1. Analysis
Malaga was in a deep agricultural, industrial and commercial crisis – we heard from the local professor for tourism – when the first luxury hotel was opened in 1959. Forty years later, the situation in rural zones of the province is still of agricultural decline. But the preoccupation for a sustainable development of these areas of the province has increased. Although tourism is still the main economic potential of the region, new aspects such as culture, traditions, history, art, environment, are now part of the development plans.
Professor Inmaculada Martin Rojo, quoting Galan 1978, described the first tourist development of Andalusia as a kind of "colonisation" where future was "forseen, programmed and conducted" from outside. Now, she said, the region is trying to plan a development "as sustainable as possible". The Spanish government issued 1988 a new Law on Coasts, inforced through a "Coasts Plan". In rural areas, diversification is promoted, with due respect for the culture of the local population, in order to create small firms and more employment, against the growing unbalance between rural zones and urban concentrations. The purpose is a better wealth distribution among regions and among social groups.
Our working group supported such a new orientation, but asked questions about the still predominant model of success and growth. Sharing experiences from Tanzania, Canada, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Wales and Baltic countries, we criticised the investment pattern in new touristic areas, with big shifts in land property and in employment ("tertiarisation", i.e. growth of the third sector), a heavy rural exodus and considerable cultural changes, powerful advertisement and new consumption values.
The future of touristic areas is heavily dependant from the choice of investment structures. Either there is an interest of multinational capital sources to invest, or the development is in the hands of small national banks and firms. Some argued that international investors could in certain cases offer better conditions than national ones, these beeing less prompt to show respect for the regional culture and environment and for the local employees.
Globalisation means that through tourism everybody could get attracted everywhere by touristic investments and advertisement. We were interested to analyse what this means for the tourists themselves (see below), but especially what it means for the touristic regions. Profits on foreign investments will generally fly out of the country, whereas the costs will have to be born by the country itself through its own public budget ("externalised costs"):
– streets, places, beaches, motorways, airports and other infrastructures;
– land planning, protected areas, nature, regional structures;
– responses to rural exodus, such as education, housing, etc.;
– hospitals, health structures in the new centres;
– care for the environmental impact of touristic developments;
– promotion of tourism, festivals, events, information, public relations;
– economic diversification, new firms and projects.
We did not hear much about public debates or citizens consultations on such changes. Policy decisions on these matters seem to be taken in small circles of people interested who are going to profit in some way of the new investments. We were told in Malaga that the political decisions in the region had been helped through EU subsidies (LEADER funding in particular). It is not clear what the structural choices behind these subsidies are, and whether Eastern countries applying for membership in the EU will be helped in the same way.
The receiving countries of touristic investments are often not yet in a position to ask for impact studies before accepting investment. They cannot submit these investments to social or structural conditions. There is a big risk that e.g. land will be used without taking into account the wishes and habits of local people, as has been noticed in African countries.
The case is different in villages where local people decide and control investments. They can even set certain rules (on buildings, shops, opening hours, working conditions) through the local government. Costs of maintaining the village may be quite high, but the local population – if they are active in shops, hotels, restaurants, hiring of flats, etc. – can expect returns from the visitors in form of cash flow, as we saw in Frigiliana (village 435m above sea level). Rural tourism could better develop in this way.
Both types of tourism are depending for their success from the purchasing power of possible clients. Andalusia enjoys the happy situation of receiving 45% of its tourists from Spain itself, then from Britain and countries in the North of the continent, then from oversea.
Not all places with interesting landscapes or touristic goals can rely in that way upon their own co-nationals for a big part of their touristic flow. Even in the Baltic countries, normal people cannot afford to travel abroad for holidays more than small trips in boats or buses. There are in most countries around the world not so many clients with enough purchasing power for holidays, air flights and tourism. Poor people have neither money nor time. Rich people have time for travel and enough money to travel and buy. Tourism is increasing this inequality and polarisation.
