Tourism, Cosmopolitanism and Global Citizenship

Jim Butcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138483088
• eBook ISBN: 9781351055840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Certain types of tourism, such as volunteer tourism and student travel, have long been associated with global citizenship. To travel and to experience other societies and other cultures is linked with a cosmopolitan outlook, and also with the capacity to empathise and act ethically in relation to people in distant countries. In turn global citizenship – being a 'citizen of the world' - has become increasingly important both as a moral and political identity. Encouraged by employers, validated by universities, travel has become a marker of moral and intent for altruistic and ambitious youth with a mind to travel and the bank balance to facilitate it. The chapters in this volume explore the relationship between tourism, global citizenship and cosmopolitanism.

The chapters were originally published in a special issue of Tourism Recreation Research.

Citizenship, global citizenship and volunteer tourism: a critical analysis

Jim Butcher

ABSTRACT
This paper reflects on the association of volunteer tourism with global citizenship and argues that it involves outsourcing citizenship to ‘the globe’ in a manner unlikely to benefit global understanding or development politics. Volunteer tourism is strongly associated with global citizenship. Global citizenship, in turn, is associated with a better world. A key claim made about global citizenship is that it enables people to discharge their responsibilities to others in distant lands in an ethical way, less constrained by national interests. Yet global citizenship involves a reworking of the concept of citizenship not only spatially from nation to globe, but also politically from nation state and polity to non-governmental organisations and consumption (in this case, of tourism). The paper argues that in a number of ways the association of volunteer tourism with this geographically expanded but politically constricted notion of citizenship both reinforces a limited politics, and also limits the capacity of voluntourism to enlighten. By contrast, it is argued that a consideration of republican citizenship both clarifies these limits and suggests a more progressive rationale for volunteer travel.

Introduction

This paper develops a novel argument: a critique of the claims made for volunteer tourism as a promoter of a morally progressive global citizenship; and a restatement of the importance of republican citizenship as a framework through which to understand volunteer tourism’s limits and potential as an enlightening human activity.

The context for this argument is the crisis in republican citizenship, and an attendant crisis of politics itself (Furedi, 2013; Jacoby, 1999), which have reinforced by default the moral and political claims associated with global citizenship. Put simply, in an age of post- and anti-politics (Swyngedouw, 2011), lifestyle can seem a more viable way to act upon the world (Giddens, 1994). It is only in this context that an activity considered until recently as politically facile as tourism can be part of a narrative of something as vital as citizenship (Butcher & Smith, 2015).

Yet there is a big, and neglected, contradiction. Global citizenship detaches citizenship from the polity and from the democratic or potentially democratic structures of the nation state (Parekh, 2003; Standish, 2012). Instead, this version of citizenship is enacted, or ‘performed’, through lifestyle and consumption (with tourism being a key example of this). The Arendtian (1958) view of an agonistic public sphere through which republican citizens can exercise their freedom collectively and in public through politics is replaced by essentially personal and private encounters and experiences (Butcher, 2015).

The argument developed here is that global citizenship is an inadequate moral and political framework for understanding the problems that volunteer tourists encounter, and one that may inhibit the potential in travel to prompt critical reflection and action on these problems. Given the commonplace explicit linking of volunteer tourism to global citizenship, the former provides much scope for looking critically at these issues.

The paper begins by clarifying citizenship and global citizenship as different and distinctive ways to consider the relationship of the individual to the social and political problems they encounter. It then considers how the literature (critically), and the providers (uncritically), consider volunteer tourism as a route to global citizenship. Drawing upon this framework, the paper then develops its critique, focusing on volunteer tourism’s: capacity to address questions of power; cosmopolitan credentials and attraction as practical, ‘doable’ social action. Finally, it is argued that volunteer tourism ‘outsources’ the important political function of citizenship to ‘the globe’ in the name of global citizenship, but that this can be to the detriment of both the potential in volunteer travel and citizenship itself.

