Tourism regional development politicies: A layering of biopolitics and territories

Biopolitics is sometimes understood as the movement from power over territories towards the power to manage populations, breaking the link between localization and organization. Tourism is an expression of this rupture, leisure mobility freeing mobile subjects from localization while they are reterritorialized by way of the destination itself. Territories are a complex entanglement of lived space and structural forces like capital rules of circulation, of political–economic systems, of fixity and mobility, localization and population. Moreover, regional development policies through tourism frame hospitality within market discourses and the right to tourism, layering biopolitics and territories. While tourism studies have addressed biopolitical issues of tourism, the actual tourism development policies have not been analysed through biopolitical lenses. To start to address these gaps, we will analyse two development strategies in Quebec, Canada, the tourism section of the BAEQ of the 1960s, and the tourism recovery action plan from 2021. We expose a process of qualification/disqualification of different ways of inhabiting the pleasure peripheries, defining what ought to be concretized in such places through regional development policies and tourism recovery strategies. Through this layering of territories and biopolitics, tourists as mobile subjects are valued as a resource for economic development, through circulation, while immobile subjects must negotiate their place in relation to circulation. This movement raises questions about how pleasure peripheries are created and sustained, their relationship to hosting and the different territorialities at play.