Narrating the Eastern Himalaya: Reimagining Ecotourism Futures in India's Contested Borderlands

This research aims to understand alternative ecotourism futures within contested borderland landscapes by foregrounding local perspectives and everyday resistance. It builds on critical scholarship highlighting the adverse impacts of ecotourism on local cultures and environments, such as cultural commodification, exacerbating inequities, loss of indigenous knowledge systems, cultural practices, and fragile ecosystems. By examining everyday resistance, the project reveals how local communities assert agency in shaping ecotourism projects and their impacts on human-environment relations. The aim is to provide insights into how local narratives of human environment relations shaped within specific historical contexts can enable, hinder, or create new possibilities for a sustainable, place-based approach to ecotourism. It studies the case of the ecologically, geopolitically, and culturally unique context of Sikkim, India, in the Eastern Himalayan borderlands driven by its tourism economy. It asks: How do everyday acts of resistance in Sikkim shap and contest ecotourism, and its impacts on historically rooted human-environment relations? This is answered through the co-production of narrative political ecologies using a reflexive participatory approach. The methodology innovatively integrates sensory ethnographic, qualitative and spatial methods, prioritising the perspectives of local communities to counter dominant ecotourism narratives and uncover alternative ways of engaging with the landscape.