Sustainable development frictions: lifestyle migration on the coast of Jalisco, Mexico

• Main Author: Jennifer Cardinal
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Arizona Libraries 2020-12-01
• Series: Journal of Political Ecology
• Online Access: https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/JPE/article/view/23215

Abstract The concept of sustainability is materialized differently in luxury ecotourism development and in locally-directed community development initiatives. I examine the diverse environmental ideologies at play in these two distinct incarnations of "sustainable development" on the southern Jalisco, Mexico coast; first, in La Manzanilla, a community inhabited by a proportionately large population of leisure consumption-driven lifestyle migrants, then to the north, in elite ecotourism enclaves and a community displaced by a wealthy developer. I suggest these divergent development incarnations may be understood by expanding the concept of lifestyle migration to include a broader range of enactments of home, from different class perspectives. Global environmental ideologies and lifestyle migrant capital play a fundamental but not the only role in local sustainable development. I suggest global influences and local initiatives are creating a productive friction, reassembling global environmental knowledge and tourism imaginaries to suit local agendas. While there is no consensus on what sustainable development should look like in La Manzanilla, the intersection of initiatives is producing locally-directed development that contrasts with the erasure of local agendas happening in elite costal developments nearby. Keywords: sustainable development, friction, environmental ideology, tourism, lifestyle migration