The empirical case study of this research consists of policies and practices of Nicaraguan rural tourism development. To be clear, this case did not, and still does not, exist in the physical world, just waiting to be discovered and explored. Instead, as Vennesson855, Lund856, Dredge, Hales and Jamal857
highlight, the case emerged and was constructed by me as a researcher, and the strange encounters858 that have taken place in the fieldwork settings
have been, at least to some extent, chosen and planned by me. For these reasons I must keep my eye on the personal, political and situated nature of the research process.859 Hence, I find it as my ethical duty to articulate and
be reflective about my standpoints and roles as a researcher throughout the entire research process.860 And even after.
More specifically, this research draws on ethnographic research that I conducted between 2007-2013 in coffee-cultivating communities of San Ramón, as well as in air-conditioned offices and cafés in Matagalpa and Managua. During these years I visited and stayed in Nicaragua three different times – travelling between rural and urban areas. This meant, as Rantala861 and Atkinson862 would explain it, moving several times between
physical, written and textual fields of ethnographic research. In the physical field, in Nicaragua, I collected data through semi-structural interviews and participant observation and by gathering official state documents, statistics, newspaper articles and tourism policies and strategies of institutions pro- moting rural tourism development in the country. In the following, I will describe in detail my experiences of being in the field, gathering the data and 855 Vennesson 2008.
856 Lund 2014.
857 Dredge et al. 2013, 32-3.
858 The formulation of this title has been inspired by Sara Ahmed’s (2000) Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality.
859 Tribe 2001.
860 Ateljevic 2007; Rantala 2011; Dredge et al. 2013. Caton 2013.
861 Rantala 2011b, 153-6; See also Caton (2013, 346) on epistemic encounters ‘before’, ‘now’ and ‘after’.
modifying my research and interview questions along the way. Returning to these experiences has been possible through the hundreds of pages of field notes which have included reflections on my own understandings, confu- sions, and processes of learning and unlearning, throughout the journey.863
During my first stay in Nicaragua, in 2007-2008, I first worked nine months at the Embassy of Finland with international development coopera- tion, and then dedicated six months to writing and collecting data for my master’s thesis. While in 2011-2012 I had a chance to be in the fieldwork in Nicaragua for four months, the last field visit, in 2013, lasted only the month of May. In addition to many informal discussions, which I have recorded in my field-work diary, the data from 2007 to 2013 consist of fifty-five semi- structured interviews. In order to give a general picture of these interviews, I want to note that thirty-eight of them (nine of these were group interviews) took place in the area of San Ramón, while seventeen of them were expert interviews conducted in Managua and Matagalpa. Although sixteen people from San Ramón were interviewed two or three times, there was a total of sixty-nine different interlocutors who kindly participated in my study. Forty-five of them were women and twenty-four were men. I conducted all the interviews in Spanish. All but six of them were recorded and later transcribed. In the analysis I will refer to the direct quotes from the recorded interviews with a code which indicates the year, the chronological order of the interview, and the gender of the respondent (e.g. 2012/23/M). The type and number of interviews are presented in more in detail in Appendix 2.
Before travelling to Nicaragua for the first time, I knew very little about the country’s tourism sector. This was not a surprise as such, taking into consideration the combination of Eurocentrism in tourism studies and the relatively recent growth of tourist flows in Nicaragua. In any case, work- ing with international development cooperation in Nicaragua, gave me a chance to follow the planning of rural tourism development in the coun- try.864 I became interested in the discussions about the possibilities of rural
community-based tourism in Nicaragua, and in Latin America in general. 863 Gadamer 1975 in Landgridge 2007, 123; Rantala 2011a, 48-50.
Some of the critiques were trying to decry this trend as ‘a misguided quest’ on the continent, 865 arguing that this kind of tourism was more likely to
cause dependency than empowerment and local control and that small scale tourism development included only a minimal possibility for economic growth.866 In short, it seemed to be a topic that divided opinions amongst
those working with the issues related to rural development in the country. When observing and listening to these debates, it begun to bother me how tourism was repeatedly treated as one of the ‘productive’ rural sectors.867
This meant that the impacts of community-based tourism were mainly measured in economic terms, while the demand for sustainability translated to mitigation of possible environmental costs.868 Thus, as I described in the
introductory chapter, believing in the emancipatory possibilities of this kind of tourism, I wanted to focus on the ‘people impacts’ and to find theoretical support for my assumption that the local context and local communities’ views should be better acknowledged in rural tourism debates.
