Tourism and the Millennium Development Goals

Tourism, Local Communities and Development

Jarkko Saarinen, Christian M. Rogerson, Haretsebe Manwa

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415523837
• eBook ISBN: 9781317966975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

In 2000 United Nations adopted the Millennium Development Goals (UN MDGs), committing the member nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of specific targets with a deadline of 2015. Related to the UN MDGs, tourism is increasingly seen as a promising tool for poverty reduction, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development, for example. Thus, the industry has become an important policy tool for community and regional development in many developing countries and the expectations for tourism and its social and economic outcomes have evolved to a high level. However, there are still many challenges to overcome in the relationship between tourism industry, development and poverty reduction.

This book aims to discuss the promises, challenges and outcomes of tourism in development with a specific aim of drawing together research related to tourism and UN MDGs. The papers discuss what lessons can be learnt and conclusions drawn from the utilisation of tourism for development and poverty reduction. What emerges from this collection is a set of interesting results and notions which both support and challenge the connections between tourism and development and the new role of tourism in global development.

This book is an extended version of a special issue published in Current Issues in Tourism.

Tourism, Poverty Reduction and the Millennium Development Goals: Perspectives and Debates

Jarkko Saarinen, Christian M. Rogerson and Haretsebe Manwa

Introduction

Constant change is said to be typical for tourism as a social and economic phenomenon. Indeed, tourism is a dynamic process with impacts that can vary in time and space. Nevertheless, the shifting characteristics of tourism concern not only its nature, patterns and impacts rather the value and role of tourism must be contextualised in various ways. Essentially, arguments and perspectives relating to promoting tourism development have been understood through three core dimensions: business development, regional development and sustainable development.

The first perspective emphasises tourism as an economic activity that provides possibilities for private entrepreneurship and profit-making. In the second dimension, operating in a wider spatial scale than single business units located in tourism systems, the industry is conceived as a viable tool for regional development and employment creation (Müller & Jansson, 2007; Rogerson, 2010). Based on this view many governments and various international and regional development agencies are supporting the industry by planning and constructing tourism infrastructures for purposes of catalysing local, regional and national development (Hall, 2000; Rogerson & Rogerson, 2010). Especially in developing countries the promotion of tourism has been regarded as beneficial for the goals of regional development (Sinclair & Stabler, 1997; Telfer & Sharpley, 2008). Related to the third dimension, since the turn of the 1990s the ideology and politics of sustainable development have influenced greatly the rationale and possibilities for tourism development (see Saarinen et al., 2009). From the sustainability perspective the industry is seen as a potential economic activity to use and manage regional resources in environmentally, socio-culturally and economically sound and sensitive ways (Berry & Ladkin 1997; Mowforth & Munt, 1998; Spenceley, 2010). Thus, the promotion of tourism is viewed as having considerable potential for advancing the goals of sustainable development (Butler, 1999; Swarbrooke, 1999).

Arguably, these three dimensions to the rationale of tourism development are interrelated and dependent on each other through symbiotic and/or conflicting relations in specific situations. For example, there cannot occur regional or sustainable development based on the tourism industry without economically viable tourism businesses operating in a given geographical context. Likewise, growth in tourism revenue per se does not necessarily equate with regional development or lead to sustainability (see Akama, 1999; Reid, 2003). One common thread across the three dimensions of business development, regional development and sustainable development is that the tourism industry has a significant capacity for generating positive economic impacts if its development trajectory can be guided correctly.

It is now widely acknowledged that the scale of the global tourism industry is extensive. Put simply, for the World Bank (2012, p. 11) ‘Tourism is a three-billion-a day business’. It is estimated that tourism contributes approximately nine per cent to global production and employs more than 220 million people across the Global North and Global South (see Sofield, 2003). Sofield has further indicated that the developing countries have a market share of 40 per cent of international tourism. It was predicted that the global number of international tourist arrivals would exceed one billion by the end of 2012. This rising tempo of tourism has raised further its developmental potential beyond the previous notions of business growth, regional development and sustainability to encompass a prospective role to tackle serious global scale developmental challenges such as poverty (e.g. Ashley & Mitchell, 2005; Bolwell & Weinz, 2008). It is against this backcloth of accelerating growth of international (as well as domestic and regional) tourism that many national governments in the Global South have established poverty reduction strategies which are anchored often on hopes for the potential of global tourism led growth (Scheyvens, 2011, p. 145–170, see Mitchell & Ashley, 2010).

