Governance, governments and tourism: selling the

9 Governance, governments and tourism: selling the

Third World

The central governments of nation states together with the global multilateral institu- tions are the last of the key players in this analysis of tourism. It is governments that have a pivotal role and possess the potential power to control, plan and direct the growth and development of tourism. And it is largely through governments that tourism-related international investments and loans and overseas aid is agreed and channelled. As such, it is widely agreed that for tourism to assist in development, a favourable national policy environment is required.

It has already been argued that tourism has come to represent a considerable attrac- tion to many Third World governments. It has been widely promoted both within the Third World and by First World ‘experts’ as a means of economic diversification and an important mechanism in producing foreign exchange. There can be little surprise that in Third World countries characterised by indebtedness and by primary industries (such as agriculture and mining) adversely affected by world market prices, tourism has come to represent something of a panacea.

In this chapter we take global governance as a further way of exploring the politics of Third World tourism development. By governance, we mean the web of institutions and agencies that are central players in the political environment, and the focus of our discussion is on national governments, bilateral development agencies and the suprana- tional institutions (such as the World Bank, IMF and United Nations). As already argued, the consideration of politics has been a poor partner in tourism analysis. The assess- ment of government activity has tended to focus on strategies, policies and programmes of national-level planning. While such analysis is an essential part of assessing the approaches of Third World governments to tourism, it tends to minimise broader consid- eration of the inherently political nature of tourism development. In other words, the pressures that governments face from external influences such as lending policies, First World foreign policy or the activities of international NGOs tend to be bypassed; simi- larly internal forces may also be overlooked. In short, the politics of tourism is another way of exploring unequal and uneven development.

In the first half of this chapter, politics is established as a critical factor in Third World tourism analysis. Most importantly, the need to acknowledge that tourism is not a neutral factor that can be assessed as just another government economic activity is established. Tourism is used for a variety of political purposes and there is a wide range of external influences. The structural adjusment policies of supranational institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, for instance, are considered along with the policies promoted by the World Trade Organisation (WTO/OMC), World Tourism Organisation (WTO/

OMT) 1 and the World Travel and Tourism Council. This provides the opportunity to reflect on the political globalisation outlined in Chapter 2 and in particular to consider the nature of sustainability promoted by such institutions.

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The second half of the chapter uses a number of case studies to illustrate the devel- opment of new forms of tourism and the ways in which these are intimately related to sustainability. In particular, we analyse sustainability and sustainable tourism as part of

a political discourse. Throughout this chapter, the ways in which politics is reflected through the power jigsaw (Figure 3.1) are considered.

The politics of tourism

We are constantly reminded by the media of the hazards of travel in the Third World and by implication the critical nature of the politics of tourism. At its most dramatic are the newsworthy events, the killing or kidnapping of western tourists often by political

13111 factions eager to further their causes. For these factions, tourism becomes a means to an end: access to the system of global communication. To First World populations, such events provide a succession of countries – Algeria, Cambodia, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, India, Morocco, Peru – which, we are told, are plagued by fundamentalist groupings and where terrorism is rife. The most dramatic of these events was the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the USA. This event clearly had an immediate impact on the perception of travel security of First World tourists. The international airline and hotel industries were hit hard with the bankruptcies of airline companies of significant size (Sabena and Swissair) and hotels all over the world reporting dramatic falls in visitors and revenue in September, October and November 2001 over the same period a year before. Lay-offs of workers involved in the tourism industry became commonplace in these same months.

Although this was an incomparable event, evidence from another traumatic event suggests that the effects on international tourism may not be long-lasting. In November 1997, 58 foreign tourists were killed by terrorists at the Temple of Hatshapsut at Luxor in Egypt. Tourism to this part of Egypt, and to most of the rest of the country, dried up overnight. The livelihoods of a majority of the population of the town of Luxor came to an abrupt end. The effect was also generalised to some extent to other countries in the Middle East. In 1998, international tourist arrivals to Egypt fell by 14 per cent, and tourism receipts by 45 per cent. As Figure 9.1 shows, however, by 1999 international tourist arrivals were back to a level that might have been expected had the yearly rate of increase up to 1997 continued without the terrorist interruption. It is by no means certain that international tourism after September 11, 2001 will recover as rapidly and as thoroughly as it did in Egypt after the 1997 Luxor killings. But ten months after the attack on the USA, signs of recovery in international flight bookings were already apparent and it seemed appropriate to conclude that perceptions of danger can change very quickly. Then in October 2002, the bombing in Bali occurred and once again it became easier to see the short-term effects of the politics of tourism than to analyse the long-term impacts of such events.

