Neoliberalism and the Political Economy of Tourism

Book excerpt: Tourism has become increasingly shaped by neoliberal policies, yet the consequences of this neoliberalisation are relatively under-explored. This book provides a wide-ranging inquiry into the particular manifestations of different variants of neoliberalism, highlighting its uneven geographical development and the changing dynamics of neoliberal policies in order to explain and evaluate the effects of neoliberal processes on tourism. Covering a variety of different aspects of neoliberalism and tourism, the chapters investigate how different types of tourism are used as part of more general neoliberalisation agendas, how neoliberalism differs according to the geographic context, the importance of discourse in shaping neoliberal practices and the different approaches of putting the neoliberal ideology into practice. Aiming to initiate debates about the connections between neoliberalism and tourism and advance further research avenues, this book makes a timely contribution which discusses the relationships between markets, nation-states and societies from a social science perspective. Neoliberalism is considered as a political-economic ideology, as variants of the global neoliberal project, as discourse and practices through which neoliberalism is enacted.