This presentation provided insights from living and working in the interconnected expert world of international development in Africa and my transition to academia. These reflections on my ‘adventures in aidland’ (Mosse 2013) highlight why the policy rhetoric, that community based tourism can advance sustainable development, is highly problematic in the field. The reality is that donor driven community based tourism interventions are often ineffective as projects waste scarce resources, cause conflicts, provide a poor tourist experience and do not reduce poverty or conserve biodiversity. Unfortunately, there are few published accounts of such development interventions but there is evidence of a high rate of project failure and a need for more rigorous analysis, transparency and accountability (Dixey 2008).
It is crucial for studies in this development arena to interrogate and/or jettison concepts that reduce complexity (e.g. grassroots, communal, authentic, sustainable) and undertake the difficult work of revealing opportunistic global and local interconnections as well as the ways so-called ‘host communities’ are divided by modernity and tradition, ethnicity and gender. This requires aidnography that can provide critical ethnographic understanding of tourism development interventions and a change in focus from not whether but how development practice actually happens on the ground (Lewis and Mosse 2005). Aidnography seeks to make visible political processes at work and explain why development interventions retain legitimacy despite the fact that their outcomes are often contrary to their objectives. Further, this approach illustrates the importance of the embeddedness of the researcher in the case study, a position rarely taken in studies of tourism and international development.
Louise Dixey
Associate Lecturer
Lincoln International Business School
University of Lincoln