Tending to destinations: Conceptualising tourism’s transformative capacities

Abstract

This article is a theoretical contribution to inform scholarship on tourism destination development and dynamics. Our point of departure is the prevailing linear ‘economic growth paradigm’ animating tourism development discourse and practice. Through this discourse, people, landscapes, heritage and artefacts become valued as commodities and claims laid to tourism benefits emerge as objective, measurable facts. We contend that this discourse relies on an understanding of tourism resources and entrepreneurial activities as pure social constructs, which does not fully grasp the dynamics of emergent tourism realities and destinations’ transformative capacities. We argue for alternative conceptualisations of tourism that equip tourism scholars with the conceptual tools to grasp the plurality of tourism futures. These involve ‘vital materialism’ built on a relational ontology foregrounding the creative life force that permeates us and all that surrounds us. We conclude with outlining the implications this approach has for the discussion of tourism destination development. We argue that these conceptual tools will lay the foundations for ethically sound tourism development in times of global uncertainties from the perspective of people, their commitments and aspirations and the environment.

Keywords

destination development growth paradigm Iceland relational ontology vital materialism

Introduction

This article critiques the prevailing linear ‘economic growth paradigm’ informing tourism destination development discourses globally. Through it, we argue, people, landscapes, heritage and artefacts become valued as commodities and claims laid to tourism benefits emerge as objective, measurable facts. The article’s conceptual point of departure is that this framing of destinations relies on an understanding of tourism resources and entrepreneurial activities as pure social constructs, whereby advocates and critics of tourism development pitch their approaches as the ‘right’, ‘responsible’ or ‘beneficial’ way (Demeritt, 2002), grounding their arguments on the view that they have access to a true state of things. However, forcing tourism on ‘the right track’, whatever that means, results in a loss of other possible future trajectories. Following Latour (2010), we are sceptical about ‘the discovery of a true world of realities lying behind a veil of appearances’ (pp. 474–75). In order to provide a range of possible future trajectories for tourism, we argue that more theoretical contributions to inform scholarship on tourism destination development and dynamics are needed: in particular, those that make sense of the physical setting in which tourism is to unfold. Thus, the article presents alternative conceptualisations of tourism that equip tourism scholars with the theoretical tools to grasp the plurality of tourism futures. These tools will lay the foundations for ethically sound tourism development in times of global uncertainties from the perspective of people, their commitments and aspirations and the environment.

Implicit to the plurality of tourism futures is a departure from dichotomous understandings of tourism, such as good/bad tourism, global/local, production/consumption and mass/independent. These dichotomies ultimately rely on abstracted and often idealised notions of tourism development, one that does not stand up to scrutiny once real-life destination dynamics are observed and analysed. The aim of our article is to grasp tourism’s capacity to precipitate change at a destination and become part of the dynamism destinations exhibit. Thereby, we move away from a critical deconstruction of these dichotomies towards critical construction or composition, that is, ways to interfere with, disrupt, value, improve, repair, assemble and choreograph reality and thus attend to the ontological politics of relationality (Heuts and Mol, 2013; Latour, 2010; Mol, 1999). Tourism scholarship needs these conceptual tools to capture and respond to the dynamics of tourism practices and destination development in a world marked by fluidity, uncertainty and change (Bauman, 2000; Young, 2017). To achieve this, the article will critically explore how a relational ontology inspired by ‘vital materialism’ may be useful for conceptualising such destination dynamics.