I booked a meeting with development officials who were working with community-based tourism in Nicaragua and asked for their recommenda- tions regarding a possible case study for my research. In my discussions with a tourism adviser from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), he suggested San Ramón as a good case for several reasons. In his opinion, San Ramón was one of the pioneers in community-based tour- ism in Nicaragua, the tourism initiative seemed to be well organized and coordinated there, and the communities had received different forms of support from many international development organizations. For instance, at that time UNDP’s Small Grant Program (SGP) was helping the local cooperative union in San Ramón to finance information signs and capacity building for the people participating in tourism development.869
Then, guided by the book Guia de Turismo Rural en Nicaragua, I took the first trip to San Ramón. I participated first on a coffee tour and learned 865 Mitchell & Muckosy, 2008.
866 Ibid., 102; PEMCE, 2008, 7; Pleumarom, 2002 cited Wild, 2008, 73; Rocha, 2008. 867 Höckert 2009.
868 See also Richter 2001, 289; Fennell & Przeclawski 2003, 144. 869 UCA San Ramón project focument 2008
about the history of the coffee cooperatives, and then I asked the local guides and the local tourism coordinators whether I could return later on to collect material for my study. I presented myself as a junior researcher wanting to learn how tourism development was changing the lives of the local families and the life in the communities in general. And they said yes. However, although I was carrying with me the mantra of local participa- tion in development, I did not connect this principle to the pre-requisites of ethical research. I had mainly read the more mainstream literature on community participation870 and must confess that I was not too concerned
about these communities’ expectations towards my study. Or perhaps I was just very sure that the interlocutors would be delighted at this opportunity to participate in an academic study, and to receive then the results from it. My assumptions were most probably strengthened by the impression that the study was somehow ‘legitimized’ by UNDP.871
Before entering the field, I filled my backpack with literature on how to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. These books reminded me about the central ideas of ethnographic research, those that I had once learned in methodology courses, the ‘seven steps of research’: thematizing, designing, interviewing, transcribing, analysing, verifying and reporting.872 I also re-
visited the instructions on of how to plan semi-structured interviews with ‘sequences of themes to be covered’873 and read how focusing on several cases
could increase the depth of the study.874 These books reminded me about
the things I should keep in mind while conducting ethnographic fieldwork, such as adequate time and openness, a respectful and ongoing relationship with the participants, and the importance of creating an atmosphere in which the interviews would feel safe to talk freely. These methodological guidebooks highlighted that I should allow the interlocutors to formulate their answers by expressing their own conceptions. Most importantly, con- 870 See for example.
871 That is, following Levinasian thought of hospitality, I was taking for granted the welcome of these communities.
872 Kvale, 1996. 873 Ibid., 124.
ducting interviews were promised to include a rare possibility to capture a multitude of views on a theme under scrutiny, that is, to picture a manifold and controversial human world.
During the bus-trip to San Ramón, I was nervous about the forthcoming interviews. While enjoying the scenery, I was dwelling in Mats Friberg’s875
demand to distance oneself from one’s cultural frameworks by proposing questions such as: ‘How much of what I believe is nothing more than a package of ideas that I have unconsciously taken in from my own culture? To what extent am I prepared to regard the ideas and values of other groups as being equally valid as mine? Is it even possible to use ideas and norms which have been developed in my own culture and apply them to other groups?’. These were some of the main things I had written in my notebook, with a red marker, when I had studied development studies at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. However, I should point out here that at that time I lacked other tools and thoughts that could have helped me to remember these questions, without falling too deeply into cultural relativism.
In September-October 2008 I lived four weeks with local families and collected field data for my study on the sociocultural meanings of tourism development. This time the fieldwork included a total of twenty-two inter- views (#1-22) with women and men who were providing accommodation for tourists, young tourist guides, local experts in the issues of tourism and gender, and those who were not directly involved with tourism develop- ment. The guides helped me to contact potential interlocutors, I mainly conducted interviews in people’s homes and the interviews lasted from fifteen minutes to one and half hour. While most of the interviews were held one-on-one with the participants, seven of them were hold in groups. I gave up on my preliminary plans to conduct mainly group interviews after I came to doubt the ethicality and meaningfulness of squeezing people into group discussions where they did not feel themselves comfortable. In these interviews I asked open questions about the tourism programme, and about the changes it had brought about in the local communities. In addition to these questions, I used more specific questions to facilitate and support the 875 Friberg 1999, 148.
interviewing. I had broken them down into the categories such community and social capital, work, gender equality, new skills, self-esteem, cultural heritage, cultural exchange and values and behaviour.
