NATIONAL DYNAMICS OF TOURISM MANAGEMENT: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES
Abstract
The dossier CULTURAL PATHWAYS: DIALOGUES BETWEEN BRAZIL AND MOZAMBIQUE IN TOURISM, organized by Leylane Meneses Martins and Elídio Vanzella for the Journal of Tourism Studies and Practices (RTEP/GEPLAT/UERN), is part of a growing movement of scientific production focused on the comparative study of practices, policies, and strategies related to tourism in Portuguese-speaking countries. The articulation between Brazil and Mozambique, two territories historically connected and marked by cultural diversity, broadens the field of investigation and allows us to observe how different national realities formulate and reconfigure tourism management models, promotional initiatives, and sociocultural practices that influence the development of this sector.
The dossier's proposal stems from the understanding that contemporary tourism has increasingly complex dimensions, ranging from challenges linked to environmental conservation and preservation, hospitality and leisure, accessibility and cultural valorization to territorial marketing processes and the construction of a virtually marketable image. In this sense, the compilation of comparative studies involving Brazil and Mozambique offers an overview that significantly contributes to the advancement of specialized literature, presenting analyses that bring these distinct realities closer together without disregarding their socio-historical, socio-cultural, and socio-economic specificities.
The six articles gathered here, developed by researchers from different institutions and backgrounds, demonstrate the power and vitality of research on tourism in transatlantic contexts. Together, they show how comparative analysis can generate consistent contributions to public policy planning, while also broadening the understanding of cultural practices and institutional challenges. In carrying out this movement, the articles present a set of reflections that strengthen the academic dialogue between the two countries and enrich the contemporary debate on tourism at multiple scales.
In the six articles, the dialogue between Brazil and Mozambique is not limited to the sphere of cultural transformations resulting from excessive capitalist globalization or simply from a commodification of the social interactions of modern life. Above all, it emerges as an expanding field of research and as a concrete opportunity for institutional strengthening and the valorization of tangible and intangible heritage. Throughout the six articles, multiple realities are brought together, revealing two countries that, although marked by trajectories of coloniality and structural inequalities, continually reinvent tourism practices, markets, and independent cultural expressions.
The first article in this series is PLANO BRASIS E INATUR: A PROMOÇÃO DO TURISMO INTERNACIONAL NO BRASIL E EM MOÇAMBIQUE (BRAZIL AND INATUR: THE PROMOTION OF INTERNATIONAL TOURISM IN BRAZIL AND MOZAMBIQUE), by Adriana Brambilla, Priscila Fernandes Carvalho de Melo, Joana Ernesto Neves Uamusse, and Gouveia Dramane Sumale. In this contribution, the authors present the strategic guidelines that guide international tourism promotion in both countries, recognizing that marketing is not just a dissemination tool, but a political instrument for building a territorial image. By analyzing the Plano Brasis and PEDTM II, the authors perceive the complexity of developing marketing policies capable of articulating identity, competitiveness, and sustainability in a global context marked by symbolic disputes and increasingly diversified tourist flows. The text highlights the differences in institutional maturity between Brazil and Mozambique, but also reveals possibilities for convergence, especially in the recognition of cultural diversity as a strategic asset and the need to strengthen governance and planning.
Moving on in the dossier, we have the second article, FROM WORDS TO FEELINGS: ANALYSIS OF QUALITY IN ACCOMMODATION ESTABLISHMENTS IN MOZAMBIQUE BASED ON TOURQUAL, by Leylane Meneses Martins, Marília Ferreira Paes-Cesário, and Thyago Velozo de Albuquerque. This article invites us to examine the tourist experience from the perspective of online reviews, understanding that digital reputation has become a central element in the choice of destinations and accommodations. The authors applied the TOURQUAL model to six Mozambican hotels awarded by TripAdvisor, revealing the importance of human interaction as the main driver of positive experiences. The text exposes tensions between infrastructure, tourist expectations, and management challenges, while affirming the strategic role of emotional and relational hospitality in emerging destinations. The article prompts us to reflect on the power of user-generated content as a quality indicator and on the need to improve management practices that respond to both symbolic and operational demands.
