Journal of Sustainable Tourism

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Reconstructing tourism in the Caribbean:

connecting pandemic recovery, climate resilience
and sustainable tourism through mobility justice

Mimi Sheller

To cite this article: Mimi Sheller (2021) Reconstructing tourism in the Caribbean: connecting
pandemic recovery, climate resilience and sustainable tourism through mobility justice, Journal of
Sustainable Tourism, 29:9, 1436-1449, DOI: 10.1080/09669582.2020.1791141

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1791141

Published online: 14 Jul 2020.

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JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM
2021, VOL. 29, NO. 9, 1436–1449
https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1791141

Reconstructing tourism in the Caribbean: connecting

pandemic recovery, climate resilience and sustainable
tourism through mobility justice
Mimi Sheller
Department of Sociology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Caribbean islands that are highly dependent on tourism are facing com- Received 7 November 2019
pounding crises from climate-related disasters to the Covid-19 pandemic Accepted 28 June 2020
travel disruption. The rebuilding of tourism infrastructure has often
KEYWORDS
been one of the main aims of international development aid and
Caribbean; climate justice;
regional government responses to natural disasters. This article seeks to coloniality; COVID-19;
identify other ways in which Caribbean small island states and non- disaster; mobility justice;
independent territories might rebuild more sustainable ecologies and sustainability; tourism
economies as they come out of the pandemic within the ongoing cli-
mate crisis. The first part shows the historical grounding of climate
change vulnerability in colonial histories, neoliberal capitalism and
ongoing practices of “extractive” tourism. This analysis of the “coloniality
of climate” centers on a critique of disaster tourism during these
“unnatural disasters,” and allows for re-framing the ethical and political
implications of tourism recovery when other human im/mobilities (such
as migration) are severely curtailed. The article then elaborates on the
theoretical concept of “mobility justice” as a way to think through the
problem of sustainability transitions in relation to tourism mobilities, cli-
mate change and disaster recovery. The final section considers alterna-
tive visions for disaster reconstruction in the Caribbean centering food
sovereignty, agroecology and regenerative economies, as promoted by
community-based organizations and people’s assemblies.

Introduction
One of the first sectors of the global economy to be severely disrupted by the coronavirus pan-
demic was tourism. By April 2020, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) reported an
“80 percent fall in flights worldwide while the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) calculates
that up to 75 million jobs in tourism and travel are currently at risk” (Ewing-Chow, 2020, n.p.).
1.326 billion international tourists travelled in 2017 (UNWTO, 2017) and the World Travel and
Tourism Council (2017) had forecast that tourism would grow 4 percent annually until 2025.
Now, declines in international tourist arrivals globally for 2020 are conservatively predicted at
between 20 and 30 percent by the World Trade Organization, but some “economists and tourism
officials have indicated that the decline could be as high as 60 percent particularly in light of the
extension of limitations on travel through the summer period” (Ewing-Chow, 2020, n.p.).
Ongoing health concerns until a vaccine is widely available, the decline in many travelers’

