- Title
- Widening the scope of evaluating volunteer tourism: Beyond impact measurement
- Creator
- Grabowski-Faulkner, Simone; Everingham, Phoebe; Young, Tamara
- Relation
- Routledge Handbook of Volunteering in Events, Sports and Tourism p. 360-372
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780367815875-33
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Tourism has a large environmental footprint. The economic, social and ecological effects of tourism have been investigated and measured in many contexts. However, there are limitations to impact measurement. In this chapter we focus on some of these challenges in the context of volunteer tourism: a unique subset of tourism that presents opportunities for volunteers to have immersive tourism experiences. While the impacts of volunteer tourism are being increasingly documented, there have been few attempts to measure these impacts in ways that account for the impacts on host communities, destination environments or broader supply chains. We argue that impact measurements in volunteer tourism are difficult to capture and we propose, that instead of quantifying impacts into universal and Eurocentric typologies, volunteer tourism impacts would best be evaluated in context via interpretative and community specific means that account for the emergent possibilities for connecting across cultural differences.
- Subject
- volunteer tourism; footprint; host communities; Eurocentric typologies
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1449538
- Identifier
- uon:43688
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780367815875
- Language
- eng
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