Globalisation has a pretention to make all situations equal and similar, but the present way of globalisation does not at all (or not yet?) equalise situations, prospects, interests and chances all over the world as it pretends to do. On the contrary! Rich people are able to buy much more than others, because everything is cheaper for them. They benefit from low prices and cause prices to go up. Poorer people with higher needs cannot compete when things cost more and more.
Employment in tourism is attracting people with low qualifications from rural areas to touristic centres and cities. Few qualified jobs are offered, requesting new education efforts from new touristic countries. But the majority of jobs are services with low security, low pay, frequent changes of employers, irregular occupation.
The main problem of the Tourist Office in a region like Malaga is to find activities and attractions to bring tourists to the place in low seasons. Competitions, festivals or congresses are organised or welcomed to the city in the spring or the autumn. The seasonal character of jobs is for the majority of the workers a big difficulty, although some of them are active in agricultural production in the time beteween the seasons.
In other places of the world, the touristic season coincides with the main agricultural tasks, making it impossible for farmers to have a second touristic activity.
Our working group discussed also the situation of tourists in the globalised touristic market. We saw foreign cultural models of touristic promoters dominating over the free choices of their clients. All efforts are focused on the promotion of sales, of consumption. The quality models offered and advertised are linked with comfort and pleasure. It is very difficult to establish alternative quality criteria of touristic offers and to evaluate these offers ethically, because the definition of quality has to recognise preferences and interests of the clients themselves in all their variety.
Nevertheless we would support criterias of alternative tourism as an active tourism, where clients are learning by doing things, meeting people, visiting places, experiencing a new life, accepting less comfort for better chances of being active. Examples of villages with special offers were shared in our group, some of us being involved in the preservation of the natural or industrial heritage of their country. But we were conscious that many clients would not prefer tourism in villages to mass tourism. We were not able to define psychological or sociological causes for this kind of preference (not only middle class preference!).
As our local informant said (prof. Inmaculada Martin Rojo), Andalusian tourism was the result of local hospitality, acceptance of guests on the part of the local population. And yet she described the flow of guests as a "cultural shock" for Andalusia.
Tourism may be interpreted as an invitation of the local population to foreigners to come to their place, and tourists could see themselves as "visitors". But the globalised market for tourism is now imposing on "visited" populations new models, new requests, new instruments and habits.
Even the touristic use of local folklore is more and more a threat to it, a corruption. People and groups are getting utilised. Of course, local people can earn money by selling their performances and products. A whole range of shops and services will grow in touristic places. But the cultural quality is changed by the stream of clients with different cultural backgrounds and with little interest towards the real local life. On top of this, the local population is compelled by the touristic flow to change many aspects of its life, as they are asked to improve e.g. the traffic control, the public information shields (adding English and icons to local language indications), the police and security structures, the aspect of towns and villages, and more.
2. discussion of theological Criteria
The critique of these factors of dependence has to do with the theological and ethical criteria developed by our working group in the course of its analysis and in the preparation for common strategies. We could gather these criterias around three main topics:
– the quality of life in the touristic place;
– the social integration of tourism into the visited community;
– the true efficiency of touristic investments.
When tourists are enjoying an interesting experience, they often say that the place where they are is a "living" place. But what can be the definition of this quality? Is there any theological evaluation of it? For some clients the purpose of holidays and tourism is to break with their active life, to stop thinking and asking questions and to relax. For others, a living place means an opportunity to ask new questions and think again, to discover new aspects of life, past or present. For others, it means to be active, physically or socially.
Theology has to do with new life and with change. In that sense the theological evaluation of a living place would be a place where people are brought to new experiences and new questions about their normal way of life. Quality of life is re-creation, be it active or passive. And this quality is linked with the possibility of a personal experience, not with myths, dreams and illusions, of which no real experience is possible. A theological point of view, as introduced to us by the Brasilian theologian and psychologist Jung Mo Sung, means a critique of the "myth of paradise" linked with touristic advertisement about beaches in the sun or mountains with snow.
Theology has also to do with a call towards the future and would submit to critique the human wish to "protect the heritage" of the past. The risk of turning to the past is real where people are playing roles in reconstructed old places, where they are rediscovering ancient life in museums or travelling through a closed reality in guided tours. Any museum can be compared with a tomb, and visits to museums are implicitly forms of resurrection. When things of our human heritage are "saved" and rediscovered, this means a relationship of present life to the dead past and has to be confronted with the theological acceptance of death. A christian sense for "new life" includes a different approach to the past.
