Format/Structure

Roundtable with brief presentations and open discussion to foster exchange on tourism (de)growth and hopeful alternatives.

Long Abstract

Tourism is increasingly contested. Mainstream actors—states, international organisations, and industry stakeholders—continue to promote tourism as a driver of sustainable development and economic growth. Yet critical scholars and communities on the ground highlight tourism’s destructive socio-ecological and socio-spatial consequences: environmental degradation, displacement, exploitation, and the deepening of the “imperial mode of living.” Such consequences have generated intensifying waves of protest and resistance in both the Global South and North, from anti-tourism mobilisations to alternative place-based models of mobility and exchange.

This joint panel brings together critical debates on the political ecologies of tourism (de)growth and touristic contestations to examine how tourism’s futures are being struggled over, reimagined, and transformed. We invite contributions that interrogate dominant “green growth” and sustainable development narratives while foregrounding the alternatives that emerge from below, including degrowth, post-capitalist transitions, buen vivir, and other justice-oriented frameworks. We are particularly interested in how such alternatives are articulated and contested in concrete socio-ecological struggles across urban, rural, island, and protected area contexts.

We also welcome papers that highlight how embodied struggles, discursive debates, and activist initiatives constitute spaces of hope: collective practices and imaginaries that open pathways beyond the current crisis. By centring local agency, grassroots organising, and community-rooted forms of resistance, the panel seeks to pluralise understandings of what tourism is, what it does, and what it could become.

Given POLLEN 2026’s location in Barcelona—a city at the forefront of tourism conflict, anti-tourism protest, and degrowth organising—this panel will foster dialogue across diverse empirical and theoretical contexts. Together we will ask: How is tourism contested as both an economic strategy and a socio-ecological relation? Who gets to define tourism degrowth and alternative mobilities? And how can political ecology help identify and amplify spaces of justice, hope, and transformation in and beyond tourism?

This Roundtable has 9 pending paper proposals.
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