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Gabriel Camară, Tourism, Change and the Global South. Jarkko Saarinen and Jayne M Rogerson, African Affairs, Volume 123, Issue 493, October 2024, Pages 555–558, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaf003
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Extract
As a global activity and the fastest-growing sector, at least until the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism has certainly had economic, social, and environmental impacts on the destinations. Despite its inherent negative effects, it is viewed as an agent of development and modernization, especially for developing countries due to its purported economic benefits.
Tourism, Change and the Global South is a successful attempt at the analysis of tourism impacts and tourism as an agent for change in the Global South. This is a necessary and welcome book because the Global South faces challenges in managing this rapidly growing activity and its associated issues. Although the first chapter of the book contains a very useful overview of tourism and its effects in general and in the Global South and the general presentation of the book, it seems that the objectives and the scientific contribution of the book are not expressed directly, but can be deduced from the presentation of the relation between tourism and change: ‘Change in tourism does not only refer to the impacts and developmental aspects caused by the tourism industry. The notion that tourism is a dynamic phenomenon also involves those changes taking place in tourism itself’, because they are ‘based on the interplay between the (global) tourism industry and specific destinations and their socio-cultural, economic and ecological environments’ (p. 7). The editors conclude this paragraph with the statement ‘In this respect, place matters, which is well demonstrated in this book focusing on the connections between tourism and change in the Global South’ (p. 7). The book is therefore rather a compendium of case studies, which on the one hand can be seen as a weakness, due to the heterogeneity of the content, but on the other hand as strength, through the variety of examples provided, which can inspire readers from various domains and places.
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