ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book addresses different aspects of tourism, through the lenses offered by, or underpinning themes relevant to, political ecology. In the way that tourism encourages struggling communities to envision hopeful futures, so does political ecology provide us with new means of reflecting upon and critiquing relations of power and difference, interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments, and political, economic, and ecological concerns. The fact that countries struggling against the vulnerability and precariousness of unsustainable agriculture industries, natural resource extraction, unfavorable market prices, fluctuating world trade agreements, and devastating natural disasters has led to tourism becoming heralded as a crucial development alternative. The book shows the work of social and environmental anthropologists, political and cultural geographers, management experts, ethnobotanists, as well as humanities and tourism scholars.