From the polis to global citizenship

The concept of citizenship originated with the polis in ancient Greece. Aristotle recognized man as a zoon politicon – a political animal. This feature of humanity was expressed through the polis, the ancient Greek city state. Citizenship progressed through its Roman conceptualisation, which involved a more developed legal relationship between citizen and state. The Italian City states of the Renaissance are also an important watershed in the development of citizenship, marking a shift away from subjects of a monarchy to citizens of a nation or city. In essence, citizenship involves the relationship between an individual and a political community, historically and culturally defined, within which social organisation is established and power legitimised and contested (Delanty, 2000; Faulks, 2000; Heater, 2004).

In modern society, citizenship developed in the context of the nation state. Citizens have rights within the state, sometimes inscribed in a constitution, as well as obligations under the law – the notion of a social contract is central. The civic republican conception of citizenship, championed by Hannah Arendtian (2000, 1958), emphasises the individual operating in the public sphere, an active part of the political determinations that shape the society in which he or she lives.

Global citizenship is a very different model. Here identification with a ‘global community’ is emphasised above that as a citizen of a particular nation (Bianchi & Stephenson, 2014; Dower, 2003; Wilde, 2013). Global citizenship transcends geography or political borders and assumes that responsibilities and rights are or can be derived from being a ‘citizen of the world’. This does not deny national citizenship, but the latter is often assumed to be more limited, morally as well as spatially (Dower, 2003).

The efficacy of global citizenship is premised upon the view that important political issues such as environmental damage, climate change and development are global in nature (Dower, 2003). That it may not be possible to address global-development-related issues from the perspective of nationally based politics is a common assumption (Dower, 2003). Issues are often presented as requiring private initiative (e.g. recycling, buying Fairtrade) linked to the globe (global poverty, globally unsustainable consumption), mediated through a global civil society of non-governmental organisations, globally oriented campaigns and also through ethical consumption (Delanty, 2000; Rhoads & Szelenyi, 2011; Standish, 2012).

Global citizenship as a concept has emerged principally through discussions about the role of education (Standish, 2012; see also various in Peters, Britton, & Blee, 2007). Advocates argue that children should learn about the world within a framework of global citizenship, and be encouraged to see themselves as having obligations towards environmental, human rights and development issues well beyond their own nation (Standish, 2012). This is especially the case in geography, but also true elsewhere in the curriculum (Standish, 2008). Today global citizenship has acquired a normative status in the education systems of Europe and North America and in much liberal thought. In the former case, US service learning aspires to promote global citizenship, and UK education from primary level through the Universities has adopted this outlook (Dill, 2013; Rhoads & Szelenyi, 2011).

According to one typical and influential definition, global citizenship means:

enabling young people to develop the core competencies which allow them to actively engage with the world, and help to make it a more just and sustainable place. This is about a way of thinking and behaving. It is an outlook on life, a belief that we can make a difference. (Oxfam, in press)

School boards, educationalists and non-governmental organisations tend to follow a similar definition, and have become more involved in gap year projects and volunteer tourism type initiatives. Active engagement with ‘the world’ as opposed to national politics is emphasised. The references to ‘a way of thinking and behaving’ and ‘an outlook on life’ linked to global engagement suggest a broad moral orientation rather than a political or legal relationship. The ‘belief that we can make a difference’ in a new way is a typical, and very understandable, reaction to the stasis that seems to characterise the aforementioned post-political climate (Swyngedouw, 2011).

Global citizenship and volunteer tourism: the literature

Global citizenship, then, suggests a less-partial and less-bounded view of the world, and this corresponds to the lived travel experience of the mobile middle classes who comprise the bulk of the market for ethical tourism niches (Mowforth & Munt, 2015). Ethical tourism (in contrast to mass tourism) has long been linked with global citizenship implicitly (Krippendorf, 1987). More recently that link has become explicit and theorised, particular in relation to ‘volunteer tourism’, ‘philanthropy tourism’ and a variety of other niches associated with ethical travel (Lyons, Hanley, Wearing, & Neil, 2012; Novelli, 2004; Palacios, 2010; Phi, Dredge, & Whitford, 2013). Even the Gap Year – perhaps the closest thing western societies have to a rite of passage for middle class youth – is associated with, and occasionally even certificated for, promoting global citizenship (Heath, 2007; Simpson, 2005). The ethical traveller can, apparently, exercise their agency and morality in relation to the globe, directly and personally, through their travels.

