The politics of fantasy and tourism development in Romania

Abstract

The paper employs the psychoanalytical concept of fantasy to examine how it infers tourism policy making, a question not raised so far in the field of tourism studies. Engaging this novel approach, the paper looks into the way political imaginaries and ontologies split apart from reality-grounded assessments and undertakings to make sense of how tourism politics moved into the realms of a national fantasy in Romania. Based on the qualitative analysis of the recently released National Strategy for Romanian Tourism Development (SNRDT, 2023), we found that fantasy depictions are used to hide cognitive biases in decision-making while enforcing the illusion of choice with fantasy propagating in different forms to tourism performance, authenticity representation and governance model. The paper also showed that fantasy permeated the core meanings of geographical concepts of place, space and scale and that tourism and fantasy are produced, enacted and experienced across multiple and intertwined geographical scales. The paper is an invite to tourism scholars to focus their interest on fantasy and the construction of reality on fantasmatic logics in different political and development contexts to identify the generalisable dimensions of the politics of fantasy and eventually enrich tourism planning theory.