Western government presentations of supposedly dangerous countries have been one of the principal ways in which our geographical imaginations are filled out, and show how tourists and the tourism industry decide where, and where not, to visit and invest; for example, in Chapters 3 and 5 it was suggested that ‘dangerous’ regions may actu- ally act as a bonus for some adventurous ‘new tourists’.

As Richter (1994) demonstrates, the USA has dozens of countries for which DON’T GO warnings are provided, of which over 80 per cent are in the Third World. But such warnings, Richter continues, appear to be based as much on ideological reasons as on potential security risks to US tourists. Countries to which the USA is more kindly

11111 disposed, such as Israel, Brazil, Mexico and Egypt, appear to require much higher levels

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US$ millions

als ('000s) 2.8 iv 3 arr

1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 tourist arrivals (overnight visitors)

international tourism receipts (US$) Figure 9.1 Tourist arrivals and receipts, Egypt 1993–9

Source: Hotel Benchmark Team website

of danger to tourists before travel advisories are made against them. For example, up to 1994, although tourists had been signalled as potential targets for attack by Islamic groups in Egypt, this large-scale receiver of US foreign aid had not been mentioned in State Department advisories (Richter, 1994). Similarly, despite the seeds of a civil war in southern Mexico, this country too has escaped travel advisories: a reflection, some would argue, of Mexico’s ‘integration’ into NAFTA.

At the other extreme, countries to which the USA considers itself ideologically opposed, such as Cuba and North Korea, remain off-limits to US tourists. The notion that tourism is politics is forcefully expressed by Conrad Hilton (of Hilton Hotels), who is reported as saying ‘each of our hotels is a little America’ and ‘we are doing our bit to spread world peace, and to fight socialism’ (quoted in Crick, 1989: 325). Conversely, tourism is used by some Third World governments to gloss over glaring social inequal- ities and in some cases, as discussed later in this chapter, the systematic abuse of human rights.

Of course, for many Third World countries, political stability is one of the principal keys to securing a steady stream of First World tourists. The case of The Gambia shows how profoundly political instability, or just the First World’s judgement of such in- stability, can affect a country’s tourism fortunes. The Gambia experienced a period of economic restructuring with two major IMF-instructed economic reform programmes (1985 Economic Reform Programme and the 1990 Programme for Sustained Develop- ment) which attempted to diversify the economy. As Thompson et al. report, ‘Both programmes emphasise the important role played by tourism in the development process’ (1995: 573). Tourism made a substantial contribution to the Gambian economy, estim- ated to be 12 per cent of GDP by the end of the 1980s and became the principal source of foreign exchange.

In 1994, Captain Yahyah Jammeh seized power in a coup d’état and established the Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council (AFPRC). A failed counter-coup in November 1994 resulted in the British Foreign Office issuing travel advice not to visit The Gambia. As a result of this advice, air charter arrivals (December to March, the peak of high season) dropped from 45,733 in 1993/4 to 8,363 in 1994/5. There was an estimated

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60 per cent reduction in the contribution of restaurants and hotels to the GDP and an estimated direct job loss of around 10,000. The indirect or knock-on effects are esti- mated at least double this impact. Overall, tourism contracted by 60 per cent and the economy shrank by 6.2 per cent. The Gambian tourism industry all but collapsed (Evans et al., 1994).

Despite the lifting of the formal travel advice for the 1995/6 season, the Economist Intelligence Unit identified what appeared to be further pressure applied by the British Foreign Office: ‘the UK appears determined to maintain pressure for an early return to full democracy and civil freedoms, and this position is likely to influence other trading and aid partners’ (Economist Intelligence Unit, 1995: 17). ‘Tourism, accounting for around 12 per cent of GDP, has yet to pick up after the most recent season (November 1994–May 1995), ruined by European governments’ advice to their nationals to stay

13111 away’ (Economist Intelligence Unit, 1995). Teye (1986, 1988) has argued that the perception of political instability arising from the liberation wars and frequency of coups d’état after decolonisation in sub-Saharan Africa has seriously stunted tourism development in some states. The perception of polit- ical instability is not the only likely deterrent to new tourists. After Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador in October 1998, the tourist money on which many Central Americans depended dried up. In Honduras the effects were so dramatic that in spring 1989 the Honduran Institute of Tourism, in concert with a number of US tour operators and tourism service providers on the country’s Caribbean coast, promoted

a type of ‘disaster tourism’, attempting to attract wealthy North Americans to witness the devastation caused by the natural disaster and to assist in the recovery programme. Clearly, then, it is not only the actual occurrence of political and civil instability that is of critical importance, but rather the way that it is perceived, constructed and repre- sented in the First World.

