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The need to understand how Arctic coastal communities can remain resilient in the wake of rapid anthropogenic change that is disproportionately affecting the region—including, but not limited to, climate instability and the increasing reach of the tourism sector—is more urgent than ever. With sovereignty discourse at the forefront of Arctic sustainability research, integrating existing sovereignty scholarship into the tourism literature yields new theory-building opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to conceptually analyze the implications of (1) applying both theoretical and social movement ideas about sovereignty to tourism research in Arctic coastal communities, (2) the extent to which these ideas revolve around livelihood sovereignty in particular, (3) the influence of existing tourism development on shifting livelihood sovereignty dynamics, and, ultimately, (4) the opportunities for further research that enables more sovereign sustainable tourism development across the Arctic region. Given the northward march of the tourism frontier across Arctic regions, an exploration of tourism’s influence on sovereignty presents a timely opportunity to advance theory and promote policy incentives for forms of tourism development that are more likely to yield sustainable and resilient outcomes for Arctic communities.
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Tourism, compounding crises, and struggles for sovereignty
Applying justice theory in tourism studies has yielded a vibrant flourishing of scholarship in recent decades. Yet, it is still argued that a clear conceptualization of justice tourism is still lacking. Sovereignty theory has seen broad application across many social sciences in recent decades, yet despite a clear connection, the tourism scholarship has engaged minimally with the sovereignty literature. This article aims to assimilate sovereignty theory into the justice tourism scholarship by carrying out a deep historical analysis to demonstrate how destination residents negotiate chronic and acute crises in the Galápagos Islands, a place with no original human population. With global immigration projected to grow and exacerbate environmental conflicts in the coming years, the current research is well-poised to provide urgent and generalizable insights into the sociocultural underpinnings of increasing human mobility, the environmental conflicts that exist between different value systems and worldviews, and the opportunities that exist to promote improved destination management on behalf of human wellbeing in places experiencing intense in-migration. Historical analyses are thus critical to understanding the subjective and temporal nature of struggles associated with justice-centric concepts, including but not limited to sovereignty.
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- PAR ID:
- 10352685
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Sustainable Tourism
- ISSN:
- 0966-9582
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 18
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2022.2108431
