Tourism Land Grabs and Displacement : The Darker Side of the Feel - Good Industry

This book examines the global scope of tourism-related grabbing of land and other natural resources. Tourism is often presented as a peaceful and benevolent sector that brings people from different cultural backgrounds together and contributes to employment, poverty alleviation, and global sustainable development. This book sheds light on the lesser known and much darker side of tourism as it unfolds in the Global South. While there is no doubt that tourism has been an engine of economic growth for many so-called developing countries, this has often come at the cost of widespread dispossession and displacement of Indigenous and non-indigenous communities. In many countries of the Global South, tourism development is increasingly prioritised by governments, businesses, international financial institutions and donors over the legitimate land and resource rights of local people. This book examines the actors, drivers, mechanisms, discourses and impacts of tourism-related land grabbing and displacement, drawing on more than thirty case studies from Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Southwest Pacific (Kiribati, Australia, Tuvalu, Fiji etc).

Andreas Neef is Professor in Development Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and co-editor of The Tourism-Disaster-Conflict Nexus (2018). With Chanrith Ngin, he edits the Routledge Studies in Global Land and Resource Grabbing book series.