CONTACT Mimi Sheller mimi.sheller@drexel.edu

ß 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 1437

disposable incomes, the restructuring of airlines and reductions in service frequencies, and
increased industry operating costs are all expected to contribute to an ongoing decline in tour-
ism, possibly “ending the era of cheap long-haul vacations” (Jessop, 2020, n.p.). The sudden shift
from “over-tourism” to fears of “non-tourism,” argue Stefan Go €ssling, Daniel Scott and C. Michael
Hall, indicates an unprecedented crisis for tourism, which “holds important messages regarding
the resilience of the tourism system, also in regard to other ongoing crises that are not as imme-
diate, but potentially more devastating than COVID-19, such as climate change” (2020, p. 3).
This collapse of tourism-based economies around the world will especially hurt small island
developing states (SIDS), a United Nations category that includes many islands that are both
highly dependent on tourism and highly vulnerable to climate change. “On average, the tourism
sector accounts for almost 30% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the SIDS,” according to
the World Travel & Tourism Council data (Coke-Hamilton, 2020, p. 1). With the fall in tourism
earnings predicted to have devastating effects on tourism-dependent economies, some argue
that there is an urgent need to rebuild more sustainable economies and societies “beyond
tourism” (Thompson, 2020), and there can be no getting “back to normal” under the circumstan-
ces (Go €ssling et al., 2020). There was already a longstanding critique of the problematic reliance
on so-called “development” through tourism, which had many negative impacts on small islands.
Campling, for example, argued that for “the genuine ‘sustainable development’ of SIDS, a popu-
lar democratic base of island citizens must exist within island societies that in turn cooperate
and coordinate – including material, political–social and operational linkages – across the spa-
tially disparate regions of the global oceans” (Campling, 2006: 1). More recently, Cave and
Dredge (2020, n.p.) point out that “Rising concerns about climate change, overtourism, declining
employment and labour conditions and resource degradation have all highlighted the inad-
equacy of the current capitalist system in addressing the failures of mass tourism. Now, under
COVID-19, there are calls for tourism to move beyond ‘business as usual’ and to find a pathway
to regenerative tourism.” Such regenerative tourism would embrace alternative non-capitalist
forms of ownership, non-monetary exchange and beneficial community-based development.
The linkage between tourism and climate change is also a key area of research, that has
driven calls for reform of the carbon-intensity of the tourism sector globally (Becken & Hay, 2007;
Hall, 2019). This would appear to be a compelling moment not simply to rebuild existing tour-
ism-dependent economies, but to find new approaches to reduce this over-dependence on tour-
ism, to mitigate the heavy carbon-footprint of tourism, as well as to repair the harmful effects of
“over tourism” (Dodds, 2019; Dodds & Butler, 2019), prevent the unintended consequences of
ecotourism (Duffy, 2002, 2008; Co rdoba Azcarate, 2020), adapt to the predicted disruptions that
climate change emergencies will bring to tourism (Becken & Hay, 2007; Hall & Higham, 2005;
Reddy & Wilkes, 2012); and to “reconsider tourism’s growth trajectory” and “accelerate the trans-
formation of sustainable tourism” (Go €ssling et al., 2020: 13, 15). Efforts in this direction have
included overviews of existing projects in a special issue of Tourism Planning and Development
(2018, Issue 5) on Diverse Economies, which explored alternative economic models; and a recent
issue of Tourism Geographies (published online May 2020) on visions of travel and tourism after
the global COVID-19 Pandemic (see Lew et al., 2020).
While there is a large body of existing work on the relationship between tourism, sustainabil-
ity, and resilience in small island contexts (e.g. Kelman, 2018, 2020; Mowforth and Munt, 2015;
Mahon et al., 2013; Pelling & Uitto, 2001), and on the wider environmental impacts of tourism
(Go€ssling, 2002; Go€ssling & Hall, 2006; Go€ssling et al., 2016), the collapse of travel brought on by
the coronavirus pandemic adds a new complicating factor to consider. In a context of the severe
economic disruption this has brought, as well as the increasing risks from natural hazards associ-
ated with intensifying climate change, what are the implications of tourism and tourists in disas-
ter recovery processes in these small island contexts? Beyond the economic analysis by tourism
agencies and governments, there is a need for critical historical perspectives on tourism. This art-
icle will develop a critical historical perspective on the question of tourism futures in the
1438 M. SHELLER

Caribbean region in the face of the emergency of the pandemic, the ongoing disasters brought
about by climate change, and the chronic “slow disasters” of indebtedness, neoliberal austerity,
and poverty that have affected the region and contributed to a “politics of delay” (Anderson,
2016, 2017; Bonilla, 2020; Carrigan, 2015; Kwate & Threadcraft, 2017; Nixon, 2013).
Methodologically, this paper represents a conceptual and theoretical reflection, building on
two decades of experience working in Caribbean studies (e.g. Sheller, 2003, 2004, 2012, 2020)
and mobilities research (Sheller, 2018a, Sheller & Urry, 2006, 2016), while also drawing on empir-
ical examples from recent events in the region. The first section introduces the problem of tour-
ism recovery after disasters in relation to discourses of “disaster capitalism”, “disaster tourism,”
“volontourism,” and the wider understanding of tourism as a form of extractive economy
founded upon uneven mobilities and the consumption of the labor, natural resources, and pro-
duced spaces of the Caribbean. The next section develops the notion of the “coloniality of
climate” to describe the deep historical roots of climate and disaster vulnerability in the
Caribbean region, and expands upon the ideas of resilience and reconstruction in terms of “slow
disasters” and historical inequities. The third section elaborates on the theoretical concept of
“mobility justice” to think through the problem of sustainability transitions in relation to tourism
mobilities, as one key part of high-carbon-emitting mobility regimes that have contributed to
the differential impacts of climate change. The final section considers alternative visions for sus-
tainable tourism as part of disaster reconstruction in the Caribbean centering food sovereignty,
agroecology, and regenerative economies, as promoted by community-based organizations and
people’s assemblies.