The third article, "TOURISM IN PROTECTED AREAS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE MANAGEMENT PLANS OF THE ANHATOMIRIM ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AREA (BRAZIL) AND THE GORONGOSA NATIONAL PARK (MOZAMBIQUE)," by Daiko Lima e Silva, Samuel Ribeiro dos Santos, Arsília Anastácio Maiela, and Adriana Brambilla, delves into the relationship between tourism, environmental conservation, and management policies. The comparison between the Anhatomirim APA and the Gorongosa National Park demonstrates that, despite distinct ecological and historical contexts, both countries have sought to integrate tourism as an instrument for sustainability. The article points to challenges such as pressure on biodiversity, tensions between resident communities and zoning policies, and highlights the relevance of social participation, environmental education, and green and blue economies. In this sense, the text reminds us that tourism cannot be understood solely as a driver of economic development, but as a practice that needs to engage with living territories and with global socio-environmental urgency.
In the fourth article, SUN AND BEACH TOURISM: A THEORETICAL REFLECTION ON THE MUNICIPALITIES OF INHAMBANE (MOZAMBIQUE) AND JOÃO PESSOA (BRAZIL), by Louis Philippe Patrick de Jongh Filho, João Bata Gove Júnior, and Felipe Gomes do Nascimento, we are led to a comparative reflection on two coastal destinations that share important characteristics of biodiversity and structural challenges related to territorial planning. When discussing sun and beach tourism, the authors revisit issues such as pollution, real estate speculation, participatory weaknesses, and coastal management practices. The analysis presented shows, in general, that both Inhambane and João Pessoa face similar dilemmas. The first is the balance between tourist attractiveness and environmental preservation; the second is ensuring safety and accessibility for users; and the third is how to strengthen community participation in decision-making processes, which are fraught with unequal governance. In this sense, the text reinforces that coastal tourism requires not only public policies that respond to the demands of reality, but also an integrated approach that recognizes the ecological, social, and economic dynamics that structure coastal territories.
Continuing our journey, we arrive at the fifth article, FLAVORS OF THE TERRITORY: THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE GASTRONOMIC IMAGE IN MANAUS (BRAZIL) AND MOZAMBIQUE (AFRICA), by Alessandra Souza Queiroz Melo, Cláudia Araújo de Menezes Gonçalves Martins, and Maria Albertina Pinto Rodrigues Munguambe. This contribution invites us to reflect on gastronomy as a cultural language and as a strategic element of contemporary tourism. The comparison between Manaus and Mozambique highlights that flavors, ingredients, and culinary narratives not only attract visitors but also reinforce identities and promote a sense of belonging and territorial discourses. The text shows us that the gastronomic experience is not merely a complement to the trip, but a central component of the tourist image, capable of mobilizing affective memory, tradition, creativity, and institutional communication. The article demonstrates that examining events and outreach practices sheds light on an expanding field that requires planning and valuing the stories that each dish carries with it, enriching cultural experiences.
Finally, the dossier concludes with the sixth article, TOURIST SIGNAGE IN THE HISTORIC CENTERS OF THE CITIES OF SALVADOR, BRAZIL, INHAMBANE AND MAPUTO IN MOZAMBIQUE, by Simone Neto de Santana Oliveira, Fernando Firmino Massango, Francinete da Silva Guilherme, Fernanda Silva Araújo dos Santos and Elídio Vanzella. The text begins with a comparative analysis of tourist signage, often overlooked in public and academic debate, highlighting that it is crucial for the quality of the visitor experience, especially in historic centers that carry symbolic and cultural heritage density. By examining signs, pictograms, maps, totems, and communication devices, the authors highlight differences in the degree of standardization, conservation, and accessibility among the cities analyzed, consequently generating structural flaws. The text also recognizes good practices and reinforces that inclusive signage is a requirement to democratize access to cultural heritage, emphasizing that accessibility should be understood as an expanded dimension of tourism, that is, good communication of a territory is a fundamental condition to ensure that everyone can experience spaces with autonomy and safety.
