Description
Tourism has increasingly become a ‘hot’ global governance topic, with many scholars, policymakers, and stakeholders around the world weighing in on how to best govern it. By paying attention to multiple forms and relations of power, the papers on this panel offer critical perspectives on mainstream tourism governance. Critical perspectives on tourism governance shift away from the question of, ‘How to “best” govern tourism? (tourism governance) to analysing how tourism itself enacts governing power, or ‘How does tourism govern?’ (touristic governance). Through this reorientation, the scholars on this panel unearth and analyse how tourism is an effect of diverse forms of socio-material power, which, in turn, shapes how tourism enacts governing power with performative and transformative consequences for institutions, places, and people. Offering empirical examples from different temporal/spatial contexts (mainly) in the Global South, the panel focuses on tourism’s underlying dynamics, which encompass structural and productive forms of power, hierarchical and exclusionary relations, and everyday practices that are often obscured in mainstream approaches to governance. The panel demonstrates how mainstream tourism governance often reinforces existing forms of global privilege and marginalisation and why approaches seeking to govern tourism ‘better’ ultimately fail to solve many of the problems they profess to address.
