Paper short abstract:

This paper explores disconnects in Bhutan’s high-value low-impact tourism policy as the country negotiates wider networks of capitalism, aspirations of modernity, tourist imaginaries, shifting geopolitics, social media webs, narratives of neoliberal development, and received wisdom of conservation.

Paper long abstract:

In the remote Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, the ground-breaking policy of high-value, low-impact tourism exemplifies conservation, nature tourism, degrowth, and embodies Gross National Happiness (GNH), a living development alternative that challenges GDP-growth metrics. Intended to limit tourist impact on the country’s pristine environment and unique cultural practices, the policy provides valuable foreign revenue for national development. Based on spiritual-ecological understandings of human-environment relations, it is founded on Buddhist cosmological understanding and respect for all sentient beings. This paper overviews Bhutan’s distinct tourism policy in relation to conservation, degrowth and GNH, while exploring newfound fractures and fissures as the country is threatened by wider networks of capitalism, aspirations of modernity, tourist imaginaries, shifting geopolitics, webs of social media connectivity, and at times, uncritical received narratives of neoliberal development. Three domains of enquiry throw into sharp relief disconnects between GNH/degrowth and GDP/capitalism, as well as loopholes in tourism policy and conservation practice: suspension of the tourism policy due to COVID19, the politics of regional tourism, and in less-travelled and conservation regions; co-option and misrepresentation of Bhutan’s environment, culture, and history by foreign journalists and professional bloggers for personal gain and self-aggrandisement; and the colonization of the tourism and exploitation of nature tourism sector by foreign tour companies for personal profit. Such unchecked trends will likely result in high-volume, low-value tourism that distorts GNH through narrow GDP-business models, mass-consumer marketing, web-based apps, online-user sociological behaviour research, hyper individualism, and the paradoxical hallowing out of context-specific indigenous environmental knowledge, Buddhist ethics and wellbeing.