Impacts Conflict over Place Change

Abstract

Concerns about unsustainable tourism practices have been a subject of academic inquiry since the earliest days of tourism scholarship. Indeed, it seems that a majority of the papers published in the first editions of Annals of Tourism Research documented adverse social and cultural impacts of tourism. As McKercher and Prideaux (2014: 21) noted: “Wenkman (1975) documented the adverse environmental impacts of tourism on Hawaii. UNESCO (1976) published a literature review of the adverse social consequences of tourism. Rodenburg (1980) condemned large scale tourism in Bali and argued that small, community based tourism is preferred. Farrell (1979) documented adverse host-guest interactions. Jafari (1974) wrote a lengthy article documenting explicitly focusing on the costs, and not benefits of tourism.” Since then, a range of topics has emerged with the sophistication of the research evolving as our understanding of the causes of impacts and possible mitigation strategies have matured. Yet, to a large extent, many of the critical issues remain unresolved, in spite of the emergence of sustainable tourism as a dominant paradigm, as discussed in the next chapter. Hundreds, if not thousands of academic papers have been published examining the impacts of tourism on host communities (Nunkoo, Smith and Ramkissoon, 2013). Deery, Jago and Fredline (2012: 65), though, note that much of this work is derivative, leading them to conclude “research into the social impacts of tourism appears to be in a state of ‘arrested development,’ [where] there is a sense that the advances in understanding the impacts of tourists on host communities is incremental at best, or potentially circular.” The reasons are manifold. Far too much of this research is descriptive in nature, and is typified by a ‘fill in the blank study – Understanding social impacts/community attitudes of tourism in ___________ destination.’ Many papers as well use the same metrics to measure attitudes, and therefore, unsurprisingly, come to the same conclusions. A third issue is that much of this research is of the self-fulfilling prophecy kind, where if one structures the study to look for adverse impacts, they can be found. A fourth and more critical issue is the lack of theoretical basis for most of the research, something identified by Ap (1990) 30 years ago that is still relevant today. This chapter explores some of the challenges in the conceptual discussion of tourism impacts. It begins with quest for theory and then reviews the founda- tional models by Doxey (1975) and Budowski (1976) that framed unsustainable practices within a conflict paradigm. It then looks at such issues as impacts as a function of place change.