At the most general level, relational ontology underpins some significant changes in the understanding of tourism and its impacts (Cohen and Cohen, 2012, 2017; Jóhannesson et al., 2015; Tribe, 2010). For instance, the way tourism relates to its surroundings in times of globalisation and global environmental change, are two emerging major topics of concern blurring the distinction between the usual organising concepts of tourism theory, such as the tourist and the host, production and consumption and/or home and away. This blurring is manifest in theorising tourism and the Anthropocene (Gren and Huijbens, 2016), hospitality (Veijola et al., 2014), performance (Hannam, 2009), actor-networks in tourism (Van der Duim et al., 2012, 2017), as well as notions of the sharing economy/collaborative consumption and creativity (Forno and Garibaldi, 2015; Dredge and Gyimóthy, 2015; Richards, 2011). All these point towards the de-differentialisation of the economic and the social as usually defined (Lash and Urry, 1994; Thrift, 2005), and call for more attentive and dynamic ways to organise tourism-environment and tourism-society relations as well as to conceptualise tourism’s transformative capacities.

Studies inspired by ‘new materialism’ and ‘vitalist philosophy’ or what we term ‘vital materialism’ (following Bennett, 2010: 21) will be our departure points of a relational ontology, moving beyond tourism as an industry driven by socially constructed abstractions, such as economic rationality. Our argument is that describing tourism through a relational ontology developed around vital materialism foregrounding the creative life force that permeates us and all that surrounds us, we open up more dynamic spaces for ethics, the environment and creativity in terms of tourism. At the same time, however, we query to what extent these inspirations can be translated into tourism development in practice as well as what potential they have when it comes to guide policy and/or decision making. In other words, we are wary of the fact that destination development can also be rendered a-political once allowing agency and fluidity to all things, much like if the growth paradigm is adopted wholly. These concerns we will address in the conclusion of our article, whereby we outline the implications our vital materialism has for the discussion of tourism destination development. Our main concern however is with outlining the terms and concepts, as we believe that these can be gainfully employed in order to understand destination development in times of global uncertainties (Young, 2017). We begin with describing a discourse of tourism development, using examples from Iceland, which we contend has wider applicability. From that we move towards a conceptual discussion about relational ontology and vital materialism, which provides us with tools to grasp tourism development in alternative and materially grounded ways. The effects of this conceptual move are then illustrated further with reference to two manifestations of destination development dynamics, before some concluding thoughts are presented.

Tourism matters

The empirical point of departure is the continuing use of tourism as a tool to affect the development of peripheral regions. Traditionally, these regions depend economically on resource extraction, such as fisheries, forestry, mining and agriculture. Yet they have been or still are marginalised through dependencies upon the transport of people, goods and services from elsewhere, through the historical ordering of society, its economies and people and/or as economic activity relocates with technological development or innovation. In face of this marginalisation, tourism is pegged as an economic option world over (see, for example, Hall, 2013; Hall et al., 2009). Tourism has indeed proved to be a viable alternative for some people and places in the periphery, not least because of their wilderness allure or unique natural properties. Coupled with low income barriers to start a business and seasonality, tourism can supplement other employment activities (Shaw and Williams, 2002). This is, for instance, the case in some parts of Iceland, which have enjoyed rapid growth of tourism in recent years.

In Iceland, tourism is becoming a central growth strategy for the national economy not least in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008 (Jóhannesson and Huijbens, 2010, 2013). Tourism is thus an integral part of regional policies at different levels of government in Iceland, the objective being to diversify local economies, slow down outmigration and create more viable peripheral communities for the future (Huijbens et al., 2014; Huijbens and Jóhannesson, 2013). Tourism is currently hailed as one of three pillars of the Icelandic economy, together with fisheries and heavy industries. In quantity it is growing in spectacular ways, manifest in the most recent compilation of tourism satellite accounts (TSA) to the Icelandic national accounts where inbound tourism expenditure has grown by 287 percent between 2009 and 2016 (Statistics Iceland, 2017). Table 1 details some of the key indicators used in media, industry and popular discourse about tourism in Iceland.

Table 1.

Key indicators of tourism growth in Iceland, used in discourse.

