Nicknaming tourism as development: commercialization of culture and nature in CHT, Bangladesh

ABSTRACT Tourism in Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) has nowadays been sensitized a prospective channel for the local development that generates a new socio-economic reality. It also provokes some critical issues regarding commercial use and its profit-making venture. This paper aims to understand how culture and nature are commercialized in the process of crafting a ‘uniqueness’ of CHT that materialize the public and private policies of tourism development, and how tourism is branded by the development actors as a potential means of local development. The study found that the tourism expansion has increasingly been nicknamed as development and impelled indigenous participation to the economic benefits, in which process culture and nature became saleable products. A considerable number of locals and tourists as informants were sampled and interviewed between November 2019 and early February 2020. This study adopted by qualitative methods, tried to explore the local perceptions of tourism development and its outcomes. The study contributed to the development of balanced tourism and its sustainable outcomes, and a deeper understanding of culture-specific ways.