The Development of Community-based Tourism: Re-thinking the Relationship Between Tour Operators and Development Agents as Intermediaries in Rural and Isolated Area Communities Stephen Wearing and Matthew McDonald School of Leisure, Sport and Tourism Studies, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia 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 think- ing’ about this relationship that challenges the dominant discourse of the tourism industry. To further elaborate these alternative concepts, the researchers lead a discus- sion 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. Introduction This paper argues that the introduction of tourism, or tourism planning into rural and isolated areas has a profound bearing on the social organisation and decision-making process in the respective communities. This, indeed, is no new argument (for an example see Trainer, 1985). But rather than looking at the direct potential and actual effects of tourism on the natural and cultural environment, this paper suggests a broader and more abstract approach in understanding community-based approaches to ecotourism, and more specifically the role intermediaries 1 play. We suggest that the reasons why the development and introduction of tourism into rural and isolated area communities 2 has such a profound effect should be sought in the different worldviews and practices that are introduced through the development agencies, tour operators and tourists themselves, and the cash- economy enforced in communities which hitherto primarily have been charac- terised by a subsistence economy. Following Michel Foucault’s notions on power/knowledge and govern- mentality, i.e. that the way we perceive the world shapes the way we act towards it, we will argue that the relationship between intermediaries and rural and isolated area communities must take relations of power and knowledge into 0966-9582/02/03 0191-16 $20.00/0 © 2002 S. Wearing & M. McDonald JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM Vol. 10, No. 3, 2002 191