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Justice Tourism as Development

File:Tourism

Defination

Justice tourism is an ethnic for traveling that has appeared in recent years, in which the central goal is to promote the economic development of local areas, increase the communication and exchange culture with the outside world or one-to-one interaction, and also to improve the local environment, and political and historical education in an efficient way. According to Holdens’s description of justice tourism, “Justice tourism is a process which promotes a just form of travel between members of different communities.It seeks to achieve mutual understanding, solidarity and equality amongst participants”. Another theorist named Scheyvens claims that justice tourism is both ethical and equitable as it “builds solidarity between visitors and those visited; promotes mutual understanding and relationships based on equality, sharing and respect; supports self-sufficiency and self-determination of local communities; maximizes local economic, cultural and social benefit”. According to Scheyvens’s theory, there are five principles of justice tourism that tourists they should know: knowing the stories of past oppression, learning the poverty problems, undertaking voluntary conservation work, undertaking voluntary development work and revolutionary tourism.

Issues of tourism

However, since the travel industry has developed considerably and the world population is rapidly increasing this has consistently created multiple issues. For instance, the environment is currently facing huge pressure through global warming, extreme weather, the exploitation of natural resources, and other forms of destruction caused by human activities and nature. Thus, this drives the challenges about how to appropriately use natural resources and share them more equally and sustainably. In addition, tourism has potentially contributed to the social inequalities experienced by local populations by excluding or marginalizing their economic benefit from the tourism industry. In fact, travel enterprises tend to maximize their revenue from travel industries without taking into consideration the benefits to the host communities. Tourists spend money on entrance fees, food, gift shops, and transportation, but the majority of the income comes from the services provided in core areas such as airlines, cruise lines, hotels, restaurants and so on. Rami Kassis illustrates how some examples of the inequities of local business in Arab countries have been often ignored in favor of limited interaction with visitors, as “migrant workers dress up as local tribesmen to offer camel treks or entertain at traditional dinners; whilst local Bedouin have little access to or interaction with tourists at all”. He also describes how traditional handicraft shops are far away from tourist destinations so that local people are hardly able to communicate with tourists in terms of their business and culture. In addition, how to respect the local culture becomes an issue in tourism, and it has a similar situation with inequities of economic. Robinson claims “ The tourism industry appropriates and packages cultural stories, often eroding their authenticity and culture value”. Also, Hitchcock and King also indicate “All cultural stories are produced by winnowing through variation to create a meta-narrative.” In industrial tourism, tourism providers used the values of culture and history, transform them into the commercial product and sell them to a mass public as interest. In other words, the narrative of the cultural identities is a mainstream that benefits tourism. Also, heritage visitors are limited by the knowledge and information sources from a specified museum so they might not completely experience the culture and local life without truly touching with it.. Those situations have led to the emergence of the perspective of justice tourism, which attempts to improve tourism from a traditional way, making it into a sustainable form of development through several measurements. Specifically, justice tourism aims to promote the understanding of local culture, mutual education, and economic exchange, and protect the environment at the same time.

Introduction of justice tourism as development

Tourism is one of the most profitable industries in the world and it is an ideal vehicle through which to provide a great source of economic revenue, job creation, infrastructure construction, and economic growth and stability. As for the tourists, tourism offers them an opportunity to experience various kinds of local cultures, environments, customs, and history, and allows them to interact with each other and encounter a world at once unique and diverse. In other words, the products of the tourism industry can be seen as commodities which bring a lot of advantages for both host communities and tourists. The main ideas of justice tourism are based around the preservation of the environment and culture while ensuring sustainable economic, social and cultural development. For instance, justice tourism encourages tourists to engage together and positively contribute their efforts to protect the environment instead of exploiting it. Also, justice tourism provides knowledge to tourists that one day their contributions will lead to equality, democracy and human rights for the human culture in the world. As for the mass tourism issue, justice tourism is built on a human foundation that decreases the negative impacts of mass tourism, such as by establishing regulations and drawing up reasonable plans based on the interests of the local population in order to promote fair, equitable and just solutions. There are several interrelated aspects in the following part that will demonstrate the relationships between justice tourism and local communities, which are justice tourism and the protection of cultural heritage; justice tourism and the protection of the environment; environmental justice and sustainable tourism issues; justice tourism and poverty reduction; and socio- economic development.

