Tourism and sustainable development
7 Tourism and sustainable development
7.1 Externalities
One could argue, though somewhat naively, that the close bond between ‘people’ and ’things’ in tourismscapes provides a solid basis for sustainability and safeguards against a relapse of the resources tourismscapes are building on. But obviously, the same relationship between ‘people’
and ‘things’ also leads to numerous issues concerning the protection of the immediate resource base that allows tourism development to be sustained. In other words, the performance of tourismscapes constantly produces externalities that ask to be internalized.
Chapter 7 Tourism and sustainable development
Economists have been familiar with the concept of externalities for a long time. Already in 1920, Pigou pointed at the external effects on persons other than on the contracting partners1 (see Dietz, 1994; Opschoor and Straaten, 1993; Dubbink, 1999). Clearly linking the private market and the public sector, Pigou suggests that the government should force contaminators to lower the level of the pollution they create, either through direct regulation or by letting them pay for external effects, now referred to by economists as Pigouvian taxes (Freedman, 1997). Forty years later, Coase2 pointed at the shortcomings of Pigou’s analysis of externalities, by arguing that not only the market but also the public sector has its limitations. Further, Coase stressed that that an external cost is not simply a cost produced by the ‘polluter’ and borne by the ‘victim’. In almost all cases, the costs are a result of decisions by both parties. So Coase first argued that externalities are a joint product of ‘polluter’ and ‘victim’, and second, that as long as the parties involved can readily make and enforce contracts in their mutual interest, neither direct regulation nor Pigouvian taxes are necessary in order to obtain the efficient outcome, the market will take care of the problem (ibid.).
However, in many cases the transactions necessary to eliminate externalities are prevented by excessively high transaction costs. So another way of stating Coase’s insight is that the problem is not really due to externalities, but to transaction costs. As Freedman (1997) argues:
If there were externalities but no transaction costs there would be no problem, since the parties would always bargain to the efficient solution. When we observe externality problems (or other forms of market failure) in the real world, we should ask not merely where the problem comes from, but what the transaction costs are that prevent it from being bargained out of existence.
Actor-network theorists have also taken up the idea of externalities3. From their perspective, externalities are effects that agents do not take into account in their calculations when entering into market transactions (Callon, 1999: 187-188; see also Callon 1998 a. and b.). Externalities are not given, but are the result of a process of externalization (Latour, 2004). In Manuel Antonio/
Quepos, the lack of water sewage systems is endangering the national park. On Texel, tourism is supposed to induce crowding, noise, pollution and other nuisances. In their calculations, most of the tourism entrepreneurs fail to account for the costs that tourism is imposing upon other human and non-human actors4.
According to Callon (1998b.), beneath the concept of externality lies a more fundamental concept of ordering5. Ordering defines, in regards to the network of relations, those taken into account and those who are not. Modes of ordering establish boundaries within which interactions take place more or less independently of their surrounding context. This ordering puts the outside world in brackets, as it were, but does not actually abolish all links with it.6
In the case of the Cultural Tourism Programme in Tanzania, coordinators sign contracts with tour operators, tourists or the Tanzanian Tourism Board, and this would be impossible were there no relations with the villages, dancers, medicine men and the surroundings. But as Callon (1999) explains, in the process of ordering, individual agents are disassociated from each other and the outside world is ‘bracketed’. For a Masaai dance, a creation of César Manrique or a ‘Texel product’
to become a commodity it has to be (at least partially) disconnected from its initial producers, cut off from its prior context and detached from its former users. It is only on this condition, as
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Callon (1998a: 19) explains, that the calculation can be looped and that a deal can be closed; that the buyer and the seller, once the transaction has been closed, can be quits. Ordering allows for the definition of objects, goods and merchandise that are perfectly identifiable. It is owing to this ordering that the market can exist, that is to say, that distinct goods and agents can be brought into play since all these entities are independent, unrelated and unattached to one another.
