Buying Up Nature: Economic and Social Impacts of Costa Rica's Ecotourism Boom

From a range of diverse political perspectives, proponents have presented ecotourism as a market-based activity that will provide income and empowerment to local communities while promoting environmental conservation. The experiences of Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, where relative isolation has limited the presence of transnational corporate capital, suggest that the impacts of community-based ecotourism expansion are far from certain and are the outcomes of struggles over access to land and natural resources, economic benefits, and representations of the environment. Ecotourism, while potentially offering new economic opportunities to Latin America's poor majority, may also reproduce preexisting patterns of stratification, particularly where state policies have favored larger and foreign ecotourism enterprises. Ecotourism may also engender processes of ideological resistance and reconfiguration that transform existing relationships of nationality, class, and gender.