Source	Indicator	2009	2016	Growth %
Iceland Tourist Board	Departing foreign nationals counted at KEF international	464,536	1,767,726	281%
Statistics Iceland	Foreigners’ bednights in all accommodation establishments	2,134,245	6,764,615	217%
Statistics Iceland	TSA inbound tourism expenditure calculations	92.3 bISK	357 bISK	287%
KEF international airport	Total number of pax at KEF international airport	1,832,944	6,821,358	272%
Icelandair	Total number of passengers carried by the airline	1,319,207	3,674,592	179%

KEF: Keflavík international airport; TSA: tourism satellite accounts.

The mere fact that these data are the most readily available on tourism in Iceland underscores how discourse on tourism development in the country fits what Viken (2014) calls ‘the growth paradigm’, which emphasises economic growth for development and ‘is the core of the neoliberal and the market economy thinking’ (p. 21). We contend that discourse on tourism development in Iceland is thoroughly lodged within this growth paradigm and thereby neoliberal market economy thinking (Benediktsson, 2014; Easterling, 2016). Within this line of thought, the prevailing objective in Iceland has been on raising the numbers of tourists through marketing measures, but basic planning and infrastructure development have lagged considerably behind (Huijbens, 2011; Jóhannesson et al., 2010; Sæþórsdóttir and Ólafsdóttir, 2017). At the same time, growth figures and national statistics gloss over significant regional differences. The bulk of the growth in tourism takes place in the capital region of Reykjavík, with the rural areas still suffering pronounced seasonality and underdevelopment. Although some examples exist of successful tourism development in the periphery, the view of tourism as some kind of general solution for marginal communities has not been substantiated (Müller et al., 2013). As a consequence, Viken and Granås (2014) note,

The complex characteristics of tourism as a business field, as described above, imply that the expectations of politicians as well as of the population in general are often unstable and sometimes also unrealistic. (p. 9)

This begs the question of why so many peripheral destinations put their faith and aspirations into tourism development based on the growth paradigm, while only few have developed highly industrialised tourism products. The answer to that question depends on how tourism is conceptualised. It is generally accepted that tourism, even if it is framed as industry, is assembled by different kinds of sectors as any national TSA compilation will make clear. Britton (1991) contends that

An analysis of how the tourism production system markets and packages people is a lesson in the political economy of the social construction of ‘reality’ and social construction of place, whether from the point of view of visitors and host communities, tourism capital (and the ‘culture industry’), or the state – with its diverse involvement in the system. (p. 475)

Indeed, tourism is mainly constructed through social, cultural and economic practices. As such the tourism production system constitutes a distinct sphere ‘of a specific sort of phenomenon variously called “society,” “social order,” “social practice,” “social dimension,” or “social structure”’ (Latour, 2005: 3). As Latour (2005) explains, ‘the social as normally construed is bound together with already accepted participants called “social actors” who are members of a “society”’ (p. 247). The traditional econometric view on tourism sees relations between these already accepted participants or variables as framed in terms of agency unfolding from solid entities, as if they were billiard balls (Emirbayer, 1997). Emirbayer and Goodwin (1994) in their sociological account call this the ‘categorical imperative’ as it attempts to explain human behaviour or social processes solely in terms of the categorical attributes of actors, whether individual or collective (p. 1414).

On the grandest conceptual scale, the growth paradigm as an imperative of tourism development holds that it is possible to demarcate clear boundaries between variables or spheres of activity, such as culture, within the economy of hosts and guests. Yet as mentioned above with reference to TSA compilations, tourism as a sector does not fit neat categorisation. It is aggregated from different kinds of economic activities, which moreover represent different kinds of practices and in fact often develop in collaboration with other types of activity, such as leisure, sport and cultural events, while tourist’s experiences are an effect of host/guest co-creation. Tourism development is thus frequently not only about ‘tourism proper’, thought as business or industry, or the ‘tourist’ per se, but also equally driven by motives, for example, related to ‘citizenship, national or local identity, values, pride, city or business development’ (Ren et al., 2015: 240) and moreover by the destination’s physical setting itself and materials present. In order to move beyond tourism as a purely socially constituted industry, it is necessary to tend to these material complexities. There is a need to tend to the diverse relations through which tourism realities emerge, and thus define tourism development successes from a broader perspective than merely as measurable economic growth. Staying true to a relational ontology, we would like to explore how tourism realities emerge through ‘vital materialism’ and how these make tourism matter.

