ABSTRACT
It is a generally accepted supposition that tourism brings about change and thus has impacts and effects on the localities and communities in which it takes place. The conventional treatment of such impacts is to categorise them into three groups, economic, environmental and social, but such a division both is too simple and misses a number of other areas in which tourism has impacts. One such area is that of politics and the bringing about of political change. Such changes are often bidirectional rather than unidirectional; that is, tourism brings about changes in the political realm but also responds to and is itself changed by political factors. This relationship of tourism with governance and politics has been relatively neglected compared with research conducted in the three main areas of impact studies. The chapter will develop a framework to place such impacts and changes in a theoretical context, particularly in relation to the other impacts of tourism and the level of politics at which such impacts take place. This chapter will examine what changes in political systems and approaches have been influenced and caused by tourism, using examples from specific countries and regions, including Cuba, Egypt, Turkey, China, the United States and the United Kingdom. Changes include those in personnel, in international relations, in development policy, in border-crossing procedures and in treaty agreements, and occur in both origin and destination countries. The chapter will demonstrate how complex the relationship between the political realm and tourism is and the interplay between the different forms of tourism and the likely impacts upon politics, politicians and the international scene.
