Governing Fragility: Tourism, Justice, and the Politics of Conservation in an Ecologically Critical Area

Abstract

Tourism governance in ecologically critical areas (ECAs) remains conceptually underdeveloped, particularly in the Global South, where environmental vulnerability intersects with livelihood precarity and asymmetric power relations. This study critically examines how tourism governance in St. Martin’s Island, Bangladesh, an ECA and the country’s only coral island, is framed and contested in media discourse. The findings reveal: (i) competing media framings that oscillate between ecological salvation and socio-economic sacrifice; (ii) recursive, policy-induced crisis dynamics whereby conservation measures generate new forms of vulnerability; (iii) persistent disjuncture between policy intent and developmental practice; and (iv) a politics of policy that legitimises environmental protection while rendering local human-nonhuman entanglements conceptually invisible. Drawing on insights from policy documents and media narratives pertaining to St. Martin’s Island, the paper advances an ecological-ethical critique of governance and calls for a reimagining ECA tourism governance as a relational, justice-oriented, and more-than-human practice.