Relational ontology

Relational ontology is based on the understanding that ‘nothing is without being in relation, and [thus] everything is – in the way that it is – in terms and in virtue of relationality’ (Dillon, 2000: 4). Importantly, this is not to state that everything is connected to everything else, but rather that everything is connected to something (Haraway, 2016). These relations are not localisable as in ‘going from one thing to the other and back again’, but are ‘a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 25). Much like a river is not constituted by the relations established between its banks, but from the transversal flow of the water in the middle, between the banks, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 25) further explain. In this sense, relations are in fact ways of wandering (Serres and Latour, 1995: 3) and a relational ontology is about how the world should be conceived in processes of unfolding and enacting relations.

Accordingly, actors and what we are used to define as separate spheres or categories, come into being through relational practices or transactions. Thus, the idea is not to derive relations from the nature of things in themselves, as a defined set of aggregate parts for instance, but the nature of things is defined by and through the relations they constitute (Van der Duim et al., 2012). Here, we deliberately use the term ‘nature of things’ avoiding the concept ‘essence’, as a relational ontology is inherently an anti-essentialist ontology. If entities had an essence, all relations would be simple associations between two or more entities and relations would be nothing, but an extension of those essences. However, for relational ontology, the relations need to be formulated as external to the entity in question and fundamentally ‘irreducible to their terms’ (Deleuze, 1991). Describing relations as external and irreducible to their terms is another way of framing their transversal flows, thus recognising that relations are not grounded in an essence or foundation somehow interior to entities. They are not lines connecting separate points, but rather, in Ingold’s (2011) words, ‘they are relations not between but along’ (p. 85). Ingold (2011) calls this meshwork, and argues that every ‘such line describes a flow of material substance in a space that is topologically fluid’ (p. 64).

A tourism destination in this sense becomes a ‘bundle of threads or lines that may engage or disengage with co-existing trajectories of other things’ (Ren et al., 2015: 243) or as Pavlovich (2014) argues, it is ‘an entangled mess of mobile connections developing in unpredictable directions, like an underground tuber system that internally ramifies, divides and produces new buds’ (p. 2). What is most important for us is to underline that understanding the world as a meshwork does not preclude other kinds of relational structures affecting our lives. Relational ontology is not about deflating differences or power structures, but to gain access to a world dynamically and continually constituted. With this we appreciate that life is always flowing, on the move and as such open-ended (Ingold, 2011).

Vital materialism

Life is most certainly not bound to social actors alone. Of particular interest and importance for our specific concerns here is the physical setting of destinations, that is, their very material being. Materialism shows how different aspects of the material have become increasingly understood as involved in the construction of the social, including tourism (see, for example, Latour, 2005; Van der Duim et al., 2012, 2013, 2017). In other words, it becomes difficult to uphold a clear and unambiguous distinction between the social and the material. As John Urry (2003) claims,

Humans are intricately networked with machines, texts, objects and other technologies. There are no purified social networks, only ‘material worlds’ that involve peculiar and complex socialities with objects. (p. 56)

Any destination is as such an event of ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005) of heterogeneous parts where humans as well as more-than humans are assigned creative capacities. Thus, the process of ‘destinisation’ is not only about who plays a role, but what (Granås, 2014). It is important to appreciate that while our intentions do play a role in enacting reality, they are not the only decisive elements at play (Law and Urry, 2004). Jane Bennett (2010) in her book Vibrant Matter asks us to loosen ‘the connections between efficacy and the moral subject’ (p. 32) and further states that we need to broaden the range of places to look for sources of change (p. 37), and transform our relations with mute objects ‘into a set of differential tendencies and variable capacities’ (p. 108). What this entails is that an ethical question is placed on each of our shoulders as to what assemblages to associate with and/or extricate from and what realities to enact (Law and Urry, 2004). Tourism and the destination hereby becomes one ‘[i]n this strange, vital materialism, [where] there is no point of pure stillness, no indivisible atom that is not itself aquiver with virtual force’. (Bennett, 2010: 21 and 57, emphasis in original).

