Towards a Poststructural Political Economy of Tourism

To increase sustainability in tourism destinations, tourism research has highlighted the need for collective economic agency in destination localities. To date, research has tended to draw on multiple, often contradicting, theoretical perspectives in an attempt to clarify how collective agency in tourism destinations should be best organized in order to foster social justice and ecological sustainability.

In her thesis, Kulusjärvi introduces a poststructural political economy approach for the study of economic agency and sustainability transformation in the Finnish North. The less growth-focused economic thinking and value-driven collective actions are brought to light as valuable forms of economic practice, also with respect to overall destination development. It is argued that this unconventional view on economic path creation is to be encouraged as it is better in line with climate change mitigation needs.