Justice tourism and the protection of cultural heritage

Justice tourism supports the preservation of cultural heritage and tries to achieve sustainability. In fact, it can allow tourists to expose themselves to different kinds of local lifestyles, values, and old customs based on the desire to learn about traditional and cultural environment practices. In addition, justice tourism not only give tourists a traditional way of visiting historic sites and religions, it also lets them explore the characteristics of this society and the culture that created those sites. Justice tourism gradually has become involved in the management and protection of historical sites that are supported and accepted by local groups. With better regulation and management, justice tourism can efficiently become an advantage to the local community by demonstrating their unique culture and history and by allowing them to make profits from it. In Rami Kassis’s research, tourism can increase the revitalization of culture and the stimulation of artistic creativity by the public. In addition, some damaged historical sites can be reconstructed and some lost traditions can be resurrected by earning benefits from tourism income. Besides, in terms of loss of culture identity issues, Barton and Leonard suggest the model of educational tourism can assist visitors having the privilege to visit the core communities and their culture, and intentionally create a goal of learning about their reality in a specific area. Education tourism allows host communities can directly touch with tourists and benefit from them by telling their own perspectives of culture.

Justice tourism and the protection of the environment

Tourism influences the local environment both positively and negatively. Indeed, it requires large amounts of land and resources for tourism development. However, the natural environment is very vulnerable to sustaining damage due to the large pressure of tourism with a great number of tourists. Environment contamination not only negatively impacts on natural plants and wild animals but also creates huge pollution for those who live in the cities and towns nearby. Rami Kassis presents an example in Palestine in which visitors from the west do not have the knowledge and consciousness needed to conserve water since they have not been told that water is a scarce resource in Palestinian communities. Thus, it is a sensual to promote environment awareness in order to minimize the damage to the environment as a result of mass tourism. In order to maintain the capacity of the local environment, strengthening the awareness of environmental protection of natural heritage and resources needs to be taken into consideration in justice tourism. One of the basic concepts of justice tourism is to foster a sense of responsibility of protection for tourists and guide them to have appropriate behaviors and be environmentally friendly.

Environmental justice and sustainable tourism issues

Although justice tourism can tackle the problems of environmental conservation and sustainable development, Camargo, Lane and Jamal indicate that in sustainable tourism is hard to ensure a fair distribution of the expenditures and benefits of development among stakeholders. One prominent case on this topic involved how the tourism industry harms the American native life in Arizona. In this case, the water from the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona is a major natural source for the thirteen indigenous nations living there. These peaks are also used to harvest plants and soil, and pure water is used for healing and ceremonies. However, a travel site called Arizona Snowbowl Resort has exploited over 1.5 million gallons of snow water per day for revenue purposes to supply to tourists who are traveling to the resort. As a result, the Native Americans’ culture and beliefs are being disrespected by this resort and are experiencing physical harm because of the contamination from this resort. The same is true for those tribal nations living close by. Thus, this shows that cultural justice is involved with the problem of sustainable development, which has created a serious conflict between these tribal nations and local businesses. Ultimately, this case has been successfully solved with a reasonable solution, the “Save the Peaks Coalition” which was ruled by the U.S. District Court in 2006. In this case, it cannot be denied that the issue of culturally sustainable development certainly has affected sustainable tourism development. Camargo, Lane and Jamal assume that it is a disadvantage for those Native Americans to receive fair treatment due to some factors, such as inequalities in race, class, or gender. Then, Camargo, Lane and Jamal conclude that there are some environmental justice principles that can provide valuable guidance for sustainable tourism development, such as the ability to fairly obtain natural resources among social groups and communities. In the meantime, the problems and challenges of how cultural sustainability can be incorporated into environmental justice-sustainable tourism still needs to be addressed and ensuring that long-term development is ecologically sustainable needs to be addressed as well.