Tourism recovery after disasters

As Caribbean islands seek to recover economically from the global recession brought on by the
coronavirus pandemic, as well as recent hurricanes and other natural disasters, how can they
rebuild their economies in climate-proof and sustainable ways that are less tourism dependent?
Caribbean islands are highly vulnerable to hurricanes, having been hard hit in recent years, for
example, by Hurricane Matthew striking Haiti in October, 2016; Hurricane Irma barreling through
the northeastern Caribbean from 6th to 12th September, 2017, devastating Barbuda, French and
Dutch Saint Martin, Anguilla, Tortola and other parts of the British Virgin Islands, the US Virgin
Islands, some of the outer islands of the Bahamas and areas of Puerto Rico, the Dominican
Republic, and Haiti, before sweeping across Florida; quickly followed by Hurricane Maria’s devas-
tating blow especially to Dominica, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the US Virgin Islands, the Turks and
Caicos, from 16th to 20th September, 2017. Finally, the slow-moving Category Five Hurricane
Dorian (28th August to 12th September 2019) razed entire communities in Grand Bahama and
the Abacos, becoming the most intense tropical storm ever to hit the Bahamas.
While these island communities were still recovering from the hurricanes, in early 2020, the
COVID-19 pandemic hit. As soon as governments realized that the novel coronavirus was travel-
ing quickly with people on the move, one of the first steps they took was to control air travel
and stop cruise ship arrivals. Early COVID-19 outbreaks on the Diamond Princess cruise ship,
which was quarantined in Yokohama in February 2020, and the Grand Princess cruise ship, which
was quarantined off Oakland in March 2020, sent this industry, so crucial to the Caribbean
region, into a tailspin. Soon thereafter many countries began to close borders except for return-
ing citizens. This left tourists, and other international travelers such as students, scrambling to
get home, while many cruise ship workers were exposed to the virus and trapped on ships that
were rebuffed from multiple ports of call. This sudden closure of global transportation networks
quickly led to the emptying of hotels, the closing of tourism sites, and a huge downturn in
future bookings, with potentially devastating effects on tourism-dependent Caribbean economies
(Jessop, 2020). These recent disruptive events provoke us to ask how the Caribbean region can
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 1439

create more sustainable futures. SIDS are highly dependent on tourism as one of the main pillars
of their economy and tourism depends heavily on well-functioning infrastructure. Rebuilding
tourism and transport infrastructure after natural disasters has often been one of the main “quick
fix” recovery projects undertaken in Caribbean islands that have been hit by environmental cri-
ses. However, there are numerous problems with tourism recovery in the current situation, echo-
ing previous problems with tourism “development” more generally, but especially problems with
post-disaster reconstruction.
Whether in post-earthquake Haiti in 2010, or post-hurricane Puerto Rico in 2017, the rebuild-
ing of hotels and travel infrastructure took place despite ongoing health crises, power outages,
and lack of housing, roads, and other services in many local communities. Such inequitable
recovery and rebuilding processes have generated extensive debates about neoliberal “land
grabs”, “disaster capitalism”, and “the shock doctrine” or “trauma doctrine” amongst critical
thinkers (Bonilla & LeBron, 2019; Johnson, 2011; Klein, 2018; Yeampierre & Klein, 2017). This kind
of reconstruction creates a divergence between the easy access of foreign travelers (including
non-governmental emergency responders, humanitarian volunteers, researchers and tourists) and
the lack of mobility for locals, especially internally displaced residents who may be refused visas
to travel elsewhere or deported if they are not citizens (Bonilla & LeBron, 2019; Nixon, 2019;
Sheller, 2018b, 2020). Indeed, the arrival of humanitarian responders may even be associated
with problematic forms of “disaster tourism.” For example, some suggest that “medical missions
following the Haiti quake were usually conducted by professionals with a true desire to give aid,
but, just as often, the missions became examples of ‘medical disaster tourism’ in which practi-
tioners were motivated by a desire to be visibly immersed in a heavily mediatized disaster spec-
tacle (Van Hoving et al., 2010, p. 201)” (Cited in Kaussen, 2015, p. 38; and see Sheller, 2020).
Recent discourses and geographies of “voluntourism” as a kind of niche tourism predicated
upon “giving back” (Germann Molz, 2017; Mostafanezhad, 2014) show the ways that humanitar-
ian travel is implicated in capitalist development projects and forms of spatial rescaling associ-
ated with extractive economies (Co rdoba Azcarate, 2020). These forms of extractive tourism are
intensified by post-disaster rebuilding processes and raise key issues around “moral encounters
in tourism” (Mostafanezhad & Hannam, 2016). Furthermore, tourist use of large internal-combus-
tion vehicles, extensive air travel, and greater energy consumption exacerbates climate change,
which in turn disrupts the lives of the lowest-income regions of the world who are least respon-
sible for causing the climate crisis, leading to calls for the decarbonization of tourism (Hall, 2009;
Hall & Higham, 2005). The mobilities of the “kinetic elite” (including voluntourists, foreign
humanitarians and even international academic researchers) then enable them to stage humani-
tarian responses to disasters, while keeping disaster-affected populations contained at a distance
(Sheller, 2020). All these forms of tourism mobilities remake space, scale and power, as Co rdoba
Azcarate argues, and are thus implicated in reproducing uneven geographies.
Many Caribbean theorists also consider these kinds of tourism economies to be an extension
of colonialism. In her book, Resisting Paradise, Angelique Nixon engages with artists and writers
who critique the overdependence of the Caribbean on tourism, and shows how those critiques
are “grounded in a resistance to paradise: defined as exposing the lie and burden of creating
and sustaining notions of paradise for tourism and the extent to which this drastically affects
people” (Nixon 2017, p. 4). Community-based grassroots movements in the Caribbean have pro-
posed reconstruction projects based on more sustainable mobilities, low-impact tourism, visions
for alternative development and alternatives to capitalism. Community-based organizations and
advocacy networks such as the Platform for Alternative Development in Haiti (PAPDA), or the
Boricua Organization for Ecological Agriculture in Puerto Rico, as discussed further below, seek
to move beyond hegemonic global North perspectives on “resilience” by highlighting radical
opportunities for sustainable development linked to environmental justice, food justice and cli-
mate justice (Sheller, 2018c, 2020). I argue that these critical alternative development strategies
can help Caribbean island-nations and territories to become less reliant on tourism and
1440 M. SHELLER

ultimately more sustainable, more equitable, and less vulnerable to climate change. This matches
the call by Cave and Dredge (2020, n.p.) for a “diverse economies framework” that “envisages
the co-existence of capitalist, alternative capitalist and non-capitalist practices and provides a
pathway to more resilient and regenerative tourism practices in tourism.”

