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

symbolic in the ways that the local or the small-scale is conceptualised as a
counterweight to the seemingly 'monolithic' tendencies of the global market
(Meethan, 2001).
Hence, there is little doubt that globalisation, in regard to the increasing
interconnections between places, is having profound impacts in terms of politics, the
economy, culture and, of course, tourism. Yet one must also be wary of viewing it as
a singular condition that has uniform effects. It is therefore perhaps best to view
globalisation as changing the context in which old certainties are being re-forged,
not as a singular process but as a combination of different influences. In turn this
can be regarded as a form of de-territorialisation in which boundaries, both physical
and conceptual, are less fixed than they have been, and the global flows of
capitalism go hand-in-hand with the global flows of both people and cultures
(Meethan, 2001).
3.5 Tourism as a Development Strategy
The restructuring of global space is partly the result of changes to the pattern of
economic growth and investment which is now played out on a global scale. Spatial
practices are no longer limited to within the boundaries of nation states, and tourism
is no exception (Meethan, 2001). It was during the 1960s that tourism as an actual
form of development first appeared on the global stage (de Kadt, 1979). This initially
involved a shift from the developed economies into the less developed countries in
Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the more economically peripheral
European economies such as Greece and Spain, and during the last two decades,
Africa (Pearce, 1989; Leontidou, 1990; Chant, 1992; Gayle and Goodrich, 1993).
In the first stages of its global spread, tourism, as with many other forms of
economic development, may have appeared as a path to modernity for many of the
less developed countries. For example, during the 1960s many of the newly
independent former colonial states implemented programmes of industrialisation and
infrastructure development programmes of modernisation designed to equip them
with the relevant means of ensuring their economic as well as political freedom
(Meethan, 2001). Unlike other forms of development, tourism has one major
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