Life in a theological sense is also different from life as nature and biosphere. Not every eco-tourism is by itself better. As human beings we are called to rediscover our responsibility in nature and society. A christian approach to tourism is to find through contacts with other people – of the present or of the past – a new sense of that responsibility, by understanding their relationship to nature, to energy, to techniques, to culture.
We would like to get a critical look at the local community to which tourists are attracted. Its life is not the life of its tourists, and both experiences are different. Local populations should be able to recover a democratic power and control on what is happening in their cities and neighbourhoods and in the surrounding nature. No owner is free to decide about his piece of land without taking into account the role of this piece of territory for the local population – and not just for the tourists there. Community is the sum of different interests and common needs in everyday's life.
A community cannot be deprived of its responsibility for basic elements of its own life. Such responsibility is especially important as touristic investors are trying for example to buy at higher prices the spaces needed to build infrastructures and hotels. Not only land planning is implied, but also culture and society, the regional impact of tourism on the life of the community. From a theological point of view, community life is more than the addition of individual choices. Criteria for the respect of cultures and values are needed, including the refusal of all practices tending to exploit weaknesses present in some sectors of the local population.
Tourism is in itself a private use of private wealth. Community life – the context where tourism takes place – should be seen as a place for the common sharing of a common wealth. The theological approach of the material elements of the local life includes a call for redistribution of wealth, not accepting the private appropriation of parts of this wealth through tourists "invading" the community.
A critical sense of "efficiency" is needed from a theological point of view. Our working group asked the plenary for some more work on this in the sub-group of WEN on theology and economy. We felt that the word "efficiency" as criterion for the evaluation of investments, especially here of touristic investments, was an ambiguous concept, because the same investments may be considered efficient or inefficient from different points of view. Ambiguous concepts are not describing but distorting the reality concerned.
Prudence may be considered positive or negative, stewardship and respect towards nature can be seen as efficient and as inefficient, depending from the scale of values used. Profitability can be estimated in different ways, if at short sight or long term.
A theological concept of efficiency should include the recognition of the very broad diversity of gifts received from God or from Life, gifts which people are not allowed to use freely without taking into account the will expressed by the Donor. Theology would emphasise that human beings are not able to be "efficient" with their own logic alone, that the special quality of social life, of nature and of personal gifts deserves to be recognised in a comprehensive, not only pragmatic, ethical meaning of efficiency.
3. Proposed Strategies
It is possible to develop local power and control mechanisms which are in the hands of the local community, as we heard in the village of Frigiliana, where the local authority is able to decide and to impose to all investors e.g. the shape of new buildings and the acceptability of renovated old ones. The problem is with the quality of the people elected into authority positions, sometimes part of a very conservative elite of the region. But the possibility to control present and future changes is clearly open, whether correctly used or not yet.
An instrument to help to develop local power is to encourage a free local press, making public the way in which local decisions are taken and putting pressure on authorities to solve precise problems. Even if conflicts may arise around the presentation of certain facts, the press or media is opening the public debate. Public opinion can get aware of problems and will better control the persons in charge.
Democratic pressure is also needed to promote a culture of solidarity. Individuals will decide alone what they wish to consume, but they have to take together the decision to organise solidarity. Some rules about new touristic developments should be taken collectively by political leaders feeling responsible for present and future relationships between tourists and the visited population. These rules could be drafted along the following lines: a comprehensive concept of efficiency, a balanced use of land and energy, a living relationship to people, a regular employment pattern.
The "efficiency of sustainability" is not identical with any other "efficiency". Current economic investments require efficiency as stability and profitability, but are very often inefficient as they are wasting wealth in making previous investments obsolete, skills remaining unused (unemployed), nature spoiled and energy wasted. Sustainability is one of the key elements of any acceptable economic development offering a comprehensive framework for social life. It calls for citizens actively engaged to promote the value of present wealth in negotiations and dialogue with promoters of new wealth.
