The purpose of this paper is to invoke a Foucauldian framework in order to re-think the development of community-based tourism by focusing on the relationship between intermediaries and rural and isolated area communities in Papua New Guinea. Foucault's concepts of power/knowledge and governmentality provide a 'way of thinking' about this relationship that challenges the dominant discourse of the tourism industry. To further elaborate these alternative concepts, the researchers lead a discussion through a number of areas that impact on the development of community-based tourism. These include the introduction of western models of management and their ability to undermine traditional forms of knowledge, the conceptualisation of the tourist destination as interactive space, and a critique of the tourism industry through poststructuralist feminist theory. From these perspectives community-based tourism or ecotourism suggests a symbolic or mutual relationship where the tourist is not given central priority but becomes an equal part of the system.

In current sociological analyses of tourist experience, class, race, ethnicity, age and gender are being incorporated into frameworks which initially assumed that male views of the phenomenon are universal. In this paper we seek to incorporate gender into the fundamental conceptualization of the tourist and the tourist destination. Drawing on concepts from interactionist and poststructural feminist theories we critique the male bias in the conceptualization of the tourist as ‘flaneur’ and the tourist desination as ‘image’ for the tourist gaze. A concept of the tourist destination as ‘chora’, or interactive space is offered. The tourist then becomes a creative, interacting ‘choraster’ who takes home an experience which impacts on the self in some way. We suggest that such a feminized conceptualization adds a second dimension to the one dimensional perspective which predominates in current sociological analyses of the tourist phenomenon.

This paper argues for a shift in tourism research that challenges models which prioritise commodified tourism experiences over alternative decommodified products. We feel the distinction between commodified and decommodified tourism can be demonstrated using Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) as a case study. Commodifying processes occur when the final outcome is defined as the economic use-value of a product or service. Current directions in tourism research often favour the pursuit of a commodified tourism product in the search for increased efficiency and global profits using research paradigms that narrowly pursue this direction. We argue that the negative impacts of such a trajectory restrict our ability to understand and analyse the tourism experience requiring decommodifying actions in tourism research to move forward; these we feel are best informed by alternative theoretical and philosophical perspectives that include feminism, ecocentrism, community development and poststructuralism. NGOs are used in this paper to provide an example of how the broadening of research philosophies allows access to approaches that pursue decommodification in tourism as they move beyond the almost exclusive pursuit of industry profits and place social, cultural and ecological value on local environments and economics.