Ecotourism’s ethics: Self-organization and care in urban Guyana

In this article, I shed light on the ethical orientations of people who labour and invest in ecotourism, and the conditions through which ecotourism becomes recognizable as a neoliberal practice. I reveal that what distinguishes ecotourism is not merely its arrangements for the commodification of nature and related scientific enterprises. Instead, ecotourism depends in part on how people live with environmental degradation and the flexible ways in which they relate ideas of care to such lived experiences. Drawing on research conducted in urban Guyana, the article lays out people’s struggles to plan for mangrove tourism despite the presence of garbage and the threat of erosion to forests. In so doing, I illustrate that ecotourism expresses itself through self-organizing processes and therefore, is dialectically intertwined with sociopolitical strategies of care and its distribution.