The coloniality of climate

The Central American and Caribbean region has been identified for some time as one of the glo-
bal climate change “hot spots” particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change (Giorgi
2006). Climate models generally predict that various regions of the Caribbean will become drier,
with mean annual temperatures increasing by between 1 and 5  C by the 2080s, and the great-
est warming and decrease in rainfall occurring around the Greater Antilles (Mimura et al., 2007;
Taylor, M., Clarke, L., Centella, A., Bezanilla, A., Stephenson, T., Jones, J., Campbell, J. et al. 2018).
Jamaican climate scientist Michael Taylor and colleagues have identified clear and unprece-
dented threats to the region, describing the current conditions as a “new climate regime”:
At no point in the historical records dating back to the late 1800s have two category five storms made
landfall in the small Caribbean island chain of the eastern Antilles in a single year. The intensification almost
overnight from a tropical storm to a category five hurricane and the devastating intensity that lingered for
several days are also unfamiliar, even to a region that is used to seeing hurricanes. Alongside other
emerging climate patterns, there is a strong case to be made that there is something unfamiliar about the
Caribbean’s climate today (Taylor, 2017, n.p; and see Taylor et al., 2012)

Increasing sea surface temperatures are contributing to decreases in total rainfall across the
region, alongside intensification of the Atlantic Warm Pool which may accentuate tropical storm
activity. Due to the El Nin ~ o-Southern Oscillation effect, historic droughts have already led to
water rationing in most large cities across the Caribbean as well as sizable agricultural losses in
recent years (Gonzalez, et al., 2017; Taylor et al., 2018).
Climate change also exacerbates other anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic environmental
stressors, including the bleaching of coral reefs, loss of seagrass beds, severe beach erosion, salt-
water intrusion and deforestation. The Global Americans working group (2019, p. 1) notes that
“specific hazards such as rising sea levels, warming temperatures, deforestation, and more fre-
quent and extreme weather events, place the Caribbean at higher risk, to the point of coastal
communities and entire islands potentially disappearing if the dangers of global warming are
not addressed collectively and urgently today.” The projected consequences of climate change
for the Caribbean, they note, have strong implications for the long-term development of the
entire region, with sectors at higher risk including tourism, fisheries, agriculture, human settle-
ments and infrastructure.
If the current climate situation can be described by scientists as “unfamiliar” and
“unprecedented,” however, this does not imply that it does not have historical roots. And the
way in which we conceptualize climate vulnerability has important implications for how we think
about the recovery of tourism after disruptions. It is crucial to recognize the complex historical
factors that contribute to current vulnerabilities of tourism-dependent islands. As Ilan Kelman
(2014, p. 120) has argued, “the rhetoric emphasising climate change as today’s biggest problem
[for SIDS] might be neglecting the past history of development theory, policy and practice;” and
in doing so it depoliticizes responses to climate change. Kelman argues that the emphasis on
physical hazards rather than SIDS’ vulnerabilities “tends to distract from other long-term develop-
ment challenges” and “tends to shift focus away from opportunities for reducing vulnerability,
including during community reconstruction.” Instead we should be focusing on the ongoing
“deep-seated problems such as poor resource access, inequity, exploitation, lack of choices avail-
able, marginalisation and injustice” (Ibid).
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 1441

