ELSI guidelines for networked collaboration and information exchange in PPDR and risk governance

Networked collaboration and information exchange technologies have transformative potential for PPDR and risk governance. However, it is difficult to shape these transformations in a way that supports real world practices of collaboration and sense-making, and it is even more difficult to do so in ways that are ethically, legally and socially sensitive and proactive. This paper presents efforts to construct Ethical, Legal and Social Issues or ‘ELSI’ Guidelines for Networked Collaboration and Information Exchange in PPDR. The Guidelines would facilitate Risk Governance and serve as a living community resource to support the design and use of IT for PPDR and Risk Governanc

Making ‘destino Guatemala’:everyday enactments of ‘global tourism competition’ in La Antigua Guatemala

This thesis provides an ethnographic case study of everyday forms of global tourism competition in one place: La Antigua Guatemala (Antigua). Located in Central America, Guatemala is better known for poverty, violence, and insecurity than for tourism. Nonetheless, like many other countries in the global South, as part of neoliberalisation the government of Guatemala has turned to tourism as a tool of development and recently embarked on a plan to transform Guatemala into one of the world’s most visited destinations. Rather than focus on government policy, this thesis turns to the everyday discourses, imaginings, practices, and performances of global tourism competition in Antigua. Antigua-locals live and work in the ‘destino Guatemala’ project and are key stakeholders and competitive actors. Through exploring everyday forms of global tourism competition, this thesis highlights how this practice is informed by and powerfully informing of diverse, and often highly unequal, social and spatial relations, as well as local identities and subjectivities. In particular, it divulges how one’s access to different forms of (dis)embodied capitals affects, but does not determine, how one engages in global tourism competition, how successful one is likely to be at attracting/satisfying global tourists, and how participating in global tourism competition can help to produce new forms of (dis)embodied capital. Within this, the ways in which global tourism competition are imagined, experienced, utilised, challenged, and resisted are brought to the fore. In providing a rich ethnographic account of everyday global tourism competition in Antigua, this thesis highlights how global tourism competition to attract/satisfy global tourists is making far more than ‘destino Guatemala’

NGOs and the making of “development tourism destinations”. The case of “destino Guatemala"

This article explores the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the making of global tourism destinations. First, it draws together diverse insights in order to substantiate the importance of NGOs in the making of global tourism destinations and, second, it empirically highlights the role of NGOs in the (re)making of one particular destination: “destino Guatemala”. NGOs in La Antigua Guatemala are increasingly engaging with tourism as a NGO resource. In focusing on the NGO touristic practice of hosting storytelling events/activities in Antigua, some of which come to form virtual/actual “poverty tours”, the article argues that while Antigua NGOs develop and host these poverty tours as a means of moving “hearts and wallets”, they are doing considerably more. Most notably, they are helping to (re)make Guatemala into a “development tourism destination”