The Resort Model and Structural Violence

TOURISM IN THE BAHAMAS IS AN INDUSTRY THAT REMOVES locals from 'valuable' tourist land in favour of 'development'. Historically, on many Bahamian islands, the community would not value oceanfront land as much as they would interior land. This was often because they were unable to farm on coastal land given the salt air and spray. Of course, this property was seen as gold to others. As it was swallowed up by speculators and large foreign investors, government became a partner in dislocating residents from the land that once allowed them to live a more traditional life of fishing, crabbing, farming sisal and thatch or straw (locally referred to as 'top'), and harvesting other coastal fare. Over the last ten years, the pace of development and dispossession has gathered speed and is rapidly leaving hundreds of people without land to call their own and without the traditional knowledge and practices that are tied to it. Indigenous culture is undervalued. In the postcolonial state, the value and wealth of local culture should be appreciated. This, however, seems to be a matter forgotten.Government has used foreign direct investment (FDI) as its crutch to remain empowered and in power. The promise of jobs succeeds in placating locals despite the fact that well-trained foreign managers are placed over local workers. The government has signed off on many new exclusive gated communities and high-end resort developments on public cays that have been newly privatised, or partially privatised, for that purpose.The beleaguered Bahamian government recently faced yet another nightmare as the developers of the Baha Mar project on Providence declared chapter eleven bankruptcy in the US state of Delaware in June 2015. The declaration was met by shock, except for those who may have been suspicious when it failed to open on time in March 2015, and worse, failed to warn visitors who had already paid for their bookings to be at the opening. Suspicions indeed grew as the parties sat down for negotiations and employees were told not to report to work for the next few weeks. Months on, the too-big-to-fail development has repeated the fame it earned some four years earlier as too big to succeed.The project had failed around 2011 and most of the original employees had left and found other jobs. Some returned when the work ramped up again, others came on later. The original project had sought to privatise large swaths of Cable Beach, so that public roads, bays and neighbourhoods would have been converted into private, gated communities of waterways and hotels; this was shelved for various reasons, many of which were not made public. When the funders pulled out of the project, the government and developers began to renegotiate the expanse and breadth of the development. The new Heads of Agreement, never made public, delivered to Baha Mar, now advertised as the New Bahamian Riviera, private roads that were once public and ownership of a large expanse of coast.This caused a large public fight, as the government sought to provide the developers with the entire coast along that section of the island, including the only beach in that part of the island that is still public. The community organised against the sale. The company also acquired acres of land that are not contiguous to the effectively gated resort development but geographically distant from the site; on a small island of twenty-one by seven miles, nothing is far, except to those in the local communities.As noted above, the Heads of Agreement, though a 'deal' made in the public interest, has remained out of the public sphere. This is reminiscent of what Erik Paul, in an Australia-based study, has referred to as structural and political violence, where the government controls and exploits the people through their ability to grant or withhold access to information.1 The tourism development legislation, which includes the Hotel Encouragement Act, serves to obfuscate information about development

Business · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Foreign direct investment · Government (linguistics · Indigenous · Political science · Tourism · Cruise Tourism Development and Management · Economic Zones and Regional Development · Law · Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies

• Enclave tourism and its socio-economic impacts in the Okavango Delta, Botswana

  Open Access•Joseph E Mbaiwa•Tourism Management•2005

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