This materialism inspired by the relational ontology set out by, for example, Gilles Deleuze allows us to deal explicitly with the vitality and creative capacities assigned to more-than humans. ‘Here, things matter not because of how they are represented, but because they have qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements’ (Stewart, 2011: 445, see also Anderson, 2014). As individuals, we constitute ourselves and our life stories through relating to and ordering the world and our material surroundings and our relations to other people. Inversely, state provisioned infrastructures are a way of making the state visible; projecting its power and legitimising its role in the lives of its citizens (Harvey and Knox, 2015). We are continually preoccupied by an exposure to what is other, be it people or material. We are thus a corporeality that is driven by inhuman forces (Clark, 2011; Grosz, 2011) and can develop creative ways of attuning to this wider conception of alterity (Berlant, 2010), while hitching ‘the issues of earthly volatility to that of bodily vulnerability’. (Clark, 2011). Doreen Massey (2005) captures these becomings and our imbrications with our material surroundings by stating that

Neither space nor place can provide a haven from the world. If time presents us with the opportunities of change and (as some would see it) the terror of death, then space presents us with the social in the widest sense: the challenge of our constitutive interrelatedness – and thus our collective implication in the outcomes of that interrelatedness; the radical contemporaneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others, human and non-human; and the ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices through which that sociability is to be configured. (p. 195)

Spaces and places, tourism destinations thus conceived, are thereby an internalisation of heterogeneous material and social entities. Destinations become ‘relationships-in-practice’ (Ingold, 2011: 142) that through their multiple socio-material entanglements acquire emergent properties, that is, the potential to create new and qualitatively different relations (Protevi and Bonta, 2004). This suggests that in order to grasp destination development dynamics, more than human forces and the braiding of the human social subject with them need to be incorporated in our accounts of tourism. Furthermore, we, as researchers, are always in the midst of things enacting realities rather than only describing them from a ‘critical distance’ (Jóhannesson et al., 2015). This forces us to rethink our relationship to time, place and the agency of things. The vital materialism contribution to understanding travelling practices and tourism development is thereby first of all to allow for the acknowledgement of space as the ‘contemporaneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others’ (Massey, 2005: 195), and as such as co-presence of diverse matter movements and energy transformations. Research inspired by this approach needs to trace tourism’s trajectories along these movements.

To recap at this stage, on abstracting tourism destinations through the growth paradigm, a destination will appear abstracted, a fixed and rigid social construction built upon a passive surface of earth and operating in isolation and competition with other destinations. Here, we are familiar with how destination marketing organisations (DMOs) create marketing advantages through defined essences or core values, and how nature is framed as passive capital resource for tourism developers to harness. These can even be managed, up to a point at least. Adding the tourist and their travels from far and wide and their multiple life trajectories, the physical setting, the Earth and locals to the mix, will breathe life into this abstraction with all sorts of complexities following as life cannot be ordered in any final way. ‘Thus, the more we connect, the more we may develop complex connective couplings’ (Pavlovich, 2014: 7). What emerges is a map traced by each traveller, locals and the physical setting itself. A map which is imminent to the seemingly rigid structure itself, has simply hitherto been overlooked. ‘It is the journey, not the destination’ as the car rental agency Hertz will claim. Indeed, the journey matters as all things have qualities, rhythms, forces, relations and movements as stated by Stewart (2011: 445), and thus accurately reflect the on-goingness of our lives and matters of concern.

