Uneasy bedfellows: overtourism and right-wing populism

Overtourism has emerged as a dominant policy concern in sustainable tourism management and is the basis for extensive anti-tourism protests in diverse destinations around the world. Overtourism is most often understood in the academic literature through a managerial paradigm, in which research is empirically focused on mitigation strategies designed to reduce perceived impacts. This conceptual paper challenges this dominant approach by repositioning overtourism as a political and discursive framework, focusing on how governance responses can take on punitive and exclusionary forms. It argues that some destination-led campaigns draw on rhetorical strategies associated with right-wing populism, including moral panic, boundary-making between ‘locals’ and ‘tourists’, and the portrayal of certain visitors as socially and morally problematic. Within this framing, sustainability is used to justify discipline, control, and exclusion. Two cases of destination-level governance communication are examined using a discourse-historical approach: Miami Beach’s ‘Break-Up’ campaign and Amsterdam’s ‘Stay Away’ initiative. These cases are used to examine three related developments: the use of populist communication strategies in destination governance; the construction of ‘locals’ as sacred and tourists as profane outsiders; and the reliance on disciplinary visuals and rhetoric, including policing, checkpoints, and surveillance. The paper argues that such responses risk normalising soft authoritarian approaches to tourism governance through overtourism discourse.