This critique implies a need to think politically about forms of vulnerability and resilience in
relation to the tourism sector’s recovery in the future, which also connects to recent Caribbean
perspectives on “climate justice.” In an overview of “climate justice” issues in the Caribbean
region, Baptiste April and Kevon Rhiney (2016, p. 17) argue that “marginalized groups experience
climate change effects differently from the wealthy and privileged, and this vulnerability must be
adequately addressed both from a political and an ethical perspective.” Puerto Rican anthropolo-
gist Yarimar Bonilla likewise crucially wrote of the 2017 hurricanes in the Caribbean,
“vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial
condition” (Bonilla, 2017, n.p.). And Cruz-Martinez et al. (2018) refer to recent Caribbean hurri-
canes as “not-so-natural disasters.” Many now refer to seemingly “natural” hazards such as hurri-
canes and earthquakes as “unnatural disasters”, because of the ways in which risk and
vulnerability are structured by all too human structures of inequality (Kelman et al., 2016;
O’Keefe et al., 1976).
Beyond the question of histories of vulnerability, I want to additionally suggest that the
Caribbean region’s climate change vulnerability is not simply a “natural fact” but is a result both
of coloniality in the past and of neocolonial restructuring today, including the expansion of
extractive and unsustainable modes of tourism. Modern Caribbean spatialities were originally
grounded in the political economy of the transatlantic plantation economy and a four-century
system of slavery in the Atlantic world. Struggles over emancipation in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries restructured Caribbean geographies, polities and ecologies, as did later
movements for decolonization and independence in the twentieth century, leaving a highly frag-
mented patchwork of independent and nonindependent territories. Capitalism, colonialism and
slavery changed climate in the past because they relied on massive deforestation, which drove
declines in island rainfall (Grove, 1995), soil depletion and resource extraction (Sheller, 2014 ),
while feeding into coal-based and later oil-based industrial development in the Global North
(Bond, 2017). Neoliberal forms of capitalism continue to degrade Caribbean environments and
drive climate change today, while simultaneously creating the uneven gradients of vulnerability
to climate change consequences (Sheller, 2020). The uneven impacts of climate change cause
severe harm to the most vulnerable groups, while the wealthy peoples and nations of the Global
North are able to buffer the impacts to a far greater extent and recover more quickly—often
while relying on continuing resource extraction from the Global South.
But what is the role of tourism and tourism-dependence in structuring such risks and vulner-
abilities? Tourism continues to benefit from these uneven geographies of risk and vulnerability.
Tourism is not simply a casualty of climate change, but is a major contributor to its causes and
its uneven harms (Becken & Hay, 2007). The coloniality of climate brings into view “the
Anthropocene as a racial process” that continues to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and
death” as Lindo Pulido puts it (Pulido, 2017). This kind of coloniality of climate is not an event
that happened in the past, but is an ongoing relation of uneven consumption based on the
exploitation and sacrifice of some peoples and ecologies for the benefit of others (Sheller, 2003).
And tourism, it turns out, is a crucial part of Anthropocene mobilities and exacerbates the
ongoing uneven geographies of climate vulnerability. The heavy fossil-fuel consumption associ-
ated with long-haul flights to the Caribbean, the marine diesel consumed by mega-sized cruise
ships, and the general use of vehicles, air-conditioning, electricity and energy-consuming build-
ings by tourists not only places a heavy burden on the local infrastructure of small islands, but
also exacerbates the conditions of unequal exposure to climate change risks. Tourism also gener-
ates additional fossil fuel consumption related to the importation of food, goods and services,
the disproportionate use of essential natural bodies such as water, plants and animals for food
and excessive waste that cannot be processed locally, damaging Caribbean ecologies
(Figueroa, 2006).
Recent hurricanes and droughts, as well as the economic collapse of tourism due to the
Covid-19 pandemic, lay bare the underlying social, political and economic vulnerability of many
1442 M. SHELLER

Caribbean islands, which were already formed by the deep-seated social, political, and economic
conditions of coloniality, neoliberalism and tourism-dependence. After any natural disaster, the
“islanding effect” can make victims appear to be isolated by island geography, when in fact
humanitarian responders and volontourists have vast capabilities for aeromobility, and are soon
coming and going to work on aid projects, missions building schools and orphanages, and
spring break volunteer trips in what becomes a kind of disaster tourism (Kaussen, 2015; Sheller,
2013, 2016, 2020). As many island studies scholars have pointed out, islands are not completely
isolated but are relational, connected, and are always “part of complex cross-cutting relations,
assemblages, networks, mobilities, spatial fluxes and flows” (Chandler & Pugh, 2020: 1; and see
Baldacchino & Clark, 2013). Thus it is crucial to understand the flows of tourism as part and par-
cel of the atmospheric flows of CO2, the spatial flux of disaster vulnerabilities, the vectors of
COVID-19 infection, the circulation of waste onto and around islands (Arnall & Kothari, in press),
and other human and non-human assemblages of risk.
Central to the field of disaster studies, therefore, are questions of the temporality of disaster,
including various concepts of “slow disaster,” “slow emergencies,” and “slow violence,” which
each seek to address the deeper temporalities of disaster in relation to coloniality, racial capital-
ism, and vulnerability to the impacts of toxic pollution and climate change (Anderson, 2016,
2017; Bonilla, 2020; Carrigan, 2015; Davies, 2018; Kwate & Threadcraft, 2017; Nixon, 2013). Hence,
rather than understanding recent disasters as posing a threat to tourism economies in the
Caribbean, and seeking government investment or international loans to rebuild them, we
should instead understand extractive forms of tourism as a threat to the creation of sustainable
Caribbean economies, and we should take the current interruption of global travel as an oppor-
tunity to re-think forms of radical reconstruction and post-tourism sustainable development. In
the following section, I will elaborate on this argument through theoretical concepts from the
field of critical mobility studies, which helps make clearer the connections between tourism
mobilities and mobility justice issues.

