Throughout the world, nature-based ecotourism has become one of the main forms of support for efforts to conserve biodiversity both within and outside of formal protected areas. In addition to directly funding conservation activities, such tourism is also commonly promoted to incentivize local stakeholders to accept conservation by demonstrating that more income can be gained from preserving rather than extracting natural resources. Yet despite these positive potentials, use of ecotourism for conservation has also demonstrated substantial downsides. These include concerns about the negative impacts of valuing biodiversity in instrumental terms, about elite capture and land grabbing in pursuit of tourism revenue, and about the climate impacts of tourists flying long distances to visit conservation spaces. Additionally, the COVID pandemic has demonstrated the danger of relying too heavily on tourism for conservation support when this support can potentially disappear in an instant. Given such issues, can ecotourism be reformed to make it function more effectively in support of both conservation and local community development? This seminar will explore this question, proposing a model of long-term convivial engagement with conservation spaces to replace the short-term, long-distance travel commonly emphasized in ecotourism promotion at present.
Robert Fletcher is Associate Professor of Sociology of Development and Change at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He is the author of Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism (Duke U Press, 2014) and Failing Forward: The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Conservation (UC Press, 2023) and co-author (with Bram Büscher) of The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene (Verso, 2020).