The Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus: Political Economies and Rural Realities of (un)Comfortable Bedfellows

Ecotourism and natural resource extraction may be seen as contradictory pursuits, yet in reality they often take place side by side, sometimes even supported by the same institutions. Existing academic and policy literatures generally privilege oppositions and transitions between "sustainable" and "unsustainable" development, and as a result, the phenomenon of ecotourism in areas concurrently affected by extraction industries remains understudied. However, such a scenario is in fact increasingly common in resource-rich developing nations in the political-economic context of late capitalism. This edited volume aims to conceptualise and empirically analyse the 'ecotourism / extraction nexus' within the context of broader rural and livelihood changes in the places where both these activities occur. The volume's central premise is that these seemingly contradictory activities are empirically and conceptually more alike than often imagined, and find their common ground both in ethnographic lived experiences in rural settings as well as broader political economic structures of power and control. The book will both offer theoretical reflections on why these two phenomena are systematically decoupled, and epistemologically and analytically re-link them through ethnographic case studies drawing on research from around the world.