Ethically-minded travellers who seek out authentic, local cultural experiences are often moved by those experiences to want to contribute in some way to a local community, project or NGO they visit over and above the commercial tourism transaction of the visit itself. Paying a tour operator, accommodation provider, restaurant, guide and so on in
a Fair Trade-style arrangement is good but, for many, insufficient; they want to donate, usually money, but also time, materials (books, paper, computers, etc.) or other resources.
This is a bigger challenge to deal with than it might seem at first glance. It's important for travellers as well as those on the "operator" side of the relationship to take a considered approach to handling charitable donations. The various complexities have been coalescing in recent years under the umbrella term of "
Traveller's Philanthropy", and NGO's,
conferences and
private companies have sprung into existence along the way.
It's important first to be clear about what is meant by the term "Travel Philanthropy" and its close cousin, "Philanthropic Travel". The former is what this essay considers, namely how to best channel the charitable intentions of travellers who visit a destination and have an experience that motivates them to want to give. The latter is a niche market for tour operators, who offer travel experiences with the express purpose of the travellers making charitable contributions. (It's pedantic-sounding, even to me, but the distinction is crucial, and I look forward to the day when we have some terms that aren't so difficult to tell apart.)
So what are some of the challenges of Travel Philanthropy? Charity can bring with it so many troubling unintended consequences that are at risk of distorting or even reversing the initial generous intention of the giver. Just a few examples I’ve seen in my tourism development work of charity’s unintended consequences:
- Creating, sustaining or increasing dependency on handouts, which is disempowering and undermines the dignity of the recipient
- Relieving pressure local civil society is placing on governments to deliver services and comply with their constitutional or other legal obligations
- Undermining the confidence of existing or potential future local leaders by supporting a dependence on outsiders to bring relief
- Creating a mechanism for distributing patronage and creating local political instability where the ‘haves’ (recipients) develop power over others. Perversely, being needy and worthy of pity can become seen as a path to amassing power, influence and cash.
In addition, almost no charitable organisations are invested in the outcomes of their projects to the degree that the locals are, so the long-term commitment of a programme is always in question: what happens when the donor funds run out or the floods wash the clinic away or the warlords kidnap aid workers instead of villagers? The outsiders go back to their much more comfortable lives and locals remain, now disempowered for lack of their outside assistance. This is even more the case when the conduit to charity is not a well-established NGO but rather a commercial tourism business, and if/when their profitable tourism revenue dries up they aren't going to keep paying the costs of maintaining their people and infrastructure on the ground just to do nice things for the locals for free. Charity is not a long-term development strategy, and can undermine other strategies that work better.
(There is a whole separate discussion about the decades that various NGOs and government agencies have spent grappling with the unintended consequences of charity - or "donor contributions", more commonly - and the lessons learned, horror stories, best practices, etc. Formerly this was an issue largely confined to a narrow, wealthy slice of individual and institutional donors but as tourism has boomed in recent decades it has become more mainstream and therefore an issue for tourism and tourists to deal with as a fairly new phenomenon.)
Also, I am highly sceptical about commercial, for-profit tourism ventures who engage in philanthropy, even at arm's length through a trust or non-profit arm. It is very difficult to tell what is authentic, credible charity and what is just brand white-washing (or green-washing). It is even more difficult to tell whether and when the credible charity is having the desired positive benefits for the recipients even if the intention is all good. And who holds the company liable for the unintended negative effects of their charity? I don't deny the urge, intention and effort to do good for others is there, I just believe the profit motive so muddies the water that it is nearly impossible for an ethically-minded customer to tease these things apart. Unless there is a credible independent credentialing or auditing system (which is a different discussion), these inherent conflicts of interest and the complexity of teasing apart intention from outcome will make the problem persistent.
This is over and above the troubling issue of a company exploiting the idealism and generosity of their customers in order to build their brand and make a profit (of which more in a future posting about volunteer travel).
I also have reservations regarding the traveller/tourist’s motivations to give, whether sub-conscious or otherwise. I include my own motivations, which can be opaque, even (or perhaps specially) to me. Are were-enforcing our own sense of superiority? Or a paternalistic mindset (‘
White Man’s Burden’ for the 21st century)? How many tourists who are moved to charity when they visit Africa or Latin America or elsewhere are charitable in their own local communities? (For example, what proportion of affluent American philanthropic travellers gave money to help their own countrymen who suffered and continue to suffer in New Orleans from the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina?) What does it say about our motivations if we aren’t charitable at home, if it says anything? And why do so many donors come halfway around the world to give money – most of these projects, NGO’s and companies have websites with other channels for donating. It’s impossible to arm-chair psychoanalyse anyone fairly, but just going through the thought exercise makes me uncomfortable about the motivations of the givers. And,
is it OK to just allow outsiders to write a cheque and feel their conscience relieved so they can sleep at night after having seen poor people living horrible lives? Is philanthropic travel creating an industry of guilt-alleviation for rich (mainly) Westerners, and profiting from it along the way?
In spite of these many and varied criticisms, I do believe that it is better to give than not to give, and better still to engage pro-actively with the desires of travellers to give and to make an effort to channel those charitable gifts in some manner. Unstructured or unconsidered giving is even more problematic than what I’ve sketched above. However, I am not yet convinced that we have a handle on how to do this well such that, all things considered, the long-term outcomes are proven to be better than not giving at all.
Organisations like
Global Giving,
Kiva,
JustGive,
Philanthropy UK,
Travelers' Philanthropy and
Travaid are some of the interesting but (to my mind) unproven models that I’m keen to see independently evaluated in a tourism context. I would encourage travellers and tourism organisations (as well as NGO's) to look at these as potential sources of assitance in helping to navigate the complexities of Travel Philanthropy. The
Center for Responsible Travel has also published a set of
guidelines for responsible giving, also available for
download as a PDF. There is also a more generic (i.e., non-travel-specific)
guide to giving from Philanthropy UK both online and
as a downloadable PDF.
[Note: I first wrote down many of these thoughts as part of a week-long virtual conference on Responsible Tourism from 18-22 May 2009 ("RT Week 2009") and these along with others, as well as many other writers on the issue, can be found as part of a forum discussion on the RT Networking Facebook Group.]
Charity and the Responsible Traveller
