ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analytical frame for viewing the nature of the relationship between tourism and development in the era of globalisation. It reviews some of the main theoretical discourses on tourism and development. The chapter focuses on the way that tourism should be understood as a complex system of production, consumption and governance and how forces that can be attributed to globalisation impact on this. Theoretical perspectives on the link between tourism and development have broadly followed trends in the larger development discourse. As such two main approaches have historically dominated understanding of the relationship between tourism and development – modernisation and dependency. In sub-Saharan Africa a substantial proportion of scholarly work on sustainable tourism development has focused on advancing models for community-based tourism. There has been a more vigorous incorporation of culture as analytical and explanatory variable in tourism over the past number of years.
