?Hi all, Please consider contributing to the proposal panel below. If interested please send me a 250 word abstract by 5 January of next year. Thanks and apologies for x-posting.
best, Rob
The Value of Life: Measurement, Stakes, Implications
International Conference
Wageningen University, The Netherlands
28-30 June 2017
Tourism and Degrowth: Impossibility Theorem or Post-Capitalist Alternative?
Macià Blázquez Salom, Universitat de les Illes Balears
Robert Fletcher, Wageningen University
Growing discussion of degrowth as a corrective to an unsustainable capitalist economy predicated on continual expansion has yet to seriously address the global tourism industry. Yet tourism is one of the world's largest industries and hence a main form of capitalist expansion, one that is predicted to expand dramatically in the future as the basis of much of the future development aspirations of many in lower-income societies. To seriously pursue degrowth on a global scale, therefore, will requiring reorienting the tourism industry as well. Yet measures to restrain real estate and tourism growth within a capitalist economy have demonstrated their contribution to monopoly rents and socio-spatial segregation. Decisions by land owners, hoteliers, real estate investors in the face of high class demand to set aside the best pieces of land from mass tourism (e.g. natural areas, heritage landscapes, countryside estates or old quarters of heritage cities) have facilitated land grabbing, accumulation by dispossession and gentrification. Bellamy Foster has asserted that pursuing degrowth within a capitalist economy is an 'impossibility theorem', and these dynamics suggest that the same critique might apply in the case of tourism. As one of the main forms of 'fix' for contradictions of capitalist development, reorienting tourism towards degrowth may therefore require radical alteration to the global capitalist economy as a whole.
This panel seeks to explore the relationship between degrowth and tourism in relation to such issues. What would a "socially-sustainable" degrowth approach to tourism look like? Is such an approach necessarily post-capitalist? If so, how could it be realized? How could the development aspirations of those whose futures are seen to lie in tourism growth still be addressed in such an approach?
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