The French state seeks to encourage the development of tourism since it has grown everywhere in the Pacific except in the French territories. Most of the support until now went to large resorts built with fiscal incentives but they no longer attract visitors and employ few local residents. This article is an attempt to indicate how tourism could be developed in the French Pacific to bring true benefits to its Indigenous populations. Certain colonial rules, for example, together with a tenacious desire to retain them, have enabled the indigenous people of Wallis and Futuna and of New Caledonia to sustain a greater breadth of cultural practices (surely an attraction for ecotourists) than in some other island groups, while decolonization has led other island destinations to appropriate the ‘seductive’ image of tropical paradise of New Cythera. The French Pacific is not decolonized politically but its residents have witnessed that lack of economic revenues drastically reduces political and economic choices of small independent nations. The author thus uses a post colonial and political economy theoretical framework to encourage sustainability. Postcolonialism questions power relations and brings to light elements obfuscated by colonial rule or by some present day Indigenous rulers. It encourages researchers to imagine the invisible to search for its causes.
Attractions are plentiful but so are challenges. Some outstanding issues include the fact that economic development in these territories is still determined by French subsidies so that at least one territory has refused any form of autonomy beyond that gained in the 1980s; no territory has felt compelled to adopt strategies that would sustain economic autonomy; despite protection from a major state, French Pacific islands have not been immune to foreign ‘unsustainable’ investment in tourism development that undermines its indigenization; and creative innovative efforts to develop their distinctive assets have been ignored. People must intervene themselves and participate more fully in the economic development of the area; they need to ascertain that the various levels of government maintain their support for sustainability rather than extend it to foreign investment. The presentation will attempt to offer some imaginative responses to the challenges of tourism development in these territories that lie in an in-between state of de-/post- colonization.