Shifting Lands
A Comparative Study of Emerging Tourism Sectors: Questions of Sustainability in Light of Threatening Climate Change Impacts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sara Alexander, Michael Long
Our study comprises a cross-country comparison examining relationships between climate change, conservation, and the recent expansion of tourism-based development by the governments of Belize and Republic of Georgia. Both countries recently committed to tourism for economic development with minimal initial planning. The boom Belize has experienced since 1998 is alarming given the projected impacts increases in surface water temperatures will have on the barrier reef upon which tourism depends. Few studies have been done in post-Soviet states examining the challenges of tourism development and resource conservation relative to promoting sustainable livelihoods and retaining cultural traditions. Whether tourism provides social and economic benefits to households, while simultaneously supporting sustainability is a question that social scientists have been investigating for three decades, yet the impacts climate change may have on tourism has thus far received less attention. Host populations, tourists, the tourism industry, and environmentalists have mutual interests in ensuring that tourism development is sustainable. In 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development promoted “win-win” policies designed to exploit the complementarity between poverty reduction, economic growth, and environmental management, all the while recognizing the empirical record gave testament to the complexities of relationships between residents, traditional lifeways, development, and environmental protection. Using a comparative country approach, our paper presents a history of tourism development focused on sustainability priorities; identifies experiences residents have regarding their transition from agriculture to tourism with impacts on livelihood security and cultural identity; and discusses how conservation measures affect access to resources upon which local populations depend.
Protected Areas Management, More-than-human Realities, and ‘el Sentipensar’
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Francisco Gelves Gomez
Examining protected areas (PAs) management, this paper discusses how current and dominant management practices constantly re-assert ‘Eden’ myths of a wild nature that frequently justify instrumental actions of landscape management. Highlighting the conundrums and disconnects that exist in adaptive management (AM) practice, I suggest re-examining the contradictions that the twenty-first century continues to impose on AM in practice within PAs. Building on more-than-human geographies and the concept of ‘el sentipensar’ (Feeling-Thinking), I consider how ‘affective’ knowing (embodied) extends agency to the non-human in ways that support some of the earlier expectations for AM—such as experiential learning. The paper considers how such an attempt to transcend the limits of instrumental and institutional knowing repositions non-humans, and ‘el sentipensar’ is incorporated into AM as a force for reconsidering PAs—their temporal and spatial boundarying, their effective non-fixedness and their potential for extending conservation beyond ‘Eden’.
