A new materialist governance paradigm for tourism destinations

Abstract

Until the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the growth of tourism had confronted many destinations with policy decisions that had impacted regional ecosystems and the quality of life of their resident population. To counter the threats driven by dominant tourism growth models, a number of tourism scholars have called for revisiting the philosophical foundation upon which tourism activities are developed. Informed by debates in philosophy and the wider social sciences, including tourism scholarship, this conceptual paper, therefore, suggests an alternative governance paradigm for tourism destinations, which is articulated in four propositions that reflect a new materialist perspective. These propositions are a monist post-anthropocentric ontology, a participatory epistemology, resilient forms of tourism and participation as methodologies, and social eudaimonia as societal value. The core argument presented in this paper is that the Anthropocene requires tourism destinations to espouse alternative governance approaches drawing from ideas emerging from new materialist scholarship.

Envisioning the futures of cultural tourism

“…A utopian future would be marked by global degrowth strategies led by post-anthropocentric community-driven modes of governance and slow cultural tourism practices. This utopian vision resembles the community-driven slow cultural tourism scenario and the perspective of Matteucci, Nawijn, & Von Zumbusch, 2022 , who urge tourism destinations to follow a new materialist governance approach, which prioritises the needs and concerns of local communities over those of tourists and the travel trade. While a utopian future would solve many of the predicaments of the Anthropocene, the past decades of tourism policy have revealed that policymakers are reluctant to embrace shifts in their governance paradigm ( Hall, 2011 ).…”

“…Even if the future of cultural tourism remains uncertain, a growing number of voices (e.g., Higgins-Desbiolles et al, 2019 ; Jamal & Camargo, 2014 ; Koens, Smit, & Melissen, 2021 ; Matteucci, Nawijn, & Von Zumbusch, 2022 ) are calling for the urgent need for cultural destinations to put local communities at the centre of tourism planning and management. As Krippendorf (1987) had already explicitly articulated in his seminal work the Holiday Makers , for cultural tourism destinations to be resilient, decision-makers will need to commit to "humanising" tourism .…”

“…In a utopian future, leadership imbued with an ethics of care and strong political commitment ( Guia, 2021 ) would facilitate a substantive paradigm shift in cultural tourism governance that stimulates such practices. A paradigm shift would entail abandoning the current anthropocentric view that nature is instrumental to human pleasure and embrace a post-anthropocentric ontology ( Matteucci, Nawijn, & Von Zumbusch, 2022 ). Post-anthropocentrism not only ascribes equal status and intrinsic value to both human and non-human forms of life but it also highlights their fundamental interconnection and interdependency ( Benson, 2019 ).…”

Post-pandemic and post-traumatic tourism behavior

“…For example, in August 2020, Portland, Oregon in the United States saw an increase in the number of tourists who came to visit the sites of the Black Lives Matter protests ( Gallivan, 2020 August ). The focus of alternative tourism is social eudaimonia that highlights compassion, ethics, and collective well-being ( Matteucci et al, 2021 ).…”

Overtourism – occurrences and effects

“…Overtourism has been analyzed from different perspectives, such as overtourism in cities in general (Goodwin, 2021;Cheer et al, 2019;Eckert et al, 2019;Milano et al, 2019a;García-Hernández et al, 2017), in a particular city such as Montreal (Khomsi et al, 2020), Budapest (Kay Smith et al, 2019), or Krakow (Szromek et al , 2020), from a visitor -resident relation perspective (Cheung & Li, 2019;Perkumienė & Pranskūnienė, 2019;Doxey, 1975), or from an european policy response (Peeters et al, 2018); have also been identified and analyzed anti-tourist sentiment (Kim & Kang, 2020), tourismophobia (Matteucci et al, 2021), touristification (Pettas et al, 2021), the effects on environment and public health (Sari & Nazli, 2020), degrowing tourism (Fletcher et al, 2019;Higgins-Desbiolles et al, 2019).…”