but energetic scholarship which is emerging on urban places in the global South. The volume moves to present a collection of original material variously on national perspectives on urban tourism following by a cluster of city level perspectives. The last three contributions turn to the role of tourism in small towns, the bottom rung in the urban settlement system. Issues of concern include gastronomic tourism, VFR travel, airportscapes, climate change, AirBnb and creative tourism. Finally, as COVID-19 is potentially a defining historical moment for urban tourism, the volume incorporates historical research perspectives in order to address the overwhelming ‘present-mindedness’ of mainstream urban tourism writings. The book highlights the challenges and opportunities for tourism development in the environment of the urban global South and is relevant to scholars of both tourism and urban studies as well as researchers in development studies.

This work explores the increasingly popular phenomenon of volunteer tourism in the Global South, paying particular attention to the governmental rationalities and socio-economic conditions that valorise it as a noble and necessary cultural practice. Combining theoretical research with primary data gathered during volunteering programs in Guatemala and Ghana, the author argues that although volunteer tourism may not trigger social change, provide meaningful encounters with difference, or offer professional expertise, as the brochure discourse and the scholarly literature on tourism and hospitality often promises, the formula remains a useful strategy for producing the subjects and social relations neoliberalism requires. Vrasti suggests that the value of volunteer tourism should not to be assessed in terms of the goods and services it delivers to the global poor, but in terms of how well the practice disseminates entrepreneurial styles of feeling and action. Analysing the key effects of volunteer tourism, it is demonstrated that far from being a selfless and history-less rescue act, volunteer tourism is in fact a strategy of power that extends economic rationality, particularly its emphasis on entrepreneurship and competition, to the realm of political subjectivity. Volunteer Tourism in the Global South provides a unique and innovative analysis of the relationship between the political and personal dimensions of volunteer tourism and will be of great interest to scholars and students of international relations, cultural geography, tourism, and development studies.

This book examines and addresses the particular character of urban tourism occurring in the global South. It presents research essays on tourism in urban areas of South Africa, a country which is associated with big 5 nature tourism but where urban areas are also major tourism destinations. The book contextualizes urban tourism in South Africa as part of 'the other half of urban tourism', an overlooked but energetic scholarship which is emerging on urban places in the global South. The volume moves to present a collection of original material variously on national perspectives on urban tourism following by a cluster of city level perspectives. The last three contributions turn to the role of tourism in small towns, the bottom rung in the urban settlement system. Issues of concern include gastronomic tourism, VFR travel, airportscapes, climate change, AirBnb and creative tourism. Finally, as COVID-19 is potentially a defining historical moment for urban tourism, the volume incorporates historical research perspectives in order to address the overwhelming 'present-mindedness' of mainstream urban tourism writings. The book highlights the challenges and opportunities for tourism development in the environment of the urban global South and is relevant to scholars of both tourism and urban studies as well as researchers in development studies.

A burning global issue, the achievement of sustainable tourism, can never ignore the global south or developing regions of the planet where tourism is rapidly growing. The readership of this book will be taken through a fascinating and comprehensive collection of writings on sustainable tourism, which brings together a compilation of profound conceptual and empirical research findings from diverse socio-economic and environmental settings in the developing South. The contributions of expert and new researchers review and interpret ideals and multiple realities concerning the concept of sustainability in the tourism development process. The categorization of the book into three parts – community, environment and management experience – encompasses the different flavours of sustainability in tourism, catering to the tastes of readers with different perspectives. Detailed accounts of the community component of sustainable tourism bring forth fascinating insights relating to its many facets, such as community capacity and participation, community empowerment, community integration, and community perceptions of tourism. The comprehensive nature of the book, and its diversity, provides a holistic picture of sustainable tourism in the global South today.

This book explores the nature of climate change in southern Africa, its impacts on tourism and the resilience, adaptation and governance needs in various tourism operations and environments. Previous studies on climate change and tourism have mainly focused on the Global North and specific forms of tourism such as snow-based winter activities. Drawing on case studies from a wide range of countries including South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, this book fills this lacuna by describing and analysing the climate change and tourism nexus in the southern African context. The book begins by providing an overview of the current and estimated impacts of climate change to the tourism industry in the region, highlighting the deepening socio-economic inequities, and environmental and social injustices. It focuses on the importance of sustainable tourism in tackling these issues and highlights that resilience and robust governance and policy systems are essential for a tourism destination to successfully adapt to change. By synthesising the key lessons learned through this analysis, Climate Change and Tourism in Southern Africa also draws attention to specific adaptation and policy strategies which have value for other regions in the Global South. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, tourism and environmental policy and justice.

There is a growing backlash against extractive and exploitative forms of tourism that have unleashed what some argue as unacceptable levels of change on local communities and environments. Examples include the rise of ‘overtourism’, the environmental impacts of the cruise sector, and collaborative economy platforms that have contributed to concerns over housing affordability and availability. Anti-tourism activism is on the rise, and the need to rethink the economic, political and social organisation of tourism in a global world has never been more apparent. It is increasingly clear that we need to rework the values underpinning tourism and visitor economies and move the focus from its traditional emphasis on profit, jobs and growth towards new models of economic and social exchange. This book gives voice to a growing movement of scholars, activists and business leaders who acknowledge that we need to reinvent relationships between tourism production and consumption, and between labour, capital and resources. In the Global North, this exploration of alternative economic and political relationships in tourism has tended to be located at the margins of discussion. The Global South has much to teach the Global North about alternative economic models, different kinds of exchange, new relationships between labour, capital and resources, and resilience. Drawing from case studies in both the North and the South, this edited collection explores how some are reworking tourism, reshaping the economies of tourism, and in the process, how tourism can deliver social and economic wellbeing in a changing world. Reworking Tourism will be of interest to scholars of tourism and development, as well as tourism and economics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Tourism Planning & Development.

Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the economic, social and political interrelationships between global environmental change and tourism, this book integrates social and physical science perspectives to give an in-depth exploration of this topical issue.