In the course of my fieldwork, I helped women in the kitchen, took many photos, answered questions about my home country, rode a horse, helped to build an eco-cottage, played football, walked to school with children who were wearing their well-ironed white and blue uniforms, bought handi- crafts, played card games, picked coffee, learned about coffee production, and drank many litres of coffee with lots of milk and sugar. As is normal in ethnographic fieldwork settings, the discussions accompanying and along- side the interviews were a central part of the interaction876. In the middle
of all this, I was imagining myself participating in people’s daily lives as an ethnographic researcher. However, especially in tourism settings, this is an ambiguous position to have as I was guided by the tourist guides almost as a tourist and I was paying for the services according to their pricelist. Although I was holding tightly to my identity as a young researcher, the locals most likely received and perceived me like any of the travellers who arrive with many questions about gender equality, coffee cultivation, history and politics. In fact, many of their guests were going there to do different kinds of studies.877
Besides staying and living in San Ramón, I travelled there several times from my more permanent home in Managua. For instance, once it was a tourism consultant from LuxDevelopment who offered me a possibility to join her – as an observer – in a tourism evaluation visit in San Ramón. Another time a small group of tourism experts from UNDP, Rainforest Alliance and the travel book Lonely Planet welcomed me on a larger tour of community-based tourism projects, including a visit to San Ramón. On one occasion, I had a chance to follow the building of an eco-lodge in La Pita and to discuss with the representative of the financing organization called Ecotours. While the observations and informal discussions from these 876 Atkinson et al. 2001, 4-5.
877 The growing trend in volunteer tourism has brought new possibilities, even highly contradictory ones, to conduct research in exotic places, far away from home.
visits formed an important part of my first empirical data, I have occasion- ally regretted why I did not ask these tourism experts for semi-structured interviews. However, during my first stay in Nicaragua, my focus was not yet on the encounters between tourism experts and local hosts.
After returning from the field, I focused my qualitative content analysis on the social and cultural impacts from the locals’ point of view. I concluded that in particular young tourist guides and the women responsible for the accommodation had gained new contacts, knowledge, skills and confidence through tourism development.878 However, while I was ’surprised’ at the
central role of the tourism developers, there were other things that I likewise should have noticed – and wondered about – during the analysis and report- ing. For instance, I never really stopped thinking why some of the people, including the coordinators of the tourism programme, had been reluctant to participate in the study. I have only later realized how the desire to come up with clear and manageable results (read: normative) can only be fulfilled when neglecting or silencing some of the non-fitting experiences. I will come back to this in the next section (4.3), where I focus on the primary and secondary analyses of the data.
Moving the focus from rural communities towards development encounters
I wrote my master’s thesis study in 2009 based on the first period of field work. Based on my analysis I argued that the real essence of rural commu- nity-based tourism could be seen in its potential to promote people’s control over those factors that affect their daily lives.879 Then a few years later, in
2011, I returned to Nicaragua to continue my research. As I had promised the people in San Ramón, we put together a workshop in order to share the results of my previous study. This matter had come up when people commented on how researchers hardly ever returned after their fieldwork, although the locals would have been interested to know what these stud- 878 Höckert 2009.
ies were actually about.880 For me this workshop meant taking one, shaky
step beyond conventional ethnographic research towards more critical and emancipatory ethnography.
While I was planning the workshop with the local tourism coordinators, I received helpful guidance from two professors from the Sustainable tour- ism programme at UNAN University in Managua.881 My role in the actual
workshop was to present the results of my previous study, and to facilitate the discussion between the representatives from different communities re- garding the current state of tourism in San Ramón. While people seemed happy about the possibility to hear about my study, it was obvious that I was telling them something that they already knew; that is, it was obvious for them that tourism had had great importance, especially for women and young people, but that there had also been conflicts related to tourism. The reactions varied greatly. While some of the participants thanked me for reminding them about their accomplishments with tourism development, one of the guides brought up that he did not understand why had I actually made a study like this. The workshop situation also turned out more official than intended, most likely because one of the tourism experts from UNDP was ‘observing’ the meeting. This experience made me painfully aware about the ways in which internal power relations play a crucial role in the success and failure of community-engaging research methods.
For me the main message from the workshop was that the local hosts were no longer very motivated regarding the activities related to tourism development. They were disappointed with the lack of tourists, the lack of local coordination and the lack of transparency and open communication (#36). What is more, they seemed to be tired of the tourism experts com- ing and analysing them and the current ‘problems’. In my view, a concrete example of this was the way in which one of the guides, Oscar who had 880 I had not been the only one doing academic research on tourism development in the com-
munities of San Ramón. Ever since, and even before, there have been other studies made on tourism development in these communities. One of the studies that has been published in academic journals, is the one by Zapata et al. 2011.
881 I am thankful to tourism professors Olga Comez and Flora Avedano for all their help in the process of preparing the workshop.
normally been very active in tourism activities, arrived to the workshop only when we were already closing up. It seemed like he had not been interested to listen to me talking about his tourism project; instead, he wanted to talk. After the workshop he came and talked to me about his frustration with the new rural tourism quality programme which, according to him, was not in any sense realistic for people living in his home community. He cursed the various demands for shower curtains, warm water and fire alarms, as these all were things that they could not afford. Neither did he see them as relevant to the rural lifestyle. He was outraged when he stated that ‘the tourism of- ficials did not seem to understand what this kind of rural tourism is about’.