The tourism and leisure industry is among the most lucrative and fastest growing industries in the world. The potential to harness revenues from this industry and direct them towards development has been touted by multilateral institutions and national governments alike. While there are many promises of how tourism can increase development for communities, further examination unveils the detrimental impacts the industry has on communities. One such impact is the erosion of communal land rights, particularly the rights of indigenous people, as the industry expands. This phenomenon is not limited to the developing world. This paper seeks to expand the discussion on the impact of tourism on land rights by highlighting the experience of the Gullah community in the U.S. and linking the Gullah struggle to maintain communal land rights to that of communities across the globe.

"This paper gives comprehensive background on the political economy of tourism in countries of the North and the South, both in a historic and a current context. The first section of this paper highlights some of the contradictory aspects of ‘tourism development' and economic development from a historical perspective. Section II examines tourism and development from the perspective of social and gender equity. Section III examines the impacts of tourism liberalization, with a particular focus on the implications of the major instrument of liberalization in the tourism sector, the GATS. Following this discussion Williams rounds out the paper with a return to the gender implications of GATS-driven tourism liberalization. This paper was released as the second paper in the the Center of Concern and International Gender and Trade Network Occasional Paper Series on Gender, Development and Trade. "