whole of their travels. The book focused primarily on research carried out in the Santa Elena Rainforest, Costa Rica (Wearing, 1993; Wearing & Larson, 1996; Wearing, 1998, 2009) between the years 1991 and 1994. At this time, the paradigm of volunteer tourism was as an extension of ideas on community-based ecotourism (Wearing & McLean, 1997).
Since that time, the majority of Wearing’s fieldwork has focused on areas closer to home in Australia, particularly Papua New Guinea and other South Pacific nations. Some of the following stems from the author’s experiences, research and recent publications carried out in these destinations from 2001 to 2012. This book incorporates some of the work written in previous publications with current thinking and research in volunteer tourism.
Although international volunteering has existed for a number of years, the industry report ‘Volunteer Travel Insights 2009’ (Nestora et al., 2009) notes that ‘it was not until after the September 11th incident and the Indonesian Tsunami that travellers started to think about this type of travel and the market came to realise that they could volunteer on their vacation’. ‘The rise of volunteer vacations seems to be the product of a serendipitous alignment: 10 to 15 years ago, at the same time that trips abroad became easier and less expensive and better-traveled Americans began to seek out more unusual travel experiences, volunteering also became the stuff of national conversation’ (McGray, 2004: 1).
In addition to the authors’ own work, we have had the opportunities to work closely on this book with a number of global scholars who are undertaking research in this area. Some of these are early career researchers who have contributed chapters. However, it is the growing body of work Wearing has developed along with that of Professor Nancy Gard McGehee from Virginia Tech, USA that provides this volume with new critical insights. Most notable is the addition of critical discussions that consider the overlaps and ambiguities surrounding volunteer tourism. Our work together draws on the links with other related areas of inquiry, including gap year volunteering, educational travel and cultural exchange, providing new insights into this phenomenon.
Since publishing Volunteer Tourism: Experiences That Make a Difference, Wearing has received constructive feedback that the first book relied heavily on a single case study and tended to emphasize the experience of volunteer tourism from the tourists’ perspective. In this book, we seek to rectify those limitations by exploring a much wider range of examples of volunteer tourism from all over the world. In addition, the title of this book reflects our attempt to focus more explicitly upon the context for the experience, and place front and centre host community issues and perspectives as a major concern of this book.
List of Tables, Boxes and Figures
Table 4.1. Additional volunteer tourism organizations.
Table 6.1. Elements of a volunteer tourism project framework.
Table 9.1. Commodified mass tourism vs decommodified alternative paradigm views.
Box 2.1. Features of alternative tourism.
Box 6.1. 2008 Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria (GSTC).
Fig. 2.1. A conceptual schema of alternative tourism.
Fig. 5.1. Primary motives for volunteer tourists.
1 Introduction
Beyond Experiences that Make a Difference
Despite the considerable growth in tourism and its many achievements, it has become clear that it has not always been able simultaneously to meet the needs of communities and those who visit them. Evidence that tourism often privileges visitors’ needs over host communities is well documented in the literature (Torres & Momset, 2005; Jamal et al., 2006; Meyer, 2007). In part, this has been attributed to a social, economic and political order that places profits ahead of people, which has dominated the globe and worsened over the past decade. The dominance of neoliberal politics, both generally and within tourism, continues to broaden the gap between wealthy and poor nations and, more broadly, between the Global North and Global South (Steinbrink, 2012). In response to this continued inequity, alternative ways of tourism development are being championed.
In addition to the obvious focus on volunteer tourism, a number of other forms of tourism will be introduced and discussed in this chapter (and throughout the book) as well, including mass tourism, sustainable tourism, ecotourism, alternative tourism and pro-poor tourism (PPT). Mass tourism refers to the mainstream, well developed and highly commodified form of tourism most commonly experienced, which involves an exchange of discretionary income for an experience that takes place away from the normal sphere of life. Sustainable tourism has received a great deal of attention (and an equal amount of controversy) and refers to tourism that is developed in a way that focuses on the long-term, economic, socio-cultural and environmental viability of a community. Ecotourism is often used interchangeably with sustainable tourism, but in fact has a stronger focus on the environmental protection of a destination. Alternative tourism emerged in the 1990s as a more radical form of sustainable tourism (Pearce, 1992). Alternative tourism sought to challenge increasingly commodified mass tourism and at the very least sidestep, but ideally disrupt, the consumptive practices that underpinned it. Finally, PPT is an approach to the industry that aims to provide opportunities for the poor. Over the past decade, volunteer tourism can trace its roots in alternative and ecotourism, but now can be found in virtually every sector and type of tourism, including mass tourism.
As a result of the growth of volunteer tourism, this book examines how volunteer tourism acts as an alternative form of tourism while struggling with its own commodification. The rise of commodified and packaged forms of volunteer tourism raises important questions about whether volunteer tourism really remains ‘alternative’. However, before addressing such critical considerations, we first turn to a discussion of the history and pedigree of volunteer tourism and the alternative ‘turn’ that we claim gave rise to it.
Historical Foundations of Alternative Tourism
Historically, the prohibitive costs, transport difficulties and perceived dangers prevented many from experiencing other countries and cultures outside of their own. From the beginning of recorded history to as late as the 18th century, leisure travel was largely the province of the privileged and even then, something that was not particularly easy. In the Middle Ages for example, a time of mass Christian pilgrimages, ‘travel was still generally considered to be a dangerous and uncomfortable experience that was best avoided if at all possible’ (Weaver & Opperman, 2000: 61).
It was the phenomenon of the ‘Grand Tour’, which became popular in the 16th century, that best represents the initial developments of international tourism (Towner, 1985). Aristocratic young men from ‘the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe undertook extended trips to continental Europe for educational and cultural purposes’ (Weaver & Opperman, 2000: 61). High social value was placed on these expeditions; however, it was here that