Mobility justice
“Mobility justice” (Sheller 2018a) is a concept for thinking across scales and fields of action that
can help place everyday tourist practices and landscapes in relation to wider uneven mobility
infrastructures. It allows us to better understand the implications of tourism mobilities for climate
change and climate justice. As an overarching concept for thinking about how power and
inequality inform the governance and control of movement, mobility justice reveals travel and
tourism as mobility regimes that have deep historical roots in colonial racial capitalism in the
Americas and that have ongoing connections to the reproduction of vulnerability. Questions of
mobility justice remain crucial to many key issues facing Caribbean societies today, ranging from
migration, deportation, diaspora and borders, to tourism, ecology, and land use planning, and to
communication infrastructure, digital access, and cultural circulation. Here I will focus on uneven
human mobilities associated with tourism and migration.
Problems of uneven motility and of mobility rights, ethics and justice have become crucial to
the field of critical mobility studies (Urry 2000, 2007; Bergmann & Sager, 2008; Cresswell, 2006),
and the nexus of transport, tourism, and climate change in the Caribbean is a prime instance of
these concerns. There has been increasing attention to concepts such as “differential mobility”,
“uneven mobilities” , “motility” or “potential mobilities” (Flamm & Kaufmann, 2006; Kellerman,
2012), “mobility capabilities” (Kronlid, 2008), and questions of power, justice and mobility rights
(Faulconbridge & Hui, 2016). There is a “politics of mobility,” or kinopolitics, organized around
“constellations” of movement, meaning and practice, as Tim Cresswell describes it (Cresswell,
2010). Mobilities are uneven, differential, and unequal, and come together through these com-
bined lived experiences and their meanings, which may be internalized through travelers’
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 1443

acquiescence to “governmobility” (Baerenholdt, 2013). This has significant implications for tour-
ism and its sustainability. We can begin to see that uneven powers of “motility” – meaning the
capability for mobility and control over the mobility of others – and differential “accessibility” to
various kinds of spaces and social goods are not just the result of social inequalities, but are pro-
ductive of those hierarchical systems of differentiation, through various kinds of enablement and
disablement. And tourism is one of the key ways in which such hierarchies of differentiated
motility are produced, maintained and experienced.
Control of the transport corridors across both sea space and air space is part of this production
of differential mobilities. While islands are traditionally conceived of as surrounded by water, air-
ports and air travel serve as the most important sites of contemporary human and non-human
mobilities across the Caribbean region, a vast archipelago of politically fragmented island-states
and extended statehood systems (De Jong & Kruijt, 2006). The sea connects it all, but so too does
the air. As Peter Adey (2010) suggests “air space” has a shape and a geography – and it is one
shaped by coloniality and racial bordering. Chandra Bhimull, for example, has crucially shown how
airline travel across the British Empire “retained the racialist ideas and practices that were
embedded in British imperialism, and these ideas shaped every aspect of how commercial aviation
developed, from how airline routes were set, to who could travel easily and who could not”
(Bhimull, 2017; see also Lin, 2016). These colonial aerial geographies remain central to uneven
Caribbean aerial geographies today, alongside maritime geographies of coast guards, naval power,
and the interception and return of refugees, such as people trying to leave Haiti by boat. Jenna
Loyd and Alison Mountz, for example, have shown how Haitians have been caught up for decades
in “the transnational productions of remoteness that cross prison walls and national borders to cre-
ate transnational carceral spaces” (Loyd & Mountz, 2018, p. 16). Mountz (2011, p. 118) argues that
“islands are part of a broader enforcement archipelago of detention” that operates through practi-
ces that “deter, detain, and deflect migrants from the shores of sovereign territory.” Such practices
of deterrence are the very same bordering mechanisms that allow for tourist arrivals; these man-
aged mobilities, premised on coloniality, prevent the mobility of aspiring migrants while empower-
ing the preferred mobile subject – the tourist – to appropriate motility (Sheller, 2020).
Different bodies (raced, classed, gendered, nationally identified) have very different degrees of
access to and experiences of movement through the controlled geographies of air space and sea
space. Control of the air space, for example, includes passage through airports, being a passenger
or a deportee on airplanes, waiting on the outskirts of the airport, working at the airport, driving
other passengers to and from the airport, or watching planes fly overhead. Tourists enter these
spaces as crucial actors and participants in the making of uneven mobility regimes. These kinds of
relative im/mobilities — alongside the rhetoric of open travel, pleasant tourism, and easy accessi-
bility that surround the sun, sea and sand tourism on which the Caribbean relies (Sheller, 2004) —
are crucial to mapping critical geographies of mobility, which are increasingly exacerbated by
uneven climate risks and vulnerabilities, even as they also exacerbate climate change.
Elite mobilities are often hidden or secluded from the public gaze, yet attention to privileged
forms of mobility can help us better understand the power inherent in the systems of uneven
mobility that support tourism. There are especially stark contrasts between the luxury kinetic
elite, the transnational diaspora who travel back and forth regularly, the relatively marooned
island citizen who has little access to travel, and the undocumented migrant who has even less.
Into this context of deeply uneven motility, disruptions such as the recent hurricanes of
2016–2019 and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 have sent shock waves through these uneven
mobility regimes across the Caribbean region, exposing how vulnerable Caribbean populations
are both to climate change risks and to over-dependence on tourism. The relation between
Caribbean tourism as an expected freedom of movement for those with the right passports, ver-
sus examples of growing patterns of refugee interception, migrant detention, and deportation of
undocumented migrants across the region is crucial to understanding the mobility inequalities
that shape the Caribbean region, especially as borders are hardened in reaction to fears of
1444 M. SHELLER