Where this trend towards seeing leisure travel as linked to the moral and political project of global citizenship is at its most developed is in relation to volunteer tourism, or voluntourism. Here the link is explicit and strong (Lyons & Wearing, 2011; Lyons et al., 2012). There are variations, and varying emphases, in the associations made between volunteer tourism and global citizenship.

One view is that volunteer tourism can forge global citizenship by building long-term relationships and networks that promote activism in new social movements (McGehee, 2002; McGehee & Santos, 2005) particularly through promoting the understanding of other cultures (Crabtree, 2008; Devereux, 2008; Howes, 2008; McGehee, 2012). This point is made with emotional force in Generation NGO, a volume of highly personal accounts from young Canadian volunteers (Apale & Stam, 2011), some of whom pledge to act on the basis of lessons learned through their experience of other less economically developed societies. Notably, the activism in this case and others is not directed at transforming poverty into wealth, but at ‘bringing home’ the lessons learned abroad about how to live a more sustainable and co-operative life.

Palacios has argued strongly that volunteer tourism should drop any pretense to development and become more explicitly focused on promoting intercultural understanding and greater global awareness (2010). Effectively, volunteer tourism is held to have the potential to contribute to the forging of a global conscience and understanding key to the nurturing of ethical, global citizenship.

Global citizenship is also regarded as instrumental, as a credential achievable through travel that improves employment opportunities. Both Heath and Simpson have pointed out the importance of volunteer tourism in the building of a portfolio of experiences that can feature on a CV (Heath, 2007; Simpson, 2005).

There is also a substantial literature problematising volunteer tourism in terms of its neoliberal and/or neo-colonial character (Mostafanezhad, 2013, 2014; Sin, 2009, 2010; Vrasti, 2012; Wearing, 2001, 2003; Wearing & Darcey, 2011; Wearing & Grabowski, 2011; Wearing & McGehee, 2013). The charge of neocolonialism in particular – that volunteer tourism can often draw upon and reinforce a narrative of northern benevolence meeting victimhood and gratitude in the global south, or the wealthy caring subject acting upon the impoverished object of their care – is relevant to this paper. Vrasti, for example, argues that the objectification of the Other in this way robs them of their humanity and their own agency, as well as ignoring the historical context of inequalities (2012). Neoliberalism – in this contact the marketisation of intercultural contact and culture itself – has also been argued to treat the hosts as objects of tourism, rather than as subjects in the context of an equal and authentic cultural exchange (Wearing, McDonald, & Ponting, 2005).

Although critical of much volunteer tourism, the literature also sees possibilities for challenging colonialism’s legacy. Mostafanezhad argues that the objectification of the host in volunteer tourism can be challenged through images and accounts that disrupt the neoliberal narrative (Mostafanezhad, 2013). Wearing, McDonald and Ponting argue that decommodified forms of tourism (volunteer tourism having this potential) can challenge neoliberal assumptions and create spaces within which more authentic human interaction can develop (2005).

This paper will argue that the objectification of the host is bett...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Tourism, cosmopolitanism and global citizenship
• 1. Citizenship, global citizenship and volunteer tourism: a critical analysis
• 2. A rite of passage? Exploring youth transformation and global citizenry in the study abroad experience
• 3. Cosmopolitan empathy in volunteer tourism: a psychosocial perspective
• 4. Class and global citizenship: perspectives from non-elite young people’s participation in volunteer tourism
• 5. ‘FEEL IT’: moral cosmopolitans and the politics of the sensed in tourism
• 6. Cosmopolitan education, travel and mobilities to Washington, DC
• 7. Producing science and global citizenship? Volunteer tourism and conservation in Belize
• 8. Volunteer tourism in Romania as/for global citizenship
• 9. Mediating global citizenry: a study of facilitator-educators at an Australian university
• 10. Educating tourists for global citizenship: a microfinance tourism providers’ perspective
• 11. The limits of cosmopolitanism: exchanges of knowledge in a Guatemalan volunteer programme
• 12. There’s a troll on the information bridge! An exploratory study of deviant online behaviour impacts on tourism cosmopolitanism
• Index