The Political Economy of Backpacker Tourism: Explorations of Tourism Actors’ Embeddedness in Colombia

Located in a broad Political Economy approach, this paper presents a new conceptual framework, based on Ferguson (2010) and Mosedale (2011), to assess the reciprocal relationship between tourism development and the power relations of the main actors within the backpacker tourism sector: backpackers; businesses catering for them; and tourism policy makers. We explore how these power relations change through the actors’ social, cultural and political embeddedness. An ethnographic multi-method approach was applied to the under-researched Latin American context with fieldwork conducted in Salento, Colombia. The analysis demonstrates that power inequalities exist concerning knowledge, financial and social power that did not seem to be diminished by backpacker tourism development. We further found that social and cultural embeddedness informed the political embeddedness of the actors. Our findings have important implications for policy makers addressing power inequalities in tourism.