“climate refugees,” as migrants from hurricane- and drought-affected areas of Central America
and the Caribbean are increasingly being described within security discourses (e.g. Barrett, 2019).
Anthony Elliott (2014, p. 29) also reminds us that, “Implicated in all global mobile lives are
various immobility regimes.” Immobility regimes can range in scale from the stillness of a waiter
waiting to be summoned, to the fixed capital invested in real estate, to the labor regimes that
limit the mobility of workers across international borders, to the populations left stranded by cli-
mate change and natural disasters. Such elite mobility also depends on creating places of still-
ness, pauses where the elite have the right to remain in place, and a kind of bubble of privilege
in which they are suspended, even as ‘locals’ are forced to move out, to move back and forth, or
to move as if caught in a circular vortex (Elliott, 2014; Elliott & Urry, 2010). Reliance on rebuilding
tourism infrastructure after disasters, therefore, should not be seen as a solution to climate
change disruptions, but rather as part of their production of these uneven geographies. A holis-
tic theory of mobility justice can help us perceive the connections across these many different
regimes of mobility, spanning from the scale of the racialized body, to the camps for internally
displaced people, to the ease of travel for global elites (Birtchnell and Caletrio 2014).
Reconstruction after disasters reproduces inequalities in the motility (or mobility capabilities)
of differently located subjects, and it is built upon existing unequal mobility regimes (Sheller
2013, 2016). Anthropologists Nina Glick Schiller and Noel Salazar theorize “regimes of mobility”
to describe “the relationships between the privileged movements of some and the codependent
but stigmatized and forbidden movement, migration, and interconnection between the poor,
powerless, and exploited” (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013, p. 188). This concept builds on geog-
rapher Doreen Massey’s concept of “power geometries” (Massey1993) through which she insisted
that “we must examine not only what flows into and across space, but who controls the produc-
tion, content, and directionality of these flows” (Massey, 1994, p. 154). In her book For Space, she
proposed understanding space as constituted through interaction; as a sphere of multiplicity and
heterogeneity; and as always in the process of being made. Space, she argued, is “an open and
ongoing production” (Massey, 2005, p. 55). This suggests that we can re-shape space and change
the way it is produced by changing who and what flows into and across it—including tourists.
Joseph Nevins (2017) has referred to travel as “the right to the world,” but such travel is not
available to all. The privileged movement of tourists in post-disaster situations and in plans for
economic reconstruction and development needs to be located within the broader kinopolitical
relations of Caribbean im/mobilities understood as part of such a regime of mobility. While the
potential for movement and the capacity for movement are being increased for foreigners who
wish to enter the Caribbean as tourists, as time-share owners, or as overseas homeowners (as
well as for external capital mobility and financial flows), both the potential and the capacity for
movement are arguably being decreased for those Caribbean nationals who wish to move freely
within the region, and beyond it, as borders are violently closed and walled off, and so too are
resorts and beaches. As the Caribbean re-opens its tourist resorts after its very robust response
to the COVID-19 pandemic, arriving tourists will almost certainly bring the virus into the region,
at the very same time that deportees from the United States are also carrying the virus into the
region, exposing the risks and vulnerabilities of unequal global mobility regimes.

Reimagining sustainable Caribbean futures beyond tourism

Under the current situation of economic disruption caused by the collapse of travel demand due
to the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing threat of hurricanes and climate change, how do
we begin to imagine survivable Caribbean futures? It would be easy to wonder what future there
can be in a world without rainfall, a world without coral reefs, an ocean denuded of fish, not to
mention an economy without tourists. Instead, though, I have proposed that we need to ask:
How can we imagine alternative post-tourism futures for the entire Caribbean region that will be
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 1445

