Progressive optimism or critical pessimism? Why I’m for the former.

Pete Smith offers his thoughts on the state of the tourism debate

Going on vacation used to be a break from the rigours of work: a chance to recharge your batteries and relax, or perhaps explore a little. It still is for most people. But in our universities  some academics have come to see  something as beautifully banal as our choice of holiday as fraught with ethical conundrums. And we have  ‘ethical’, ‘sustainable’, ‘green’ or another of a host of other  worthy prefixes to remind us to do the right thing.

Mass  international tourism emerged in the 1960s and 70s and rapidly became a matter of interest for sociologists and human geographers. These discussions formed the basis of tourism as a discrete academic field of enquiry. Books such as Dean MacCannell’s (1976) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class set the scene for subsequent framings of discussions of tourism.

MacCannell’s work in particular is notable in that it is informed by the political Left’s turn from viewing production and the working class as the focus for social and economic change, to a concern with consumption and consumers. The decline of organised labour movements and projects of the Left meant critics were increasingly without an identifiable agent of social change. The working class may still have existed as  a sociological group, but it’s role as a political force, or a ‘class for itself’ as Marx put it, was becoming increasingly untenable. This played itself out through the New Left starting to look away from class and social transformation, towards consumption and lifestyle. Conspicuous consumption, in the form of tourism, was set to become associated with people’s social, humanitarian and even political aspirations.  

MacCannell was, like others on the Left, searching for new ways to conceive of social change. He saw the cultural and social encounters between tourist and host as offering potential to raise consciousness about global inequalities. He considered tourist / host encounters to be problematic, but prospectively sites of positive interaction and cultural understanding. This thinking prefigures the rise of the politics of new social movements, and also the emphasis on cultural identity influential on the ‘social justice’ Left today.

Cultural interaction is important. The greater freedom to see the world and experience other cultures represents social progress. And its study is important, too.  But MacCannell went further, arguing that from the tourist / host encounter new hybrid subjects oriented towards progressive change were possible. Against a backdrop of disillusionment with formal public politics, and with progressive change seemingly distant, culture became the terrain of a new politics of lifestyle. The declining fortunes of labour movements and collectivist politics generally gave impetus to this cultural turn. On the basis of this we’ve seen worthy attempts to critique mass tourism and reform it so it becomes a force for progressive change.

It is a little later,  in the 1980s, that ethical consumption starts to become an established point of reference in debates about tourism. The book that epitomises the ‘ethical turn’  is Krippendorf’s The Holiday Makers: The Impacts of Leisure and Travel (1987). He took a very sceptical approach to tourism and modern society in general. For Krippendorf, mass tourism had become a ‘restless activity that has taken hold of the once sedentary human society’ (1987: xiii). In his reading, mass tourism results in damage to host communities and the local environment, as it encounters social and environmental limits. That sense of societal limits to tourism’s growth has become increasingly prominent in the various critiques of mass tourism, most notably the recent rise of ‘degrowth’ thinking.  

Yet Krippendorf does not just criticise mass tourism. His major contribution to the field was to shift the discussion to the behaviour of tourists – their consumption decisions and behaviour on holiday. Whilst a public critique of tourism is far from new (see Lucy Lethbridge’s recent Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves), for Krippendorf and a generation of critics since, this behaviour was linked to the politics of development and conservation. It is where the problems, and the prospective solutions, lie. And if, as per Krippendorf,  package holidays and their patrons were perceived as the problem, the 1990s onwards has witnessed plenty of niches posing as progressive solutions to this problem: ecotourism, community tourism, regenerative tourism, volunteer tourism and so on. So whilst MacCannell epitomised the cultural turn, Krippendorf represents the ethical turn, or perhaps the interpersonal, or behaviourist turn.

Krippendorf also suggests that through ethical consumption, individuals can adopt lifestyle patterns that lead to a more aware and ethical individual, thus ‘humanizing’ travel, as well as helping communities and saving the planet (1987: 138-148). His approach of judging consumption and behaviour in ethical and development terms – either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ on that basis - has been the normative academic framing of tourism for the last 25 years.

MacCannell’s and Krippendorf’s ideas loom pretty large in some of the discussions of tourism today.  Investing certain types of tourism with the potential to contribute to progressive change (usually counter-posed to the ‘problem’ of mass tourism), or charging tourists with ruining the planet, have characterised strands of the academic discussion of tourism ever since.

Where tourists are seen as having the potential to bring about progressive change, this is very much through niche tourism activities, such as ecotourism or volunteer tourism. These alternatives to mass tourism are now widely advocated and exclusively focus on small-scale projects, often in the developing world (Butcher and Smith, 2015). We may wish good luck to local community-based ethical tourism, but the usually very small projects and businesses bring minimal benefit to local communities and fail to transform the economies or infrastructure of developing countries in any meaningful way. Sometimes, via some advocacy of ecotourism for example, they pit themselves against economic development.

This is at best tinkering at the margins.  It does not offer the prospect of transformative public politics and substantial options for economic development, which is what critical thinkers on the Left used to advocate for poor and oppressed peoples. In fact it can, on occasion, end up reifying poverty as something vaguely progressive through  the invocation of fine sounding labels such as ‘sustainable tourism’, ‘ethical tourism’ or ‘community tourism’.

Today critical academic work on mass tourism tends to focus on the problems that tourism brings, particularly in developing countries: water shortages, poor waste disposal, poor working conditions, threats to natural habitat, drunkenness, crime and sex tourism. There are, of course, well documented instances of all of these blights to the industry. But the methodology adopted is often to locate and interrogate the victims of tourism in a one-sided way. Findings uncover what the author intended: that tourism can be destructive.

If you ask people what is wrong, they will tell you and you should listen. But is anyone asking people what they desire for the future ? Criticism of particular mass tourism developments is not a rejection of economic progress, but these two things are elided in fashionable critiques of tourism such as degrowth.

The reality is more complex. For every put-upon community discussed, a convincing account could be given of others that have gained through mass tourism (Aramberri, 2017). For every ‘overtoured’ cultural city, there are swathes of beautiful places out of bounds through causes linked to poverty. For every hyper-mobile cosmopolitan (perhaps bemoaning mass tourism from their eco-friendly vacation) there are plenty of grafters who need a holiday but can’t afford one.  And most of the ‘negative impacts’ of tourism could be better understood as actually being a consequence of a lack of systematic, rounded economic development, rather than too much development. There is no automatic reason why a hotel in Cancun or Phuket should take water away from local people, any more than a hotel in London or New York takes resources away from residents in those cities – people and planet do not exist in a zero-sum game. And it is not necessarily a bad thing if a developing country’s government decides biodiversity in a particular area should take second place to human-centred economic development. After all, that’s been the experience of every developed country.

Mass tourism certainly has many issues that need to be addressed, such as historically poor wages, localised competition over water resources and poor planning. But I question the critical pessimism that infuses today’s tourism debate in the universities

Peter Smith is a lecturer and author at the University of West London, UK

Aramberri, J (2017) Mass Tourism Does Not Need Defending, in Harrison, D and Sharpley, R, Mass Tourism in a Small World, CABI, Oxon.

Butcher, J and Smith, P (2015) Volunteer Tourism:  The Lifestyle Politics of International Development, Routledge, London.

Krippendorf, J (1987) The Holiday Makers: Understanding the Impact of Leisure and Travel, Routledge, London.

MacCannell, D (1976) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

MacCannell, D (1992) Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers, Taylor & Francis, London.

Novelli, M (2005) Niche Tourism: Contemporary Issues, Trends and Cases, Routledge, London.