Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how shorter work-time debates intersect with top-down tourism governance. It examines how expanded free time may empower citizens , challenge growth-oriented models, and enable non-extractive forms of travel grounded in cultural, ecological and personal flourishing.

Presentation long abstract

Since the 18th century, theorists including Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes, and Webb have argued that technological progress would eventually enable societies to reduce working hours. However, in most Western democracies, the 37–40-hour workweek has become an entrenched, rarely questioned standard. Although opposition to shorter working hours is frequently ascribed to economic concerns and fears of profitability, other tension exists: political unease about the potential for increased autonomy among populations arising from expanded free time.

Humanistic and psychological traditions, as articulated by Maslow and Fromm, conceptualize time free of duties time as essential for self-development and social flourishing. As Navarro Navarro (2018) notes, trade unions attempted to direct free time away from vice and toward education, nature, and collective organization, practices that align with Sen’s capability approach and Adela Cortina’s ethics of civic responsibility.

This paper situates these debates within the context of the political ecologies of tourism governance. Tourism represents a domain in which free time is commodified, directed, and regulated through policies that frequently perpetuate extractivist logics. If productive labor were restructured to prioritize social and ecological needs over consumerist imperatives, leisure and tourism could be fundamentally transformed. Such a shift might enable forms of mobility that promote personal and civic enrichment, reflecting the visions of William Morris and the practices advocated by John Ruskin.

By analysing the intersection of top-down tourism policies with prevailing temporal regimes, this paper explores how reduced working hours could facilitate non-extractive, autonomy-enhancing forms of travel and support more democratic, ecologically grounded leisure trajectories.