Current Issues in Tourism
Editor: C. Michael Hall (Department of Management, College of Business and Economics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand) and Chris Cooper (Foundation Professor of Tourism, University of Queensland, Australia) Michael and Chris are joint editor of the book series Aspects of Tourism. Reviews Editor John Jenkins (University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia)
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Volume: 10 Number: 2-3 Page: 231–254
doi:10.2167/cit318.0
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Exploring the Tourism-Poverty Nexus
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Regina Scheyvens
School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
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Current discourse surrounding ‘pro-poor tourism’, a term emerging out of the writing of UK researchers in the late 1990s, suggests that tourism can effectively work as a tool to alleviate poverty. This proposition is alluring given that tourism is a significant or growing economic sector in most countries with high levels of poverty. Consequently the idea of utilising tourism to eliminate poverty has been embraced by donors, governments, non-governmental organisations, conservation organisations and tourism bodies, including the World Tourism Organisation. Academic views on the relationship between poverty and tourism have however varied widely over the past half century. While in the 1950s tourism was identified as a modernisation strategy that could help newly-independent Third World countries to earn foreign exchange, in the 1970s and 1980s many social scientists argued that poor people and non-Western countries are typically excluded from or disadvantaged by what tourism can offer. It is thus fascinating to see how there has been a concerted push towards a reversal of this thinking in the 1990s, coinciding with the development industry's global focus on poverty alleviation. This paper will detail this evolution of thinking and in doing so, explore theoretical debates on the tourism-poverty nexus.
Keywords: poverty, development, pro-poor tourism
© 2007 R. Scheyvens
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