Chapter 10: The Trajectory of Public Tourism Policies in Brazil (1922–2022): From Wicked Problem to a Geopolitical Strategy?

This chapter aims to analyse how tourism has oscillated from a wicked problem and a geopolitical strategy tool in Brazilian federal tourism public tourism policies (PTP) over the past century (spanning from 1921 to 2022). Recently tourism has garnered significant relevance, emerging as an alternative avenue for development within the constraints and resource limitations faced by the National States. The empirical study collected secondary data from the government official press, encompassing records from the Senate, the House of Representatives, as well as the executive and judiciary branches. Considering this timeframe, a corpus comprising more than 31,000 documents TNAs (‘Tourism Normative Acts’) was meticulously gathered and systematically analysed. Our analytical framework integrates classical geopolitics, with a primary focus on State actors and the nation-building process, and the public policy approach, which is focussed on the degrees of wickedness. Our findings show that (a) the number of international tourists as well as the number of NAT have increased in a considerable way recently, but we cannot directly connect both; (b) three are the periods (1970–1980, 1990–2000, and 2002–2016) in which we can see a tourism geopolitical strategy has been more explicitly and effectively mobilized, and it is not necessarily reflected in the number of NAT, but in the actions generated in each period; and (c) the wicked degree of the tourism policies seem to be reduced according to the more explicit geopolitical strategy is. Despite, the importance tourism has reached, the support system underpinning this endeavour remains deficient, notably in terms of material and financial resources essential for its efficacious execution.