Making space for the visitors, the physical setting and locals and their life stories, that is, the unexpected and uncertain holds a particular allure. It places responsibility and care on each of our shoulders in each moment and every encounter. This responsibility can be talked of in terms of hospitality, generosity, openness or experimentation (see: Molz and Gibson, 2007), but basically revolves around situations that do not lend themselves to straight forward rationalisations, managerialism or scripted political projects. We do not want to claim to be the first promoting such situations in tourism. These can be seen in existent tourism scholarship, such as creativity and performance and collaborative consumption. We would now like to turn to these to link them and thereby existing tourism studies to our vital materialism.

Tending to tourism

How to make tourism matter is to us an ethical quandary of hospitality once tourism is understood to entail the physical setting, more than human forces, host and guest aspirations and the ever on-goingness of tourism practices which cannot be boiled down to the one-dimensional rationality of economic growth. Tourism, we argue, can through this understanding be seen as tending to diverse local development objectives and having the capacity to act as a fertiliser for a varied set of local aspirations. In this section, we would like to mention two interrelated examples of positive and creative manifestations thereof.

The first is understanding destination dynamics through performance and creativity. A relational understanding of culture and economy frames the economic as performed (Callon, 1998; du Gay and Pryke, 2002), which again implies that individual day-to-day practices and skills applied to the setting and materials appropriated are important factors for boosting innovation and competitiveness on all levels. Creativity has in many ways been identified as a key to prosperity and social well-being. Tourism is no exception where creativity has been taken up as a development strategy in itself, although it is not always clear what that includes (Richards, 2011, 2014; Richards and Wilson, 2006). Creative tourism indeed comes in many guises, ranging from the tourist buying local products and handicrafts to her participating in workshops intended to enhance her creative skills, materially or performatively expressed. This participation means that tourism cannot be fully managed or ordered and the guests are crucial participants of the ‘production’ process. Creative tourism and hospitality is thus necessarily about catering to the desires of tourists to be involved in ‘activities and experiences related to self-realization and self-expression’ (Richards, 2011: 1237). The actual doings of tourists, the way in which travellers engage in tourism practices and relate those to their everyday lives are therefore highly important for understanding destination dynamics (Bærenholdt et al., 2004). On the flip side, tourism businesses or development projects can work as important outlets for creativity at the destination, raising awareness of local culture and traditions, empowering local communities and strengthening economies (Brouder, 2013; Jóhannesson, 2010). In this way, creative tourism allows for a refocused approach to entrepreneurship, where individual lifestyles and aspiration, along with their material manifestations are brought to the fore in tourism development.

The second manifestation we would like to hitch to our vital materialist understanding of tourism is the idea of collaborative consumption as a particular manifestation of what has been called ‘the sharing economy’, the ‘demand economy’ or the ‘gig economy’ in the current business and economic literature. It revolves around user-centred innovation processes, whereby people use social media platforms to collaboratively meet their needs in terms of time and assets (Von Hippel, 2005). Collaborative consumption relies on advances in information technology and how innovation is increasingly driven through software platforms running multisided markets. This new techno-economic paradigm is seemingly guiding innovative practices and wealth creation allowing extreme flexibility in the organisation of work and the monetising of what was previously shared through the civil society, both digital content and physical assets (Belk, 2014; Botsman and Rogers, 2010). In terms of tourism’s potential in fuelling destination development, the physical assets of a destination can through these platforms be mediated directly by local entrepreneurs, who have hitherto struggled to gain direct access to source markets. These sharing platforms thus have the potential capacity to disrupt mainstream business models of tourism (Molz, 2013), in this instance where centralised marketing and/or DMOs manage destination or regional marketing strategies, more often than not distilling vastly different components and aspirations into a single essential message. In some sense, this trend towards collaborative consumption in its ideal guise summarises the potentialities involved in creativity and life-style entrepreneurship when it comes to destination development in peripheral areas (see, for example, Jóhannesson, 2012; Jóhannesson and Lund, 2017; Peters et al., 2009). Making sense of this forging of new social relationships and redefined human relations with physical assets is imperative to conceptualise.