These are perhaps dramatic examples, but they help to emphasise the inherently polit- ical nature of tourism development and the way in which power is transmitted through tourism. Countries promoting tourism (both mass and new) can be influenced by a range of factors, from the decisions of First World institutions and tourists, to the way in which particular Third World destinations are perceived in the First World. Consequently, Third World governments are also eager to control the way in which their tourism image is projected. We must therefore ask whether the messages we receive reflect truly what is happening in reality.

Assessing the politics of tourism

Although the size and scale of the global tourist industry would seem to suggest that tourism is a hot political issue, so far we have argued that the politics of tourism has remained relatively underexplored (Richter, 1983). In terms of assessing the activities of Third World governments, the majority of analyses have been policy studies focusing upon national tourism policies, including both individual case studies and comparative policy analyses between countries (see, for example, Richter and Richter, 1985; World Tourism Organisation, 1994). A good deal of this work is also focused upon the iden- tification of relevant and appropriate methodologies for planning and implementing tourism policy (for example, Gunn, 1994). Clearly such discussion is of interest and use, and has a wide appeal to practitioners.

Its weaknesses, however, lie in both its often prescriptive nature and its formulation from within the First World and, in many cases, the failure to set policy and action in 11111

a broader and more critical framework which acknowledges that there are competing

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interests. In Chapter 3 it was argued that the political economy approach is one of the few attempts to illustrate the way in which control of tourism development is held firmly in the First World. As Britton argues: ‘The World Tourism Organisation, International Monetary Fund, United Nations, World Bank and UNESCO, among others, set the para- meters of tourism planning, promotion, identification of tourism products, investment and infrastructure construction policies often in conjunction with metropolitan tourism companies’ (Britton 1982: 339).

Of course, it is not just external influences that affect tourism policy and develop- ment, but internal factors as well. This includes the conflicts between governmental and non-governmental interests, and conflicting interests and priorities within governments themselves. The latter are particularly prevalent where responsibilities over tourism resources overlap more than one government department. In Uganda, for example, there are three separate government departments with responsibilities for national parks, the focus of Uganda’s tourism. Box 9.1 illustrates a similar problem of different outlooks adopted towards its national parks by different government departments in Guatemala. Clearly, it is necessary to avoid the crude suggestion that government policy and action is an undifferentiated whole.

A non-critical approach also tends to assume that there are rational policy decisions that will lead to the surmounting of potential problems. As Hall and Jenkins argue, while ‘rationality’ represents an influential approach to policy analysis, it is also ‘extremely misleading as it fails to recognise the inherently political nature of public policy’ (1995: 65). Take, for example, the approach of Edward Inskeep, a tourism planner who has worked with the WTO/OMT, World Bank and UNDP in many Third World countries: ‘[the] planning of tourism is necessary not only for scientific purposes and to conserve the environment for the benefit of residents, but also for the protection of long-term investments in tourism infrastructure, attractions, facilities, services, and marketing programs’ (1987: 119).

What is important here is to question who benefits from planning and policy formu- lation and who controls these decision-making processes. If anything the ‘benefit to resi- dents’ is a poor partner of the need to protect ‘long-term investments’, but the latter is couched in terms of conserving the environment for local people. The suspicion that environmental conservation is not really about a concern for local people is confirmed: ‘Increasingly, tourists are demanding that their environments be high-quality and pollution-free as well as inherently interesting, and some tourists will change travel patterns if environmental quality expectations are not met’ (1987: 119). The results and effects of the Tourism Master Plan for Bali, outlined in one of the case studies given later in this chapter, are also interesting to note in this regard.

Ultimately then, we must ask who controls government policy and planning and what forces drive the processes of its formulation and implementation. Sustainability is a crit- ical consideration here, for Agenda 21 designates national governments as having the lead responsibility for the process. The overall aim of developing a sustainable tourism programme has been set out by the WTTC, which defines Agenda 21 as the process ‘to establish systems and procedures to incorporate sustainable development considerations at the core of the decision-making process and to identify actions necessary to bring sustainable tourism development into being’ (1995: 38). We must also ask in whose interests such actions are undertaken and explore how the uneven and unequal nature of development is reflected through this.

The notion of ‘interests’ is a useful one in focusing attention on which groups, organ- isations and institutions have influence and power in decision-making. As Table 9.1 implies, such influences can vary from the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF to the campaigns against visiting certain countries (due, for example, to

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