Rolling Rains Report:

Transforming / Re-Forming Tourism. Perspectives on Justice and Humanity in Tourism’: Perspectives from 25 years of civil society

The Ecumenical Council on Tourism has published, "Transforming / Re-Forming Tourism. Perspectives on Justice and Humanity in Tourism," edited by Ceasar D'Mello

A review by Dr. T T Sreekumar entitled, "Practicing the Rage: Perspectives from 25 years of civil society engagement in Tourism", begins:

Tourism has eclipsed traditional industries and livelihood options in many parts of the world and has emerged as the single most important industry in several countries. However, studies that seek to understand its impacts on economy, environment, and culture are constrained by methodological and theoretical limitations. One of the reasons for the ambiguities and inadequacies in the area of tourism research has been its inability to properly appreciate the importance of the ethical dimensions of human development.

The review continues:

Review of TRANSFORMING, RE-FORMING TOURISM: PERSPECTIVES ON JUSTICE
AND HUMANITY IN TOURISM-A Publication marking the twenty fifth
anniversary of the Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism. Editor: Ceasar
D’Mello by Dr. T T Sreekumar

A focus on the distributional and socio-cultural effects of tourism within the framework of ecological approaches to development would help understand the complex and diverse impacts of tourism on nations, regions and local communities. Tourism certainly engenders a framework for redistribution as it opens avenues for consumption and production. Nonetheless, redistribution that disregards the political and ethical imperatives that would mould its shape and directions would reinforce structures of unequal exchange.

Regarded as a third world phenomenon, tourism is indeed a post
colonial challenge. Its discourses encompass some of the major debates
in justice, development, deprivation and freedom in the era of
decolonization. Institutional critique of tourism began to take shape
in the post colonial period responding to the growing concerns about
combating poverty and other development maladies in the poor
countries. Janus-faced character of tourism in contemporary
discourses, (as a universally replicable model of development and as
an instrument of oppression, dispossession and cultural
disintegration), emanates from the contestations that generated the
new debates on the impacts of post colonial tourism.

The book under review, “Transforming, Re-Forming Tourism”, published
on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of The Ecumenical Coalition of
Tourism (ECOT) is subtitled “perspectives on justice and humanity in
Tourism”. It is a bold attempt to address this challenge reexamining
facts and perceptions, rhetoric and reality, ironies and paradoxes
while exploring spaces for initiating changes in the unequal economic
and social power equations that tourism has engendered. It is now
clearly known that one of the most important international agendas of
global tourism industry is to silence the civil society.
Contextualized in the dilemmas of contemporary civil society
interventions for claiming its rightful place in current debates, a
book that looks at the processes and patterns in global tourism from
perspectives that provide models and paradigms for alternatives is
deeply political and challenging.

Enriched by a reflexive reassessment of the role of ECOT in shaping
the current debates the introduction by Ceasar D’Mello sets the
underlying tone and tenor of the book with his reflections, inter
alia, on how post colonial tourism has disadvantaged local
communities. He says that “from the very beginning, ECOT’s
‘preferential option’ has been with the communities marginalized and
made vulnerable by tourism” (P.12). The substantial work that ECOT has
carried out in defining, positioning, sustaining and redefining
alternative policies and practices in Tourism in the last two and a
half decades forms the subject matter of Peter Holden’s informative
essay “Maintaining the Rage: Roots of ECOT”. Transforming a post
colonial rage against global iniquities of modern tourism into
concrete action has been a particularly challenging task given the
multitude of institutional and organizational barriers in mobilizing
resources for developing an alternative platform. Holden brings to our
attention the fact that a post colonial dimension has been deeply
built into the programme of alternative tourism from the very
beginning. Holden makes several insightful observations in his essay.
Reciting ECOT’s history, he says “tourism in the context of Third
World people have had effects which are qualitatively different from
the impacts which it has outside Third World. Consequently it is third
worldness and not simply tourism where the rage needs to be
maintained” (P. 26). This is a broader view that must help shape
future civil society interventions and guard activists from cynical
retrogressions.