Tourism and Poverty Reduction

Pro-Poor Tourism: Tourism Serving the Poor?

Although tourism is both highly mobile and increasingly global by nature, the industry is also deeply attached to certain spaces which provide opportunities for tourist production and consumption. Donald Getz (1999, p. 24) has defined tourist space as ‘an area dominated by tourist activities or one that is organized for meeting the needs of visitors’. From this perspective the idea of pro-poor tourism (PPT), i.e. tourism that aims to create net benefits especially for the poor (Ashley & Roe, 2002), may appear incompatible. As indicated by Getz we usually link ‘meeting the needs’ in tourism to people who have spending power well beyond their basic survival needs in everyday life. Obviously, this socio-economic difference between the hosts and guests is one key to understanding how tourism and tourists’ needs could work for poverty reduction. Tourist consumption can be harnessed to serve the poor by ‘unlocking opportunities’ for them ‘at all levels and scales of operation’ in tourism (Ashley et al., 2001, p. 3). In this respect Mitchell and Ashley (2010) have identified three pathways by which the benefits of tourism can be transferred to the poor: direct effects; secondary effects; and dynamic effects.

Essentially, the direct effects involve labour and non-labour income in which the former refers to individual earnings while the latter relates to community income (e.g. based on land leases). In addition, the direct effects include non-financial elements such as improved infrastructures benefitting other livelihoods in the local scale. The secondary effects of tourism for the poor are based on indirect earnings from non-tourism sectors but which are linked to tourist activities. Local agricultural products sold to tourism businesses represent one example of such effects (Rogerson, 2012). Also the so called induced impacts, i.e. tourism workers’ consumption from local economy based on their earnings, can represent secondary effects to the poor (depending on the target of income spending!). Finally, the dynamic effects are pathways to poverty reduction based on long-term (positive) changes in the socio-economic, cultural and physical environment created by tourism development (Mitchell & Ashley, 2010).

In order for these pathways to function properly, not least for the poor, certain structures, principles and context-dependent conditions are required. As recently observed the tourism industry, like other businesses, ‘comes with its own set of risks and challenges’ (World Bank, 2012, p. 7), most notably the dangers of environmental degradation, increased crime, and exploitation of women and children. Nevertheless, it is asserted that by raising an awareness of the risks associated with tourism-led development, carefully managing growth and improving private sector linkages these risks can be reduced and tourism benefits maximised for destinations. Existing scholarship stresses that PPT is not a tourism product but a wider framework to organise host-guest relations and benefit sharing in tourism (Chok, Macbeth & Warren, 2007; Rogerson, 2006; Scheyvens, 2011). Its key principles, which should guide the industry’s relations with local communities (especially the poor), are summarised in Table 1. In addition to these general principles, the UNWTO (2006) has outlined a set of main strategies that would lead to pro-poor tourism impacts, such as the direct employment of the poor; the supply of local goods and services by the poor; establishing tourism operations by the poor; and supporting entrepreneurs in the informal economy to engage in the tourism industry. Overall, it is argued that there is a great potential in tourism to serve not only the needs of the visitors but those of the poor as well (Mitchell & Ashley, 2010). However, in practice this opportunity has turned out to be highly problematic which has caused rising levels of criticism of the tourism industry’s capacity to reduce poverty (see Hall, 2007; Scheyvens, 2009).

Table 1 General principles of pro-poor tourism (Source: Chok, Macbeth & Warren, 2007).

Participation	Poor people must participate in tourism decisions if their livelihood priorities are to be reflected in the way tourism is developed.
A holistic livelihoods approach	Recognition of the range of livelihood concerns of the poor (economic, social, and environmental; short-term and long-term). A narrow focus on cash or jobs is inadequate.
Balanced approach	Diversity of actions needed, from micro to macro level. Linkages are crucial with wider tourism systems. Complementary products and sectors (for example, transport and marketing) need to support pro-poor initiatives.
Wide applicability	Pro-poor principles apply to any tourism segment, though strategies may vary between them (for example between mass tourism and wildlife tourism).
Distribution	Promoting PPT requires some analysis of the distribution of both benefits and costs- and how to influence it.
Flexibility	Blue-print approaches are unlikely to maximise benefits to the poor. The pace or scale of development may need to be adapted; appropriate strategies and positive impacts will take time to develop; situations are widely divergent.
Commercial realism	PPT strategies have to work within the constraints of commercial viability.
Cross-disciplinary learning	As much is untested, learning from experience is essential. PPT needs to draw on lessons from poverty analysis, environmental management, good governance and small enterprise development.

