Travel & Tourism Impacts
The Backpacker Social Identity Makes Them More Sustainable — But Should We Care?
Backpacker tourism is good for Ghana’s Cape Coast.
by Elizabeth Agyeiwaah, Benjamin Iaquinto, Stephen Pratt, and Wantanee Suntikul
As the global tourism industry struggles to recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, adventurous tourists, including backpackers, will play an important role in re-establishing tourism in many areas.
This is because backpackers have a reputation for adventure and risk-taking. They prefer ‘off the beaten track’ destinations rather than tourist centers.
Ghana’s Cape Coast is an example of a popular backpacker gathering place.
A typical backpacker in the Cape Coast is seen wearing brightly colored “Ankara fabric” with their backpacks also sometimes made of African print. They enjoy bargaining at the popular “Cape Coast Kotokuraba market” and try to speak “Fante”, the indigenous language of the region.
Backpacker tourism generates employment for local people, shares local cultures with travelers, and preserves environmental integrity through tourists use of environmentally friendly budget accommodation — all core principles of sustainable tourism.
The closest counterpart to backpacker tourists are volunteer tourists, who prefer homestays, but also have considerable interaction with locals through their volunteer work.
Ghana also receives heritage (or roots) tourists — exploring their ancestral links to Ghana’s slave trade, and recreational tourists — seeing Ghana as a new and interesting destination. In contrast to backpacker tourists, these groups prefer international level accommodations and standardized services.
The distinct differences in behavior between backpackers and other international tourists to Ghana made us wonder whether simply identifying oneself as a “backpacker” makes one behave more “sustainably”.
Many backpackers identify strongly with the label of ‘backpacker’ to contrast themselves with ‘typical’ tourists. Their identity is a social one in the sense that they identify as belonging to a particular group of like-minded people.
This sense of belonging to a social group (us) against other groups (them) could be explained by social identity theory.
Social identity theory argues that people have the need to belong to a specific social group in complex societies — basically, collections of different social groups. Consequently, there is a conscious effort by individuals to become members of social groups that will give them the type of emotional support and self value that they desire.
Historically, backpackers have been the leading edge of the global tourism industry in many places — bringing the first wave of globalization to an emerging tourism destination.
For example, in Ghana, the growing backpacker presence in Cape Coast has led to higher prices for local products and accommodations because backpackers tend to prefer things that are more like what local residents would purchase.
Thus, backpackers’ preference for local products puts them in competition with local people. This raises questions of whether backpacker tourism is as sustainable as many think it is.
In addition, where backpackers go, mass tourism development will often follow, resulting is even greater social, economic and environmental impacts.
Backpackers and sustainability
Backpackers have an intriguing relationship with sustainability. As a low-budget, long-term form of tourism, backpackers voluntarily reduce resource consumption for prolonged periods of time. However, they also bring tourism development into marginal areas ill-equipped to deal with such impacts.
In our research, we explored this apparent paradox through the lens of “identity”. Our study aimed to understand whether being a backpacker could lead one to engage in sustainable behavior in the Cape Coast tourism hub.
We surveyed 400 backpackers in the Cape Coast of Ghana and found that their social identity as a “backpacker” had a positive effect on their sustainable behavior. This in turn also affects the level of satisfaction they felt visiting the Cape Coast.
In fact, the more tourists identified themselves as backpackers, the more sustainably they behaved, in terms of trying to reduce their cultural and environmental impacts, and in positively supporting the local economy.
These strong correlations indicate that backpackers in Ghana assign a high degree of importance to sustainable behavior as a way of affirming their membership in, and social identity with, their group.
Implications
Much of the research exploring the relationship between identity and pro-environmental behaviour has found that identity often limits the expression of sustainability that people show.
For example, politically conservative white men are more likely to reject the science of climate change, and men with strongly masculine identities avoid reusable shopping bags (which they see as ‘feminine’).
Similarly, we found that sustainable behaviour increases among those with a strong backpacker identity.
Thus, hostels and budget accommodation owners and managers can promote their facilities as places where backpackers can embrace their identity. They can go further by adopting practices that allow them to affirm their identity by participating in activities that are economically, culturally, and environmentally sustainable.
Far from simply being an exercise in pleasure-seeking, tourism destinations are key places in which we develop and negotiate our relationship to the environment and to foreign cultures.
It is common to hear calls for more education as a way to increase environmental behaviour. But it is also important to consider how social identity can direct people either toward or away from sustainability in different contexts, such as tourism.
But identities are changeable. It is uncertain whether sustainable behavior that is normalised in a backpacker tourism context will carry over to a non-tourism context where social identities are different.
Most backpackers eventually return home. Perhaps if their backpacker identity is strong enough, their sustainable behaviour will persist beyond their trip.
This article is based on:
Agyeiwaah, E., Pratt, S., Iaquinto, B. L., & Suntikul, W. (2020). Social identity positively impacts sustainable behaviors of backpackers. Tourism Geographies, 1–22. doi:10.1080/14616688.2020.1819401
See the original paper for a full list of scholarly references:
About the Authors
Elizabeth Agyeiwaah is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Macau University of Science and Technology, Avenida Wai Long, Taipa, Macau. Her research interests include sustainable tourism development, small and medium tourism enterprises, and tourist studies.
Benjamin Lucca Iaquinto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests are in the areas of sustainable tourism, cultural geography, mobilities, and backpacker tourism.
Stephen Pratt is Professor and Head of the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, the University of the South Pacific. His research interests include island tourism, sustainable tourism development, and tourists’ misbehavior.
Wantanee Suntikul is an Assistant Professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her core research interests and expertise deal with the impact of tourism on cultural heritage tourism, sustainable tourism, and social aspects of tourism development.
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