Tending to the development of tourism

While the two manifestations of tourism, gleaned from our vital materialism might send shivers of liberatory potential down the spine of the reader, we feel obliged to warn that there are key questions that nonetheless need to be addressed when it comes to tourism development.

Both manifestations sketched out above have their downsides. The possible democratisation of ‘pro-sumption’ through collaborative consumption could possibly create the opportunities for destination life-style entrepreneurship in capitalising on a place’s physical assets. However, a destination’s ability to take advantages of these opportunities is dependent on entrepreneurial capabilities and skills in generating interesting virtual content and not least infrastructure allowing efficient telecommunications, which still is lacking in many parts of Iceland and the peripheries in general. The very material conditions for the Internet economy tend to be too often ignored. Another threat to the potential of collaborative consumption is that individual social relations are in fact being monetized and the mediation of these relations becomes a sought-after asset by investors (see, for example, Molz, 2013). Money indeed has far reaching material consequences (Aglietta, 2018) and Keen (2015) argues in a rather comprehensive volume on the Internet that distributed technology doesn’t necessarily lead to distributed economies. In a similar vein, Dredge and Gyimóthy (2015) ask if ‘the collaborative economy really is a social movement that solves pressing socio-economic global problems, or whether it is perhaps a business consultancy fad orchestrated by self-interested intermediaries and others who are positioned to gain?’ (p. 299).

In terms of creativity, the acknowledgement of its importance may neither translate easily into a regional policy nor should it be an excuse to discount quality or responsible behaviour towards host cultures and the environment. On the contrary, tourism life-style entrepreneurs need support to develop their business, for instance, in terms of marketing, product development and quality management. That said, support to life-style entrepreneurs should be on the premises of the people and communities involved and the values they bestow upon their destination resources, such as the natural landscape and the destination setting itself. For such a diverse sector as tourism, it is highly uncertain that the same measures will fit all, no matter the size or location. In sum, it is possible that what can be positive manifestations of tourism development in terms of creativity, life-style entrepreneurship and collaborative consumption turn out to be empty promises of improved social well-being and a more robust tourism sector. All these bundles of practices bear within them the seed of their own self-destruction.

It is evident that there are pervasive and dominant structures that exert force on the tourism system. At a destination level ‘… the crucial information about a political bearing is often found not in declaration but in disposition – in an imminent activity and organization’ (Easterling, 2016: 214). Tourism and destination development is dominated by market led interests and drive to produce new possibilities for profit. The economic growth paradigm thus represents ‘a drive to habituate without specific content. Perhaps nothing can be more powerful’ (Easterling, 2016: 187). The relational approach to politics and power sees these structures as tangible relational accomplishments, but not as predefined and totally stable realities. They are like bundles of entangled matter-movements and politics need to focus on how these relational bundles can be affected, interfered with, disentangled or managed (Jóhannesson et al., 2015 and see Lund et al., 2018). The vital materialism understanding of tourism gives us all a place from which we have the power to affect and contribute to the composition of (alternative) tourism realities. The plausibility of our matters of concern animates tourism politics. The sense we make of ourselves and each other shapes who we become and can leverage or constrain personal and collective action (Clark and Clark, 2012). This understanding also highlights that ‘different tourism realities and orderings may co-exist and how ultimately, tourism is not and can never become a singular, unambiguous or hegemonic practice’ (Jóhannesson et al., 2015: 6).

Concluding thoughts

Our ultimate journey is our life and every trip we take contributes to who we are and what we do. The ambiguities surrounding tourism and its potential role in social change and not least destination development prompted us to explore tourism’s role through the lens of a vital material relational ontology, with insights from the periphery in general and Iceland in particular. In our view, the common growth paradigmatic ways to conceptualise the capacities of tourism for societal change do not fully grasp the dynamics of destination development. We need to make more sense of the visitors, locals’ aspirations and the physical setting in which tourism unfolds. For that purpose, we outlined vital materialism and related it to recent discussions in tourism studies on creativity and collaborative consumption. Our argument is that tourism’s capacities for inducing a positive change to destinations may be hampered by its social construction as a one dimensional development tool, an external force impacting bounded entities, focusing merely on its economic potential. By that, we mean that tourism cannot be defined as an industry based only on a particular economic logic derived from perceived structures and essence of a society sui generis, but needs to include more.

