Tourism Planning Beyond Formal Economies and Governance: Exploring the Capacity of Local Practices to Transform the Development of Two Destinations in Brazil

Abstract

Sustainable tourism is not yielding the ‘development’ gains for Global South communities that are often claimed of it, with stalled economic growth, inadequate cultural and natural heritage protection, and fewer than expected welfare benefits. The demand for more beneficial forms of development requires those who influence public planning for sustainable tourism to align themselves with objectives of ‘alternative tourism’. However, mainstream principles of this agenda focus on limiting growth in order to reduce impacts, which have failed to improve the local welfare of communities. The need to tackle poverty has required a re-engagement of sustainability with mass tourism through ideas of ‘inclusive growth’. This inclusion is mostly limited to activities directly related to the formal economy of tourism, which may further marginalise those involved with informal livelihood forms. Thus, despite attracting revenue to destinations, the current agenda on sustainable tourism remains elusive due to high levels of leakages and unequal resource distribution. To advance this issue, I draw on the congruence between post-structuralist and relational political economy. Whereas the influence of formal and informal economies is often presented in binary terms and with one sector inevitably triumphing over the other, I utilise the ‘diverse economies’ literature to reveal their interdependence. Likewise, that literature enables a new way of envisioning tourism’s impacts that generate new possibilities for understanding the relationship between tourism and community developments. I employed a comparative analysis between different nature-based tourism destinations in Brazil, Bonito and Santana do Riacho, in order to analyse the perspectives of interviewees on factors guiding tourism development. Innovations on how tourism supply chain is perceived, planned, and ‘linked’ within formal and informal spheres of social life shown to cope better with the need to tackle unequal development than emphasising institutional arrangements for collective decision making. However, it was possible to demonstrate that the focus on economic linkages also has limitations, as transformations are still dependent on advantaged “gatekeepers”. In Bonito, privileged players within existing linkages demonstrated limited awareness of interdependencies, which resulted in unbalanced negotiations with representatives of livelihood activities, such as tour guides. Absent infrastructural conditions in Santana do Riacho such as roads connecting the tourist village to the rural areas, made it difficult for the establishment of linkages in the first place. Nonetheless, the positive results of existing care-based practices carried out by local individuals in both destinations have positively reverberated in unexpected forms of tourism development. This suggests that the relationship between host communities and tourism development goes beyond economic interdependencies. They are made by everyday practices that all individuals within a community can perform. Therefore, rather than assuming that the solution for tourism’s challenges is restricted to governance decisions and entrepreneurial initiatives, planning for sustainable tourism could be enhanced if more attention is paid to existing capacity of all community members to affect pathways through everyday practices.