The book is usefully divided into several sections of uniting themes
and concerns. The first substantive thematic section explores the
contestations of Tourism as a tool for building a world community. The
articles by Tricia Barnett, Rosemary Viswanath, Annette Groth and
Judith Almeida look at the ethical, economic, environmental and gender
dimensions of global tourism. Barnett’s article reassesses the
possibilities of transcending cultural and economic barriers through a
transformed tourism informed by ethical guidelines. Recognizing the
place of tourism within formidable economic project of neo-liberal
policies thrust upon third world by global financial institutions,
Viswanath provides an illuminating narrative of the processes that
keeps the quest for justice and humanity in tourism disappointingly
elusive. Taking the argument a step further, Groth discusses the
intensifying corporatization of tourism industry and its disempowering
effect on local communities. She concludes that increased
concentration in the tourism industry in the recent decades is a cause
for serious concern. Quite insightfully, she also argues that the
tweezers-grip of corporatization will affect the nature and quality of
critical research and action in tourism. Nothing could be closer to
truth than her observation that “it is increasingly difficult to find
political analysts and academics, generally, and in the field of
tourism who have the background as well as financial means to conduct
neutral and objective research. Academics and scholars are
increasingly dependent on consultancies paid by multinational
organizations and/or companies and therefore ot independent” (P.60).
Irrespective of one’s reservations on the notion of what constitutes
“neutral and objective research" her argument on the constraints of
freedom of research remains valid. Almeida’s paper focuses on the Goan
(India) experience of gender representation and women’s participation
in tourism industry. The essay seeks to challenge the economic
conservatism of the UNWTO that tourism offers “enormous opportunities”
for women’s advancement.

The section on Tourism and Development consists of three
contributions. The essay by Jeff Wild argues for the necessity of
engaging the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by religious and
civil society organizations. This, for him would be a more strategic
approach than either ignoring or too heavily criticizing the project.
Heinz Fuchs’s note reflects on the joint journey by ECOT and Church
Development Service, Germany. The essay by Julia Schornhall and
Shirley Susan explores in some detail the nexus between tourism,
poverty and AIDS. They argue that tourism industry must discard its
inhibition to recognize the relationship between tourism and AIDS and
join the campaigns that fearlessly address the issue.

The section on “Tourism and Faith Perspectives” addresses the
spiritual dimensions of tourism and approaches of world religions to
the question of just tourism. Archbishop Agostino Marchetto and
Anthony Rogers in separate notes provide different aspects of pastoral
approaches to the awareness and critiquing of tourism. Buddhism’s
perspectives on tourism are sketched in the contribution by Sukthawee
Suwannachairop. Muhammad Abdus Sabur provides a brief introduction to
the contours of Islamic approach to the question of accountability in
tourism. The need for including tourism and human rights perspectives
in theological education is convincingly brought out in the paper by
Margit Leuthold and Christian Baumgartner.

In the section on Tourism and Environment, two short essays and an
interview with Oliver Hillel are included. The essay by Marco Vinicio
Garcia critically reviews the concept of eco tourism while ECOT’s
interview with Hillel brings out some dilemmas faced by international
organizations like UNEP in addressing ecological questions related to
mass tourism practices. Rungrot Tangsurakit and Sabine Minninger
shares some experiences from the post Tsunami field work and draws
lessons for future policy making and disaster prevention interventions
in Coastal tourism destinations. The two subsequent sections on
“Regional perspectives” and “Case studies” provide glimpses and
snapshots of the diverse impacts of modern tourism on Nations and
local communities. The insights and caveats in the essays by Rami
Kassis and Regula Kauffman, Peter Rezel, Nic Maclellan, Ernest Canada
and Jordi Gascon help readers to appreciate better the similarities
and dissimilarities in the effects of tourism in different regions.
The illuminative case studies by Alison Johnston, Maureen Seneviratne,
Frederick Noronha and Nicole Haeusler adds immensely to the to value
of the book and its authenticity as a volume that seeks to balance
theory and practice. Ron O’Grady’s post script “The end and the
beginning” consolidates the book’s message for readers and for ECOT.

The most surprising aspect of the book, perhaps, is the poetry of
Cecil Rajendra appended below each section. He narrates a deepening
sense of alienation and an intensified experience of loss in the hyper-
real consumerist world. The drastic scaling down of expectations and
aspirations of fishers, farmers and folks at large caused by the
disempowering imperatives of global tourism is innovatively captured
in the deep and dark poetic imageries of emerging realities:

“The bulldozers, tractors
And tourists have moved
in with a vengeance;
hotels duty-free
shops, cafes and chalets
have sprung like fungi.

As the bewildered villagers
are pushed off their land
to make way for another
billion-dollar condominium
they begin to question
which was the greater burden:
Mashuri’s or our Century’s
Curse of dust and development?”

(Cecil Rajendra, “Lankawi, Mashuri and the 21st Century”)

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Posted by rollingrains at July 8, 2008 06:14 PM