more resilient and more just? Too many reconstruction programs have sought “quick fix” policies
in the face of natural disasters, implementing recovery projects that benefit foreign humanitar-
ians, voluntourists, and foreign investors more than local communities, apart from the small,
well-connected business interest groups who heavily influence government policy. These kinds
of policies prevent alternative visions of development from taking root. Rather than yearning for
the return of cruise ships, the rebuilding of bankrupt hotels, or the arrival of time-share tourists
and second-home buyers as the panacea to the region’s current woes, we might do better to
work with Caribbean-based communities to reimagine regenerative economies and resilient ecol-
ogies that are grounded in more just relations of mobility and connection.
As Angelique Nixon asks: “Given the unimaginable scale of devastation at this start of the
2019 hurricane season, we should be thinking about what will happen when climate crisis
reaches critical mass. Will this be the new norm? What happens when we all become climate ref-
ugees? What do we need to do, across our region, to challenge an ongoing logic of develop-
ment that turns our spaces of living into death zones?” (Nixon, 2019, n.p.). To understand
contemporary climate change, and respond appropriately to it, I have argued that we first need
to appreciate its foundations in the history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of planta-
tion slavery, which first shaped extractive economies in the Caribbean. The devastation of recent
“unnatural disasters” in the Caribbean is the outcome of the coloniality of climate, the deadly
logics of racial capitalism, and the persistence of anti-black racism globally as a denial and fore-
shortening of black life, as Ruth Gilmore and others have theorized the operation of racism.
Global uneven development, anti-blackness, white supremacy, and the ideologies of exclusion
and exceptionalism that are embedded in tourism mobilities continue to influence who has
access to resources, to safety, and to preferable ecologies – in short who can survive the climate
emergency, or the uneven impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
Movements for just recovery offer a very different vision of post-disaster “reconstruction” and
climate “resilience” than that found in mainstream disaster response discourses. In post-
Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico, this vision has involved the formation of People’s Assemblies to
offer mutual aid and engage communities in planning. We see the combining of climate justice
and food justice strategies by organizations such as Resilient Power Puerto Rico, which distrib-
utes solar-powered generators for creating small-scale community-run micro-grids, and Boricua
Organization for Ecological Agriculture, which sends out “agroecology brigades” to deliver trad-
itional seeds and soil and train people in their cultivation (Perez-Lizasuain, 2018, n.p.). In a special
issue on “not-so-natural disasters” in the Caribbean, the contributors show how alternative com-
munity organizations and grassroots movements propose alternative scenarios for resilient recov-
ery. They became “complementary actors to the limited and slow state- or market-relief
response” and rejected the “historical prioritization of Caribbean government towards perpetual
economic growth in their development agendas.” Instead such organizations sought to develop
“space that could be used to grow subsistence crops, which is not only essential to mitigate star-
vation after a natural disaster but reduces the dependency on food imports” (Cruz-Martinez
et al., 2018, n.p.). These kinds of visions for recovery are very much in line with visions for more
sustainable tourism linked to preserving biodiversity while drawing on innovative sustainable
culinary systems ( Hall & Go €ssling, 2013). Such innovations must also be linked to wider historical
transformations of transnational mobility justice and the promotion of diverse economic practi-
ces within tourism such as those described by Cave and Dredge (2020) and in the Diverse
Economies in Tourism special issue (2018).
These alternative economies of community-based organizations call for the complete recon-
struction of economies, labor relations, relations to the natural world, and relations to each
other. This demands mobility flexibility, allowing for movement in the hurricane season, so that
people in affected localities can find temporary respite. It also calls for protecting water sources,
coastal areas and fisheries, mangroves and coral reefs, as well as implementing programs of re-
planting forests and re-seeding reefs. Rather than rebuilding tourism as it is, we might learn
1446 M. SHELLER

from agro-ecological projects how to plant and expand Caribbean food sovereignty through agri-
cultural practices such as regenerative low-till and no-till conservation agriculture, multistrata
agroforestry, silvopasture, tree intercropping, use of tropical staple trees, and multi-crop garden-
ing systems known as conuco, an Arawak term. The return of such indigenous knowledge and
horticultural practices might make the Caribbean more resilient in the face of climate emergen-
cies (cf. Mercer et al., 2007). We might also imagine building backward and forward linkages
between such agro-ecological projects and local food markets within a renewed vision for sus-
tainable tourism that is non-extractive, tourism that supports local farmers, renewable energy
micro-grids, and more regenerative circular economies that also reduce waste. This could also
include urban gardens and vertical farms that can be placed on roofs in dense urban areas, as
well as larger hydroponic farming systems that have been successful in Jamaica, for example.
Rather than quick fix rebuilding after climate disasters, pandemic emergencies, and ongoing “slow
disasters,” what Caribbean activists have called for is a regenerative approach to building mobility
justice within an integrated, inter-regional, reparative framework, into which sustainable tourism
could be integrated with a view to supporting resilient food systems and jobs, while preserving bio-
€ssling, 2013; Duffy and Smith, 2003). The differential mobility regimes that have
diversity (Hall & Go
long determined patterns of tourism and migration, visiting and dwelling, are inequitable and unsus-
tainable because they are grounded in coloniality, racial inequity, white supremacy, and extractive
neoliberal development. Current forms of tourism have also deepened ecological stresses and added
immensely to greenhouse gases. Rebuilding them would simply exacerbate existing problems.
Instead this should be an inflection point for moving toward a different kind of collective future.
A holistic theory of mobility justice, in conclusion, can help us draw connections between
transport infrastructure, tourism practices, bordering processes, and questions of sustainability
and regenerative economies that cross regions and scales of governance. Visions for recovery
from the current and ongoing crises across the Caribbean region must reject uneven mobility
regimes that disempower the communities in which and upon whom tourism is visited.
Sustainable tourism is not simply an environmental project or a green business plan, but should
be integrally linked to projects of mobility justice that help support the rebuilding of resilient
regional ecologies and regenerative economies.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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