Critical views concerning the industry’s ability and willingness to focus on the net benefits of the poor in tourist destinations are grounded on the basic logic of tourism as a private sector and market driven business (Scheyvens, 2011). As emphasised by Getz (1999) instead of focusing on locals and the poor the tourism industry is primarily organised to serve non-locals and their needs. Although local and non-local needs are not necessarily conflicting in tourism development, critical questions are who has the power and control to lead the development and define appropriate goals, impacts and their limits as well as the distribution of benefits based on tourism growth? Quite often the answers can be grounded on Ringer’s (1998, p. 9) statement that tourism is an industry ‘that satisfies the commercial imperatives of an international business, yet rarely addresses local development needs’. Thus, tourism-led economic growth does not automatically translate into benefits for the poor. This dilemma is a major challenge for the advocates of PPT aiming to work directly with the global tourism operations. As Harold Goodwin (2009, p. 91) has stated ‘the radicalism of the PPT approach was seeking to use mainstream tourism to achieve the objective of poverty elimination’. Although there is the general idea of controlling the impacts involved in the PPT development model, Regina Scheyvens (2009, p. 193) has critically questioned why we should assume that (the mainstream) tourism industry have some ethical commitment to ensuring that their businesses contribute to the alleviation of poverty (see also Hall, 2007; Hall & Brown, 2006).

On the other hand, those who promote, support or sympathise with PPT indicate that it is ‘not about theorising or subscribing to a particular ideology, but essentially about attempting to find workable market invention strategies’ that empower the poor in practise to be actively and mutually involved with the industry at a local level (Meyer, 2009, p. 198). Along similar lines many PPT advocates realise that in the context of tourism true poverty alleviation cannot be attained without the mainstream industry’s involvement (Goodwin, 2009). While this may be a realistic view in the global context it also brings risks locally – because theory does not always translate into practice.

Despite these risks and criticisms, several international development organisations led by the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) have issued policy documents and statements (e.g. UNWTO’s (2002) ST-EP: Sustainable Tourism – Eliminating Poverty advocating the role of tourism in poverty reduction. As stated by Francesco Frangiolli, Secretary-General of the UNWTO: tourism can play a major role in the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (UN MDGs)(UNWTO, 2006). The World Bank (2012) highlights the transformative role that tourism potentially can play in transforming economies and societies in sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, it identifies that tourism can empower women, young people and marginalized populations. Most critically, perhaps, tourism’s ability to create jobs and infrastructure, particularly in rural areas, makes it an attractive vehicle for poverty alleviation and development across sub-Saharan Africa. The UNWTO further emphasises that tourism development in Africa is particularly important for the fight against poverty and the progress towards the UN MDGs (UNWTO 2006). Indeed, across the recent policy discourse and academic discussions one of the strongest reference points in touri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Tourism, Poverty Reduction and the Millennium Development Goals: Perspectives and Debates
• 2. The UN Millennium Development Goals, tourism and development: the tour operators’ perspective
• 3. The Grootberg lodge partnership in Namibia: towards poverty alleviation and empowerment for long-term sustainability?
• 4. Tourism and development challenges in the least developed countries: the case of The Gambia
• 5. Promoting gender equality and empowering women? Tourism and the third Millennium Development Goal
• 6. The tourists of developmentourism – representations ‘from below’
• 7. Can community-based tourism contribute to development and poverty alleviation? Lessons from Nicaragua
• 8. Pro-Poor Tourism: From Leakages to Linkages. A Conceptual Framework for Creating Linkages between the Accommodation Sector and ‘Poor’ Neighbouring Communities
• 9. Tourism Chains Pro-poor Tourism Development: An Actor-Network Analysis of a Pilot Project in Costa Rica
• 10. The effects of tourism development on the sustainable utilisation of natural resources in the Okavango Delta, Botswana
• 11. Balancing people and park: towards a symbiotic relationship between Cape Town and Table Mountain National Park
• 12. Can ecotourism contribute to tackling poverty? The importance of ‘symbiosis’
• 13. Beyond 2015 – Rethinking the Nexus of Tourism and Poverty Reduction
• Index