Paper short abstract:

Using the case study of 'environmental crisis' in Inle Lake Myanmar, this paper explores the ways in which tourism and its affiliated discourses become mobilized as tools for development and consequently shape the co-production of knowledge and political order. It is based on 18 months of fieldwork.

Paper long abstract:

Inle Lake in Myanmar's southern Shan state holds status as one of Myanmar's primary tourist destinations. However, in recent years it has become characterized as an ecosystem facing environmental threats to survival. Popular environmental narratives draw on fears surrounding climate change, pollution, silt accumulation, and the widespread use of agrochemicals on farms in and around the lake. Regional discourses of tourism subsequently situate these environmental challenges within a developmentalist framework that prioritizes the continued enhancement of Inle Lake as a tourism destination.

Much discussion about Inle Lake's environmental situation becomes structured around actionable cause-and-effect "problems" that prohibit the ongoing ability of the environment to sustain its current tourism economy. These narratives are further strengthened by drawing on emotionally laden and symbolic imagery of the lake's people's and traditional ways of life which draw tourist populations to the region.

This has led to the development of oversimplified narratives of environmental crisis. In defining and outlining environmental problems in this simplified format, regulatory interventions by development experts, institutions and government bodies that claim stewardship over land and resources they do not own are legitimized (Forsyth and Walker, 2008: 23). With an uneven division of political and economic power amongst the ethnic groups that neighbor one another in the areas surrounding Inle Lake, the construction of environmental narratives and the knowledge and policies that develop out of them necessarily take on a political dimension. Tourism discourse consequently plays an instrumental role in the coproduction of environmental knowledge and political order.