Decoding Public Policies Narratives of Tourism in Brazil: a critical reading on community-based tourism (CBT)

Abstract

For the past few years, tourism has been interpreted by official narratives of public policies in Brazil, as a possible route for socioeconomic development and for social inclusion. Thus, many experiments took place in the world for this purpose and, among them, the community based tourism or CBT, which in theory, seeks the development of tourist locations, based on central premises for the conservation of natural resources, valuing culture and local protagonism. Under this inspiration, this article aims to analyze the way in which the conceptual premises related to CBT has been expressed in the narratives of public tourism policies, in the Brazilian case, seeking to contribute to the construction of a baseline to guide a qualified debate on the topic, in a post-pandemic scenario of Covid19.Therefore, the methodology adopted was based on bibliographic and documentary research, considering public tourism policies in the period between 2003 and 2018 as the universe of analysis. The analysis suggests that, despite some of the theoretical premises that guide CBT being expressed in the most recent documents, in general, this has been interpreted, predominantly, by the logic of the market in the narratives of public policies, in contradiction with the theoretical basis, which has guided the debate on the theme. Thus, considering this trend in a scenario of post-pandemic uncertainties in Covid-19, the risk of instrumentalising this practice in official narratives seems to be evident, in order to meet the interests of the market, through the false discourse of fighting social inequalities.