Sustainable development and nature tourism: Valuation and collective action over common pool resources in Holbox, Mexico

Abstract

The commodification of Holbox Island as a tourism destination has been based on the reassessment of available resources particularly common pool resources. By taking the economic broadly, its necessary to objectify the process of production and reproduction jointly. The creation of value is not only the production of the commodity to be put into circulation, this means to take social reproduction to explain the reconfiguration of economic, social and cultural values. In this regard, production and reproduction leads us to the understanding of the ideological processes that frame the material practices in a particular society. Here, I analyse this articulations to reflect upon the ideological streams that frame local livelihoods and social action under the pressure of wider social fields. In Holbox, the novel values that have been circulating under the frame of ecotourism production are land property and wildlife in the sea; both are generated under the rhythms of the two main markets in the region, viz. nature tourism and real estate. But the creation of tourism commodities led to the dispossession of communal property and the dislocation of the possibilities of exploiting marine wildlife under a common pool resources orientation, due to the messy design and implementation of biodiversity protection policies. Through the empirical traces of this case, I explore how rural societies and their definitions of valuable resources are reconfigured under the pressure and struggles of wider fields of hegemonic domination that use development discourses as an end. This dynamics has important contradictions that make this ideological construct a value to be achieved by rural populations, meanwhile inequalities are reproduced endlessly with the circulation of the idea of “improvement” as a common goal.

Keywords: tourism, development, collective action, uneven development.