In the case of tourism as in any other case, negotiations between the receiving country or region and the investors have to start with the search for common criteria of sustainability. The preferences of consumers and of the local community have to play their role in the decisions of investors. The social costs, infrastructure and security costs are all part of any projected investment and should be internalised in the course of the negotiations conducted by public authorities of the receiving country or region.
On the other side, local small and medium sized entreprises would prefer if money could be channelled to their touristic region through local banks. This credit system allows credits to be offered even to small local groups or firms in villages with conditions very different from those set to bigger firms. This kind of credits make it possible for a region to develop with its own rhythm and purpose, under the responsibiltiy of local people. The invested capital is opening opportunities for the region itself, and not only for its tourists and visitors. Local credit systems have to be developed.
Before investment is allowed, every country or region has a right and a duty to evaluate the impact of this investment on land, nature, society, public budget, and more. The whole social space is changing in some way through touristic projects and their flows of people. New Southern or Eastern places for touristic investments would require the same impact studies as Northern ones, and these studies need improvement even in the Northern context. Their cost is not negative to the efficiency of the investment, as these studies are bringing security for the future of the project. The local authorities should be supported by law and monitored by social movements in this kind of preventive action.
A rational and balanced use of land (land planning) is allowing different projects and activities to grow together, through a division of areas with different purposes and through strict rules of the local authority about construction and development in each area. Tourism is dependent from the quality of the landscape, which can be protected or improved through such rules and procedures. The planning, if it follows democratic procedures, allows concerned citizens to give their contribution before investment decisions are taken. Social movements are responsible for their own quality of life and can obtain from local authorities hard negotiations prior to investments. In the case of some regions in Europe, they can even find subsidies of the European Union which will be given only under strict conditions.
A particular aspect of the environmental planning is the impact study on energy consumption in touristic areas. Rules on energy saving and equal access to natural resources are essential to avoid that only a scarce part of resources can go to the local population and its rural activities, all energy and natural resources being used by touristic projects. It is especially the case where the supply of water is limited, and our group asked such questions about the irrigation of the big golf courses in Andalusia. Inequality is often suffered by the local population, and at the same time tourists with low information and low consciousness of the problems are wasting these scarce resources! Some analysts would even question, as in third world countries and wild life areas, the use of airways to come to touristic places.
The integration of touristic projects into the local community, especially into rural life, is requiring the pressure of civil society and farmers movements. Their interest should not be limited to their own particular sectors, because the comprehensive planning of the use of land and resources is part of their own interest.
Populations visited by tourists are ready to sell or offer parts of their products, crafts, songs, dances, festivals and other activities. But who decides and controls the quality of this cultural relationship, to avoid its limitation to dead products?
The visit to a museum or the touristic contact with a region should open and not close the relationship to the living reality there. This is a call to a different experience of the tourists themselves. But when there is a real chance of a living relationship, the call goes mainly to the local population. They can take this chance in their hands, not allowing other interests to decide and organise a market without them. They know their own history and arts, their true cultural products, their living folklore. The decision should belong to them as organised defenders of their own heritage.
Tourism is not only a market. But it has been developed as such for new generations of consumers around the world. Older generations and many poorer populations in the world are still not in a position to enjoy tourism as a positive possibility of visiting other regions and people. The development of new cheap offers should not be left to agencies making a profit from it. Other channels of exchanges between continents and between countries should be opened and used, which don't need to attract clients with the myth of a paradise.
Alternative agencies, alternative links between continents, organisations for contacts between poorer regions (South-South) have to grow. But the distances are still there, and the main challenge of tourism is to really overcome distances. This should be a strategy for itself, not left to tour operators and airline companies.
For good employment conditions, trade unions try to organise workers in cities and industries, but they have more difficulty protecting rural workers coming to touristic places and getting employed in small hotels, restaurants, shops, or even in bigger ones. Social protection should preferably be imposed by law in those places where no branch contracts can be negotiated. Employees in touristic sectors have problems developing their own organisation and defending themselves.