Justice tourism and poverty reduction

Poverty is a prevalent issue that has arisen at many tourist destinations and has increasingly gained the public’s attention. Addressing this problem requires a lot of time and effort from the political, economic, cultural and ecological fields. For instance, it takes a lot of effort to challenge multinational corporations (MNCs) and international financial institutions’ (IFIs) behavior. They aim to increase the profits of foreign shareholders and governments and have caused huge damage to local economies and exploited natural resources. Because poverty is the main issue that needs to be addressed based on its root cause, justice tourism can efficiently deal with this issue by stimulating local economies and educating foreign tourists. In order to fight poverty, Rami Kassis illustrates four strategies that justice tourism organizations ought to implement. First of all, justice tourism organizations need to pay attention to the empowerment of local communities by working to replace mass tourism practices with responsible tourism practices. Secondly, it is important to work to create programs within the justice tourism industry that are aimed at reaching marginalized classes within communities, such as gender equality programs. Thirdly, an international network of alternative tourism organizations should be established to conduct the collective resources and strengths of these organizations and channel them efficiently. Lastly, incorporating practical programs into the communities assists alternative tourism operators in turning theoretical talk into concrete action. Basically, justice tourism functions to cultivate the understanding of the external and internal reasons that cause the phenomenon of poverty. As mentioned above, these strategies can expose the exploitative and manipulative practices of MNCs and IFIs and enhance the knowledge of visitors so they can understand the real situations. Thus, visitors and justice tourism organizations can cooperate to positively change the poverty situation and benefit local communities economically, culturally, and socially.

Justice tourism and socio-economic development

Although tourism can create contribute to improving the standards of living, education, and health for local people by offering resources and job opportunities, people still have the obligation to protect the original local industry in order to keep tourism from becoming the dominant source of income. The reason is to make sure the regular industries can maintain the socio-economic harmony of a community. As for sustainable development purposes, justice tourism has the potential function of promoting the participation of local communities in tourism but also of ensuring the preservation of cultural and natural resources at the same time. In Rami Kassis’s idea, justice tourism influences socio-economic development in a positive way by increasing the business and products related to tourism, such as guided tours, hotels, handicrafts, and so on, and also attracts some markets for local non-tourist business and production. Justice tourism helps stimulate the local economy’s development so they can gain stability in the balance of payments and increase budget revenues, such as by acquiring income from tax revenues and creating job positions. In addition, this takes place with the primary goal of balancing regional projects and infrastructure development, as well as improving the living condition and quality of local life. All of those practices can positively stimulate growth in GNP.

Organization

An NGO (non-governmental organization) is a non-government, non-profit, and non-political organization that is independent of states and international governmental organizations. Since a number of NGOs have appeared they have started to engage in a variety of activities and deal with different kinds of issues in the world, including the tourism field. The purpose of NGOs is to offer welfare, economic growth, promote social or cultural growth, observe religious beliefs, and so on. For instance, in the context of tourism, Global Exchange (GX) is a non-governmental organization founded in 1988 which offers reality tours that support justice tourism. They work based on the concept of promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world, and believe that tourism is related to social justice education and activism. The first Reality Tour in 1989 proved that “travel can be educational, transformational, and positively influence international affairs”. Compared with the traditional travel style, reality tours not only focus on experiential education and economic, social, political and environmental issues but also have the social responsibility to build a firm connection between each participant. According to their principles, reality tours encourage tourists to explore and face the global environmental issues with them together in order to make the world a better place. For example, “Beyond Tourism” in Jamaica focuses on the reality of a tourism-dependent economy and there are plans to implement this program in Cuba, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Venezuela and other places. Another justice tourism organization is called Oxfam Australia’s Community Leadership Program, which believes that global change can assist improvised regions and people in developing countries by trying to improve their living conditions. At the same time, it is necessary to build new relationships between consumers and the market-driven lifestyle in developed countries. Therefore, justice tourism can play an essential role in alternative globalization to promote awareness of the unsustainability and dissatisfaction that accompanies capitalist-driven consumerism. In addition, tourism and NGOs also motivate people to join in the activities with them, such as volunteer tourists participating in the protection of museums, gallery patrons and heritage sites. However, since the major goal of tourism is more focused on the development of high revenue, education, and construction fields, the initiative of participation and concerns of communities are being neglected and marginalized gradually. A lack of community participation can be seen as a barrier and a restriction to tourism development. Based on social justice principles, the function of NGOs is to decrease those barriers to community participation that are involved in tourism initiatives. What is more, NGOs aim to promote a socially appropriate and fair form of tourism. For example, NGOs can be a considered as a bridge to maintaining the cooperation between stakeholders, and also build connections and partnerships between communities, and local governments. For the tourism projects, NGOs also can provide the opportunity for employment and represent an income source for local populations in order to stimulate regional economic development. By contributing a vital source of income for communities and encouraging tourism, NGOs bring a great advantage in terms of advocating and efficiently achieving the goal of sustainable development in tourism.