But what is this more to be included? How can destination developers do this and tourism scholars grapple with it? A starting point is the recognition that tourism is life itself. It grows through relations and the act of being with others and the world (Veijola et al., 2014). Tourism as such is part of globalising mobilities of all kinds and environmental change. These far-reaching relations are partly evident in the practices described under the headings of creativity and collaborative consumption. But what is lacking there is more space for our physical environment, the material of the destination itself and thereby the Earth. It is essential that we conceptualise and make sense of those for the sake of more informed and sensitive notions of hospitality and environmental responsibility. As individuals, we are continually preoccupied by an exposure to what is other, be it people or material, and we can develop creative ways of attuning to this wider conception of alterity. The way this can be brought about is admitting more people, more varied knowledge practices, more ways of doing, being and sense making into the tourism decision-making process. Tourism scholars can inform on ways in which such wider participation can be facilitated. Their input can range from that of introducing knowledge about the material entanglements of destinations unravelled, for example, through ecological footprint analysis and through facilitating wider involvement to setting up mechanisms enabling the empowerment of relations hitherto unrecognised. The mere decision on who speaks and how, on behalf of the physical setting of a destination per se, its landscapes and ecosystems, is one that is both relevant and imperative in times of global environmental change. Providing legitimacy and a platform for such a voice is a task for any concerned tourism scholar and destination developer.

Tending to and appreciating material relations, when developing tourism destinations we argue can make tourism a fertiliser for local aspirations and global responsibilities. If the physical destination as such is taken into account, that is, the material there and the ways in which it is engaged with, made sense of, moulded and sculpted for the purposes of tourism, foundations can be lain for ethically sound tourism development, in times of global uncertainties from the perspective of people, their commitments and aspirations and the environment. But also, tourism acts out its transformative potential on an already given destination; on an ordering already in place, one that has had acts of definitions and operationalisations acted upon it, creating, for example, marketing advantages through defined essences or core values. Therefore, it is imperative that our conceptual frameworks assist in critically engaging with the realities they describe and perform (Law, 2004; Law and Singleton, 2013). As a consequence, politics are everywhere and in everything we do, also in our material undertakings, such as handicraft and souvenir making to where to build infrastructure and how. Politics and power rest in associations or relations and the question is what kind of realities we should strive to enact (Law and Urry, 2004).

Simply celebrating tourism as a transformative activity, liberating for the lifestyle entrepreneur, allowing for novelty through performance and creativity or new ways of sharing through collaboration will gloss over more pervasive and penetrating ways of modern day tourism operations. While the celebratory account allows us to imagine the most positive and beneficial ways a destination can develop and thus inform policy decisions and help people make sense of their tourism career, very real and materially grounded steps towards implementing this vision need to be taken and acted out in the currently staked out policy arena. It is imperative that destination developers do not uncritically buy into the seemingly appealing logic of the (fluid) market, when it comes to creativity, online platforms or lifestyle pursuance. The first step there towards is understanding the concepts that can be deployed to make relations hitherto silent speak, and critically tend to all destination development dynamics.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Edward H Huijbens

Author biographies

Edward H Huijbens is a geographer, scholar of tourism and graduate of Durham University in England. As of 1 February 2019 Edward is professor at Wageningen University and chair of the Cultural Geography Research Group. Prior to his posting to the Netherlands he was professor at the University of Akureyri, Iceland.

Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson is an anthropologist, scholar of tourism and graduate of Roskilde University in Denmark. Gunnar is professor at the department of geography and tourism at the University of Iceland.

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