Tourism is one of the employment sectors with low qualification, similar to rural employment and employment in certain small industries. Most of the touristic jobs (in hotels, restaurants, cleaning services, transport) would not allow employees to come to higher responsibilities or better qualifications. The local population lacks opportunities for alternative employment and has an interest in seeking better qualified jobs.
The government is responsible for the quality of the jobs, linked with the quality of the education provided to people in the region. The development of new technologies in touristic areas should be anticipated and reflected in the education programmes for young people coming from rural regions with less technology. The tourist industry is all too prompt to offer only low paid low quality jobs, and the protection against this kind of jobs is a very important task of social services in touristic regions.
Another employment problem there is the reality of high and low seasons. The necessity to provide employment not only in high season but all over the year should be felt by all local authorities in such regions. A broader touristic offer and new attractions are one possibility, another is to look for different businesses and new productions, not limited to construction and maintenance, the two main sectors offering jobs around touristic places. New developments will happen only with the support and mandate of government bodies defending public interests and not purely touristic ones.
4. global dimensions
To be able to understand touristic developments from a global point of view, local populations and social movements definitely need more information and a better education and communication. They should be helped to face the demands coming from transnational financial societies with their investment projects. They would also be able to contribute usefully to new thinking within local government bodies and sometimes even within their national government.
Not all regions are attractive for tourists. But a lack of development is not always due to a lack of attraction. Some attractive third world countries or regions do have touristic development projects. But they should be helped to face the common dilemma as they try to look for new investment. They are asked by the world financial institutions to have no deficit in their public budget and at the same time to spend for new developments. They are requested to improve their state budget through taxes and at the same time to attract new investments through tax facilities and exemptions, although their labour costs are often already very low. The pressure of multinational companies is difficult to resist as a single state, but should be resisted through multilateral decisions in a UN framework (and not OECD!).
Because of the role of civil society in these matters, education and information material are especially needed around following issues:
– Agreements on investments: land planning and the protection of local populations and of their needs, alternatives and choices in the field of job creation
– Promotion of new local products and crafts, requiring qualified employment
– Tourism as part of the new international division of labour, linked with the job destruction in rural areas
– Access to credit for small firms or touristic groups
– Study on the theological and ethical meaning of efficiency in relationship with investment and work
– Cultures and mentalities: psychological reactions of social groups to touristic flows, understanding or misunderstanding of touristic myths and dreams
– Theological critique of western touristic myths and of their global promotion, search for alternatives and new horizons in tourism, sociology of touristic interests and values (the dream to see and touch everything) and the role of medias
– Working life with free time and travel opportunities for all workers, inclusion of holidays and possibility of tourism into normal working conditions – instead of stress, overload, reduction of free time, unequal access to tourism
– Analyses of the interests of tourists as different from the interest of touristic industries
– Studies about the financial flows and profits around tourism
If it is true – as we heard from the Tourist Office in Malaga – that tourism is going to produce 11.5% of the world internal product in 2005, the just access of all social groups to this possibility of contact and discovery should be promoted throughout the world, but also the just relationship of these tourists with the visited populations. People should not only be free to spend money in tourism as they wish (if they can). Ethical values have priority over the freedom to be a client.
Political action is also part of this endeavour towards a new balance of forces in the touristic sector. It is necessary for non-governmental organisations to look carefully all over the world at the social and environmental impact of touristic developments and to use these analyses as instrument for lobbying. Local governments should be asked to commission such impact studies. Trade unions should be asked to analyse the quality of jobs provided by touristic firms in different regions of the world.
Laws have to be proposed and imposed in order to use touristic investment as real development of the country or region, but politicians should be asked and pressed to have a better view of the country's future resulting from such a development, so that cultural risks are avoided (destruction of traditions, of historic places, of social groups), as well as geographical ones (destruction of landscapes, of energy, of rural productions). People should be able to decide what in their country has to be maintained from the past into the future and what new investments have to be promoted.
The role of communication and medias in this respect is very important, so that local populations touched by touristic development can find ways to understand it, to intervene, participate and give orientation to the building of their economic and social structures.
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