Chapter 10 Who Owns the Right to Be Visited?
Tourism discourse assumes that tourists have a right to visit places. Freedom of movement is enshrined in international law. Tourism is celebrated as promoting peace through understanding. The right to travel appears as self-evident as any right could be. But who has the corresponding right to decide whether to be visited? This question is rarely asked because the answer might inconvenience tourists.
This chapter argues for host sovereignty: the principle that communities have the primary right to determine whether, how, and by whom they are visited. This is a radical claim in a world organized around tourist entitlement, but it follows directly from principles of self-determination that are otherwise widely accepted. The implications are profound for tourism policy, planning, and ethics.
Begin with the concept of sovereignty. In political theory, sovereignty refers to supreme authority within a territory. Sovereign entities may enter into agreements and alliances, but they do so voluntarily and retain the right to exit. Sovereignty is not absolute (international norms constrain sovereign action) but it is foundational. Without sovereignty, there is no self-determination.
Tourism governance operates as if communities had no sovereignty over their own places. Decisions about tourism development are made by national governments, international organizations, and private corporations. Communities may be consulted, but they rarely have veto power. Tourism happens to them more than it is chosen by them.
This arrangement is justified by the collective benefits that tourism supposedly provides. Tourism creates jobs, generates revenue, promotes development. If communities benefit, they should accept tourism even if they would not have chosen it. Individual objections must yield to collective gains.
But this justification assumes what should be demonstrated: that tourism actually benefits communities. We have already seen reasons to question this assumption. Benefits are often overstated, unevenly distributed, and accompanied by costs that standard accounting ignores. The supposed collective gains may be concentrated in a few hands while costs fall broadly.
More fundamentally, the justification treats communities as aggregations rather than entities with collective interests and rights. It assumes that if enough individuals benefit, the community benefits. But communities are more than the sum of their members. They have character, culture, integrity, and trajectory that can be harmed even when individual members gain.
Consider a neighborhood that transforms under tourism pressure. Housing becomes short-term rentals. Locally owned shops become chain stores. Long-term residents leave and transient populations replace them. Some individuals benefit from these changes: property owners who rent to tourists, entrepreneurs who serve them, workers who find employment. But the neighborhood as a community may be destroyed even as individual members profit from its destruction.
Host sovereignty would give communities the standing to refuse such changes. It would recognize that the community has interests distinct from the aggregated interests of its members, and that these interests deserve protection. It would treat the decision to accept or refuse tourism as belonging to the community itself, not to external actors who claim to know the community's interests better than it does.
The analogy to national sovereignty is instructive. No one argues that developing countries should be forced to accept foreign investment against their will, even if the investment would bring jobs and revenue. We accept that nations have the right to determine their own development paths, even if outsiders think they are choosing poorly. Why should communities have less sovereignty over tourism than nations have over investment?
The objection will come that communities cannot be trusted to make good decisions. They may refuse tourism that would help them. They may be captured by narrow interests. They may lack the information needed to evaluate costs and benefits. External authority is needed to overcome local parochialism.
This objection proves too much. The same could be said about any exercise of self-determination. People may choose badly in elections. Communities may resist beneficial changes. Yet we do not conclude that external authority should override democratic choice. We accept that self-determination sometimes produces suboptimal outcomes because we value self-determination itself.
The information asymmetry argument is particularly weak when applied to tourism. Communities know things about their own situation that external authorities do not. They know which changes they would welcome and which they would resist. They know what aspects of their place are non-negotiable and which are open to modification. They know the texture of their daily lives in ways that planners and consultants cannot.
Host sovereignty does not mean that communities would always refuse tourism. It means they would have the genuine option to refuse. Many communities would welcome tourism under conditions they could accept. Some would refuse entirely. Most would accept with limitations. The point is that the decision would be theirs.
Implementing host sovereignty requires mechanisms that currently do not exist. Communities need legal standing to refuse tourism development. They need the economic capacity to forgo tourism revenue without catastrophe. They need information about alternatives and support for transitions. They need protection from pressures (economic, political, social) that might compromise genuine consent.
Legal mechanisms might include community veto power over tourism permits, binding referenda on tourism development, and judicial review of tourism decisions on sovereignty grounds. Economic mechanisms might include alternative development support, transition funds for communities exiting tourism dependency, and guarantees that refusing tourism does not mean refusing all investment. Informational mechanisms might include independent assessments of tourism impacts, access to alternatives that tourism-promoters do not advertise, and transparent accounting of costs as well as benefits.
These mechanisms would redistribute power fundamentally. Currently, tourism decisions favor tourists, corporations, and governments over communities. Host sovereignty would rebalance toward communities. The effects would ripple through the entire system.
Some destinations might close to tourism entirely. This has precedent. The kingdom of Bhutan strictly limits tourist numbers. Various indigenous communities have refused tourism development. These are not aberrations but exercises of sovereignty that the current system makes difficult. Host sovereignty would make them easier.
Other destinations might radically restructure tourism. Communities might determine visitor numbers, types of acceptable tourism, conditions of entry, and distribution of benefits. They might require tourists to contribute to community purposes rather than just consuming community resources. They might create genuinely reciprocal relationships that the current system's asymmetries prevent.
Still other destinations might continue much as before, but with the crucial difference that their openness is chosen rather than imposed. The legitimacy of tourism depends on genuine consent. Currently, most tourism operates without such consent because communities lack the power to withhold it. Host sovereignty would transform tourism from imposition into invitation.
The transformation would not happen quickly or easily. Vested interests would resist. Habits of entitlement would persist. The infrastructure and institutions of the current system would not dissolve overnight. But the principle would be established, and principles matter. They set the terms for future contests.
Who owns the right to be visited? Not tourists. Not corporations. Not governments. Communities own this right because they own their places, their lives, their futures. Tourism that proceeds without their genuine consent is trespass dressed up as exchange. Host sovereignty is nothing more than the recognition that trespass is wrong.