the role of tourism in natural resource management in the okavango ...

conceptualised as a global process of commodification and consumption involving
flows of people, capital, images and cultures (Appadurai, 1990; Lanfant et ai, 1995;
Clifford, 1997; Frow, 1997). In terms of its economic value and global spread,
tourism is growing at an exponential rate. At this macro level, a number of factors,
from the growth of multinational corporations to the ways in which nation states
attempt to control and regulate the globalising trends of the tourist system for their
own purposes, such as using tourism to achieve economic growth and development,
need to be analysed (Elliott, 1997). The issue of commodification, the ways in which
material culture, people and places become objectified for the purpose of the global
market must also be addressed (Meethan, 2001).
For all its global spread, tourism is also associated with the specificity of places, with
the processes by which sights are demarcated and set apart from the mundane,
becoming in effect the commodities to be sold in the global market place. In this
sense, there is also a need to focus on the ways in which the global and systematic
properties of the tourist industry are manifest at the micro or local level of daily life.
In effect, this means analysing tourism in terms of the relationships and forms of
mediation between the macro level of the global tourist system, and the micro level
of lived experiences, or more simply, in terms of the interactions and dynamics that
exist between the global and local (Meethan, 2001).
Globalisation and development theories will be adopted within this study in trying to
develop a framework that encompasses all aspects of the 'international tourism and
local resource utilisation relationship'. These theories which deal primarily with the
conceptualisation of the structures and mechanisms that underlie existing world­
wide economic developmental problems, and the processes that aid and abate
regional underdevelopment will be utilised to better understand local transformations
resulting from global capitalist processes. As Torres (1996, p. 17) states, "...global
acceptance of a common capitalist paradigm has resulted in profound
transformations of local economic, social, cultural, political and environmental
processes. Rapid and widespread adoption of modern communication and
transportation has facilitated a 'time-space compression' (Pred, 1993), significantly
enhancing the ability of global forces to reconfigure local realities. The mediation
between local and global forces has resulted in a restructuring of the relations of
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