Discurso institucional sobre turismo comunitario y cooperativas: análisis multinivel en Chiapas, México

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present a multilevel analysis of institutional discourse on community tourism and tourism cooperatives in the municipality of Las Margaritas in Chiapas, Mexico. The study examines how meanings associated with community, benefit redistribution, and collective organization are formulated and interpreted at national, state, and local levels. The research methodology consisted of documentary and discourse analysis of 29 documents (6 national, 18 state, and 5 local), organized by government term and level. The findings show that at the national level tourism is consistently represented as a source of economic development and, in more recent discourse, as a driver of territorial equity and community tourism. However, the tourism cooperative is rarely identified explicitly in discourse at this level as an instrument of local development. Discourse at state level is focused mainly on management devices (planning, regulation, promotion, coordination, indicators), resulting in increased institutional operability but less focus on the cooperative as a policy instrument. Finally, local government discourse is oriented toward organization, records, and promotion, with limited explicit attention to cooperatives as a mechanism for retaining benefits locally. The findings of the study highlight thematic coherence across all levels of institutional discourse and gaps at all levels regarding the tourism cooperative, which account for the difficulty at present of implementing the instrument locally.