The six articles complement each other organically, each text illuminating distinct aspects of tourism in Brazil and Mozambique, but all converge on central issues such as sustainability, cultural identity, public policies, social participation, territorial marketing, and the quality of the tourist experience. In this way, they present themselves as a complex mosaic that reveals not only diagnoses and analyses, but possible paths, research agendas, and horizons of cooperation between both countries.
In this sense, the dossier recognizes that the dialogue of Lusophone cultural tourism is not limited to the Portuguese language, but that it is an exchange that involves diverse ways of producing and experiencing territories. Furthermore, the dossier reinforces the importance of partnerships between universities, research centers, governmental public bodies, and local communities, especially when we understand tourism as a phenomenon that requires an interdisciplinary approach between the humanities and applied social sciences.
It is worth noting that the articles that make up this edition illustrate the already traditional field of regional monographs on tourism studies, addressing both the problems of management and planning, as well as the political and sociocultural aspects of certain tourism practices in peripheral contexts. Promptly, the works presented here recover important micro and macrostructural encounters and disagreements in the realities of Mozambique and Brazil, including academic and research ones, rowing both in the tide of practical possibilities for change via politics, and in the technical-propositive debate of the business field.
This dossier also opens up perspectives for critiquing the colonial past of both countries and how this problematic legacy reverberates in the territories and in the socioeconomic and cultural processes of each touristified reality. As these are two countries of peripheral capitalism, dependent on and excluded from the decision-making and hegemonic center of informational and neoliberal capitalism, Brazil and Mozambique end up reproducing problems and challenges inherent to the social and territorial division of labor, since they share very close production and labor relations.
Thus, in both cases, practical and academic juggling acts are performed to ensure a certain maintenance of part of the competitive tourism dynamics of these countries. Human service is seen as a driving element of the positive feeling of the tourist experience, reflecting the impact of emotional experiences on the affective memory of visitors. Therefore, at the heart of these studies, there is a structural finding that is already well-known – and even contradictorily neglected – in tourism studies: the pronounced material precariousness of the destinations and the amateurism and voluntarism in labor relations, compensated basically by emotional labor and the hijacking of the worker's subjectivity, who tries to overcome the low quality of services with resourcefulness, empathy, kindness, and improvisation, and, not infrequently, with the cunning inventiveness that transforms difficulties into positive experiences of the exotic.
The six articles presented here also touch on central weaknesses in so-called conservationist and preservationist tourism practices, such as the precariousness of participatory management and the limited inclusion of communities in decision-making processes, which characterizes the historical and concrete practice of tourism management as authoritarian and centralizing. It is shown, however, that the presence of communities in tourism planning processes reinforces the need for participatory management, and both Brazil and Mozambique have advanced in the integration between tourism and conservation, using strategic plans and instruments to balance socio-environmental and market demands, but divergences and contradictions are identified regarding the inclusion of the local community in the most basic decision-making processes and in territorial planning strategies.
Brazil and Mozambique, still bound to a historical primary-exporting, oligarchic and highly concentrated economic legacy, mainly embrace nature tourism as a productive force to try to overcome a dependent tertiary economy, while material conditions are challenging and uncompetitive when compared to the tourist destinations of central capitalism. Both destinations share structural problems related to public safety, institutional instability, logistical bottlenecks, and a lack of conservation and maintenance of heritage, which contradicts the idea of social inclusion, conservationism, and sustainable development.
In short, this edition has great monographic value insofar as it brings the two countries closer together and politically points to alternatives for reducing regional inequalities. For the future advancement of this field of comparative analysis, it is beneficial to conduct statistical analyses of global tourism demand flows and revenues in these countries, so that it can be analyzed whether, how, and in what way tourism is distributing or concentrating income. In addition, ethnographic immersions would help to move beyond the limits of the bibliographic-documentary field and give greater concreteness to the analyses, in order to combat the ideological mystification of certain statistical data that are apologetic for the prevailing neoliberal order.
With this preface, we invite the reader to reflect on the phenomenon of tourism based on the following articles, recognizing that each one is part of a larger framework, reaffirmed by academic research and the cultural ties that historically link Brazil and Mozambique.
Enjoy your reading!