As we have seen, this process of ordering is never over. In reality it is impossible to take it to a conclusion. There are always relations that defy ordering. It is for these relations that remain outside the process of ordering that economists reserve the term externalities. The latter denotes everything that the agents do not take into account and that enable them to conclude their calculations. But one needs to go further than that. When, after having identified them, in keeping with the predictions of Coase’s theorem as explained above, agents decide to reorder them – in other words, to internalize externalities – other externalities appear7. Callon (1999) suggests the term ‘overflowing’ to denote this impossibility of total ordering. Whereas economic theory seems predisposed to the hypothesis that externalities should be regarded as accidental and consequently that ordering should be perceived as the norm towards everything should tend, Callon (1998b.: 252-253) takes the view that overflowing is the rule.
Instead of regarding ordering as something that happens by itself, and externalities as a kind of accident that must be put right, ordering is a fragile, artificial result based upon substantial investments. According to Callon (1999: 189), any ordering is necessarily subject to overflowing, because it mobilizes or concerns objects or beings endowed with irreducible autonomy. The Masaai dance has to be (at least partially) extricated from ordinary Masaai life to become a tourism commodity. The one who receives ‘Texel products’ never leaves and cannot escape the web of relations on Texel if the product is not disentangled from its prior context. Therefore, complete ordering is a contradiction in terms (ibid.: 189).
Thus, it is a false impression to suppose that one can internalize every externality in the performance of tourismscapes. All the negotiations, orderings, contracts between the actors in the network (e.g. between Ecole Travel and Costa Rican hoteliers, between the hotelier and the tourists in Manuel Antonio, between the Costa Rican National Park Services and the Costa Rican Ministry of Tourism) and all the translations involved are part of the same plot. But each element and each transaction is simultaneously helping to structure and order the interactions within tourismscapes, and a potential conduit for overflowing (Callon, 1998b: 254). Ecole Travel is not held accountable for tourists littering in Manuel Antonio National Park, the hotelier is not held accountable for polluting ground water, and the Costa Rican Ministry of Tourism is not questioned on its implicit policy of neglecting the role of small-scale entrepreneurs. And if they were held accountable, excessive transactions costs would prevent them from internalizing these externalities. And the contract between tour operators and their clients, which rests on contracts (or personal communication) between the tour operators and their local agents, which in turn rest on agreements between the local agent and local hoteliers, guides and bus drivers, is not capable of systematically suppressing all connections, burning all bridges or eliminating the dual nature of every element involved. All the heterogeneous elements linked together in the performance of tourismscapes in reality take part in its overflowing (see Callon, 1998b: 255).
Chapter 7 Tourism and sustainable development
Analytically speaking, two kinds of ‘externalities’ are discerned in this chapter (see also table 7.3). The first category stems from the fact that people and things that have been translated into tourismscapes can become polluted, depleted, exploited, inflated, overcrowded, subject to criminality or vandalism and the like; they are effects of elements constituting and constituted by the actor-networks. Here, the particular mixture of people and things leads to sustainability issues within tourismscapes. Essentially, the robustness of the actor-network itself is at stake.
Generally speaking, actors constituting tourismscapes increasingly feel responsible for these kinds of externalities as they include the danger of tourismscapes collapsing. Therefore, all around the world initiatives have been started to internalize some of these externalities.
However, tourismscapes also produce externalities in components of the environment that have not or not yet been defined and/or ‘ordered’ as part of the tourismscapes. Depletion of the ozone layer, climate change, the decline of biodiversity or the exclusion of particular regions or population groups (like ‘the poor’ in Africa) from tourism activities are just a few examples. They belong to a new generation of ‘wicked’ problems that often manifest themselves less directly and clearly than the first category, as they are supranational in scale and/or have a lengthy time dimension (see WRR, 2003). I shall discuss this distinction in more detail in Sections 7.3 and 7.4.
First, I shall historically depict the relation between tourism and sustainability.
7.2 A short history of the relation between tourism and sustainable
