Towards sustainable consumption and production in tourism in China: Practices, mobilities, and material dynamics

Abstract

Social practice theories (SPTs) present a family of theoretical approaches that consider practice central to social life and the basic unit of analysis. Despite an emerging body of literature leveraging SPTs to understand household sustainability and tourism phenomena, little research has analysed tourism SCP issues through a practice lens. Since the 2000s, the sustainable development of tourism and lodging industries has been promoted by the Chinese government in response to the escalating demands for tourism mobilities, beautiful environments, and higher quality of services. The dominant technological and behavioural paradigms in sustainable tourism studies and policies prioritise eco-friendly technical innovation and environmental concerns. However, they fail to explain (1) the gap between what people say and what they do about environmental protection; (2) the escalating resource demands; and (3) the co-evolution of supply and demand. Anchored in the fertile theoretical and methodological grounds of SPTs, this thesis explores sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in tourism in China by asking: (1) why do people travel to nature-based destinations; (2) what do people do by using natural resources at the destination; and (3) how are material arrangements of resource consumption designed, innovated, managed, and used at the destination? To address these questions, ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Wentang town, a hot spring tourist town in south-eastern China. This thesis detects an emerging highly mobile group, i.e. lifestyle travellers, who constantly move and moor across nature-based tourist destinations within China, not to explore self-identity or taste, but to cope with the pervasive urban environmental and climate stress. The understanding of environment-health relations, together with other cultural meanings such as leisure and cleanliness, are interwoven with water infrastructures and competences in performing hot spring bathing across (non-)touristic spaces, escalating the demand for geothermal water. Focusing on tourist accommodations providing hot spring services, this thesis finds that how material arrangements affect tourism sustainability depends on professional imaginations of what and how services should be delivered (at the design stage) and the interdependence, interaction and co-evolution between infrastructures and the practices they enable and sustain (at the stages of innovation and management). SCP scenarios in tourism go hand in hand with the interaction between obdurate but also dynamic material arrangements and complexes of practices. In brief, SPTs allow this thesis to flexibly zoom in on the constitution and variation of resource-demanding tourism practices (e.g. hot spring bathing) and zoom out on how they intersect with practices in other domains (e.g. infrastructural design, hotel management, and everyday life) - both of which matter for tourism SCP agendas. This thesis argues that the interdisciplinary, innovative and reflexive nature of practice-based approaches opens up new spaces for exploring SCP issues in the tourism and hospitality sectors. It also contributes to the theoretical and methodological development of SPTs and tourism scholarship. The policy implications are drawn out not only for China, but also for countries in the Global South that face crises of water and energy, social inequalities, and socio-technical vulnerabilities along with rapid industrialisation, urbanisation, tourism pressures and increasing consumption-led mobilities.

Date of Award	11 Jul 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Alison Leigh Browne (Supervisor) & Deljana Iossifova (Supervisor)