On- and offstage: Encountering entangled waste–tourism relations on the Vietnamese Island of Phu Quoc

Abstract

Vietnam’s most popular island, Phu Quoc, is undergoing rapid social-ecological change. Two crucial drivers of this are tourism development and plastic-intensive everyday practices. The growing amount of wasted single-use plastics is increasingly shaping the appearance of places on the island and challenging the creation of tourist imaginaries of a pristine tropical landscape. Very few qualitative empirical studies have analysed the place-making quality of waste in tourism settings, along with everyday waste management practices and their social-spatial implications. The paper draws on Goffman’s theatre metaphor of front- and backstage places to explore waste-tourism relations as an ongoing place-making practice aimed at creating the image tourists are seeking. We scrutinise the place-making efforts of both the international tourism industry and local authorities. Our empirical findings reveal that the frontstage paradise makes backstage places necessary to accumulate or store discarded items. As our research shows, this has led to increasing spatial fragmentation of the island into clean places for tourists and dirty places for residents, reflecting an unequal distribution of the waste burden.