Paper short abstract:

The paper brings an ethnographic account of how tourism as an entrepreneurial state initiative, in the name of development, constructs a neo-liberal governmentality and becomes a potential peril to the nature and culture of the indigenous people of Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract:

Based on inadequate economic parameters, tourism is often propagated as a prospective and alternative entrepreneurial venture to alleviate poverty and inequality in Bangladesh, intersecting the SDGs-2030 agenda. It rather inflames some critical issues regarding the notion of governmentality, unequal power relations, and disproportionate access to resources surrounding tourism development that breeds a new socio-economic reality for the underprivileged indigenous communities in CHT. This neo-liberal entrepreneurial practice, another mode of capitalist ‘accumulation’, develops states’ discourses that disseminate the notion of tourism as a blessing for sustainability, a channel for peaceful co-existence, and a fundamental pillar of local development which validates and normalizes the process of commodification and privatization of resources and the forceful expulsion of indigenous people. The paper critically deals with some questions to grasp the ground reality: how public actors are showing themselves as ‘savers’, but acting as ‘grabbers’ using tourism with resource management policies; how the indigenous people perceive the politics of entrepreneurship and development trap; how the notion of ‘eco-governmentality’ generates a false dream of sustainability? With a critical anthropological perspective, this study also reveals the local responses to the neoliberal and neocolonial tourism policies where the state constructs subjective discourses to devalue the indigenous wisdom and capacity for eco-cultural resource management which creates an asymmetric market relation between the locals and state-backed traders that contest the perceptions of sustainability and community well-being. It provides first-hand narratives of victims which serve as a baseline for understanding how the state governmentality through tourism policy produces a sustainability paradox.