Management Summary Research Study „Liquid flows and solid ground: Indigenous politicisation of cruise tourism in New Caledonia“

This paper examines how Indigenous communities in New Caledonia politicise cruise tourism to negotiate power, resources, and socio-environmental protection. We conceptualise cruise tourism as a ‘liquid tourism offer’, drawing upon Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity to capture its mobility, temporal compression, transient consumption, and low territorial embeddedness. We then use political ecology to identify the structural asymmetries and environmental justice tensions generated by the encounter between de-territorialized cruise operations and territorially grounded Indigenous communities. To explain how these tensions become politically actionable, we mobilise market sensemaking (MSM), which reveals how actors collectively interpret tourism-related frictions and transform them into coordinated forms of political action. These perspectives provide a multi-level framework linking structural conditions, power relations, and interpretive processes. Through ethnographic fieldwork (2014-2023) in New Caledonia, we analyse four cases using two analytical heuristics derived from MSM: hot conflicts (emotionally charged articulations of dissent) and cool inferences (rationalised justifications). The findings show that Indigenous communities are not passive victims of tourism impacts but political agents who influence tourism governance around environmental concerns, customary authority, and territorial claims. The study contributes to critical tourism scholarship by advancing understanding of politicisation, Indigenous agency, and governance in postcolonial and liquid tourism contexts.

Target groups of stakeholders: The target stakeholder group for this article includes academics in tourism studies, political ecology, and Indigenous studies; Indigenous communities in New Caledonia and other Pacific destinations facing pressures associated with cruise tourism development; policymakers and institutions responsible for tourism governance and territorial protection; cruise industry operators and investors; non-governmental organisations focused on Indigenous rights and environmental justice; and students and researchers in related fields seeking analytical frameworks for understanding how Indigenous communities negotiate power, customary authority, and territorial claims in the face of de-territorialised forms of tourism.

Citation: Kania, K. (2026). Liquid flows and solid ground: Indigenous politicisation of cruise tourism in New Caledonia. Current Issues in Tourism, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2026.2726995

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13683500.2026.2726995