Paper short abstract:

We posit a conceptualisation of the ‘ecotourism/extraction nexus’ that seeks to bring together concrete lived experiences and abstract political economic power structures in order to problematise and ‘defetishize’ the incommensurability associated with the nexus

Paper long abstract:

The material practices and epistemological underpinnings of ecotourism and resource extraction activities are not as incommensurable as they are habitually made out to be. Instead, this paper argues that they are rendered commensurable within ethnographic lived experiences of people in the sites where both activities occur and within the global political economy of neoliberal capitalism. Taking David Harvey's theory of the uneven geographical development of capitalism as our starting point, we posit a conceptualisation of the 'ecotourism/extraction nexus' that seeks to bring together concrete lived experiences and abstract political economic power structures in order to problematise and 'defetishize' the incommensurability associated with the nexus and related ideas about 'sustainable' and 'unsustainable' development. Indeed, we argue that the abstract power of capital to shape lives and legitimate seemingly endless forms of accumulation and appropriation becomes especially concrete in ostensible contradictions such as the ecotourism/extraction nexus.