These ideas provide a key tension for this book. They are unlikely to be answered conclusively but they will be necessarily explored with a view to providing a better understanding of the difficulties that exist in moving toward an understanding of volunteer tourism experiences. The following section examines several of the underlying tenets and structural principles of the tourism industry in order to provide a specific context for tourist experience at the industry level. This analysis will provide an inclusive context for the idea of volunteer tourism.
Volunteer Tourism and the Tourism Industry
A range of institutions and organizations, such as Earthwatch, Community Aid Abroad, Global Volunteers Network, Conservation Volunteers Australia, British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, Voluntary Services Overseas, Rotary Youth Projects and Youth Challenge International play a role in providing tourism experiences that fall outside the boundaries of what is generally considered mass tourism. The type of organizations that fall generally in the volunteer category of experiences often provide international support and sponsorship for the implementation of research projects and community development. These organizations have operating philosophies and processes that use resources that may not otherwise be available to mass tourism — such as fundraising — as their infrastructure requires and uses different resource bases. Such a focus allows for the provision of experiences that are not generally encompassed in the analysis of mass tourism experiences — such as volun-teerism, community development and personal development. Whelan (1991), for example, was one of the first to identify organizations that recruit participants with free time and money to spend on sustainable development efforts. It is such organizations that provide the boundaries for examining alternative tourism experiences.
Against this background, long before volunteer tourism was labelled as such, a United Nations (1975) study stated: ‘international realities today and in the foreseeable future, therefore, point to the importance of paying increased attention to programs fostering the participation of youth in development’ (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1975: 34). Therefore, the tourism industry (and in particular volunteer tourism) will certainly gain from having an understanding of the history of these types of organizations that have contributed to the provision of the tourism experience being sought by the youth who become involved.
An examination of the impacts of tourism industry practice5 can shed some light on how the provision of alternative tourism experiences relate to it. The power relationships present in modern mass tourism practices and the emerging resistance to these practices provides a useful arena to discuss the context of alternative tourism (e.g. Cheong & Miller, 2000; Hollinshead, 2000; Wearing & McDonald, 2002; Kirstges, 2003; Telfer, 2003; Tribe, 2005; Dredge, 2006; Bramwell & Meyer, 2007; Mowforth & Munt, 2008).
While definitions of the tourism industry define firms as private companies or enterprises whose existence is focused on profit motives, the definition itself is broad enough to encompass organizations that operate with other objectives. For example, organizations can operate with a focus on achieving such objectives as conservation, community development and personal development, offering a range of experiences that engage the tourist in experiences aimed at developing values that are not focused simply on the pleasure of the experience, or the desire to escape from day-to-day existence (Wearing & Deane, 2003). Therefore, the definition is inclusive of organizations such as Earthwatch with those such as One World Travel, whose primary focus is beyond normal profit motives and potentially differs from the mass tourism operators such as Thomas Cook Travel.
However, it often becomes difficult to differentiate the alternative tourism modalities of the myriad of tourism industry organizations. Ecotourism, for example, has been pejoratively labelled ‘green imperialism’ and the eco-tourist ‘eco-missionary’ by Dowden (1992), ‘eco-colonialism’ by Cater (1987) and ‘eco-imperialism’ by Hall (cited in Cater & Lowman, 1994). Other detractors include Kamauro (1996), Duffy (2002) and McLaren (2003). In this respect, ecotourism might be considered no different from other forms of tourism development and, it could be argued, falls into the range of commodified tourism products as explained in the preceding section. As an industry and a leisure activity, tourism generally revolves around the production and consumption of cultural difference, and so the thirst for ‘nature’ and other ‘cultures’ can be viewed as an endless attempt to commodify them by capturing an ‘essence’, but never really succeeding because it is an experience that provides only a fleeting gaze (e.g. Urry, 2002).
Post-industrial patterns of consumption have enabled the use of mass tourism as a vehicle for the packaging of a developing nation’s culture as ‘commodities of difference’, filling a commercially created need in the mass consciousness through the effective ability of developed nations to monopolize market forces, thus changing the shape of developing nation communities. Fussell (1982) discussed the artificialities of this type of tourism experience; Turner and Ash (1975) described it as a ‘plague of marauders’, with other authors commenting on its consumptive focus (Murphy, 1985; Krippendorf, 1987; Urry, 2002).
Developing nations are promoted as ‘commodities of difference’ to fulfil a commercially created need in the consciousness of affluent tourists. Urry (2002), Edensor (1998, 2000) and Cohen (2001) argue the re-arrangement of ceremonies, festivals, arts and crafts to meet the expectations of tourists trivializes the very cultures they seek to witness. As Urry (2002: 1) notes: ‘the consumption of cultural difference is socially organized and systematized’. Through in-depth fieldwork in various local communities, Macleod (2006) investigated the ways in which culture is sold to and consumed by visitors, illustrating the processes that produce ‘globalize cultural experiences’:
… tourists … will remain less aware of the destination culture than may be desirable due to the inadequate marketing material that focuses on tried and tested successful formulaic images and narratives … If the tourist experience is to lead to a richer understanding of other cultures, and an increased chance for indigenous communities to successfully use their culture as an asset if they wish, then those responsible for selling the destination should become increasingly sophisticated and sensitive towards the meaning of culture and the profile of the tourist.
(Macleod, 2006: 83)
Failure by some operators to change their operating philosophy and general behaviour has seen not only the ongoing degradation of already over-burdened developing nation tourist destinations, but a move by the promoters of mass tourism to comparatively pristine environments coveted for their untouched qualities. Greenwood (1989) suggests this form of tourism initially establishes footholds in developing countries by promising increased prosperity for the government of the day and the host communities: this, however, seldom results. Culture becomes a pre-packaged commodity, priced and sold like fast food and room service, as the tourism industry inexorably extends its grasp (Greenwood, 1989: 179).
Conversely, it is argued that the promotion of tourism experiences to developing nations is a form of global income redistribution. Money is made available to developing nations through tourism, thus allowing developing countries to acquire the foreign exchange needed to purchase technology, resources and infrastructure from developed countries (Wasi, in Srisang, 1991: 54). However, Lea (1993), Zheng (2000) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (UNWTO-UNEP-WMO, 2008) suggest that much of the income and perceived benefits generated by mass tourism ‘leaks out’ to large, multinational companies based in developed countries from which the operators come. This occurs through the corporate industry structure that is both vertically and horizontally integrated — for example, where one multinational corporation owns an airline, the tour buses, the hotel restaurant and recreational facilities. Profits in many of these cases are returned to the multinational’s ‘mother’ country (UNWTO-UNEP-WMO, 2008). It is generally