Political ecology and decolonizing tourism development in Nova Scotia: Towards a context-sensitive conceptual framework
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Tourism development is underpinned by a euro-centric philosophy manifested in western socio-economic values and systems that impose control over countries, and people (Escobar, 1998). As critical tourism scholars widely recognize, development discourses can work as a powerful, capitalist tool in the acquisition and commodification of land and cultures necessary for the growth and sustainability of the tourism industry (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006). The objective of this paper is to contribute to critical analyses of tourism development discourses, particularly as they relate to structures of power and inequality. Drawing on political ecology as a general framework and applying a critical theory and decolonizing lens more specifically, this paper aims to challenge neoliberal views on human-nature relations; views that commodify land, create inequalities, and silence and exclude voices, while continuing to benefit those in positions of power and privilege. Specific land dispute cases situated in the Indigenous-Settler space of Nova Scotia are used to illuminate how a focus on decolonizing tourism development, as well as the institutions that support western development discourses (i.e., post-secondary tourism education), offer potentially disruptive ways of “doing” and “undoing” tourism. Recognizing that tourism’s relationship to Indigenous lands is problematic and complex, decolonization, as Mackey (2015) writes, requires unsettling the colonial power, while also imagining a decolonial future; a future that, as Stinson et al., (2021) write, must be collectively shouldered. In this paper, we bridge this notion of collective responsibility for the future of tourism (and indeed our environments) with the growing body of tourism literature on regenerative tourism, which is a framework that supports the departure from traditional pro-growth ideologies, support Indigenous perspectives, and ways of knowing and doing, and call for a “radical reform of tourism practices” (Boluk & Panse, 2022, p. 353). In addition to these suggestive insights for reimagining tourism worlds, this paper extends on applications of political ecology as a pluralistic, situated theoretical lens for critically engaging with the human-environment relations, distributions of power, and multi-scalar social structures that configure tourism development.