Pandemic Political Ecologies and Tourism in Tanzania

Keywords: tourism, coloniality, development, pandemic
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 25

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought forth unprecedented and ever-changing crisis and disruption to the global economy. The tourism sector has been brought to the brink and reconfigured economic capital flows and foreign investment in the global south. Nowhere is this more apparent than Tanzania, where pre-pandemic tourism produced 25% of foreign exchange income and 17% of the GDP. This paper draws upon a political ecology framework to examine the impacts, power relationships, and economic outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism in Mafia Island. Mafia Island is an important tourist destination with Africa’s largest marine park and ongoing power contestations between the tourism industry, the government, and local people. Through ethnographic research, I draw upon semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis and archival research to examine policy documents, economic reports and economic change, views and decisions of hotel owners and operators, flows of tourists to and from Tanzania, news media coverage of the pandemic, Tanzanian state responses to the pandemic, and the impact on the tourist industry on Mafia Island. My study reveals how neo-colonial legacies and logic, economic dependence on foreign capital, and state structuring are important factors in shaping how the tourist sector is affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than an opportunity for transformation as some pandemic scholars have argued, I find a reinstallation of unevenness producing further entrenchment in economic dependency on international financial institutions and colonial relations within the tourist industry (Leach et al. 2021).