‘Making a Difference’: Volunteer Tourism and Development

In recent decades there has been a boom in international volunteer tourism, mainly in the form of the growth of gap-year companies offering placements, linked to conservation and community well-being goals. This paper makes two points: firstly, it argues that the growth of volunteer tourism is in part a product of the politics of the current period—the decline of grand narratives and the growth of ‘life political’ alternative forms of agency. Hence volunteer tourism, motivated by the impulse to ‘make a difference’, tells us something about the way in which development issues are being conceived of by idealistic young people who comprise the majority of volunteer tourists. Secondly, the paper takes issue with the view that today's volunteer tourists are part of a tradition of colonialism and neo-colonialism that projects western conceptions of modernization onto the Third World societies to the detriment of the latter. Rather, it is argued that the politics behind volunteer tourism is better characterized as a rejection of modernization as development in favour of a post-development influenced approach.