Resources

RESOURCES


RESOURCES: PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS

Author : Kevin Lyons
School/Work Place : University of Newcastle, Australia
Contact : kkevin.lyons@newcastle.edu.au
Year : 2007

The popularity of volunteer tourism as a form of alternative tourism has grown significantly over the past decade (McGehee, and Norman, 2002). Volunteer tourists can now be found throughout the world participating in a wide array of social, educational, political and environmental projects. While these projects continue to use volunteer tourists as a significant source of labour, the NGOs and community organisations that provide and support them have begun exploring other innovative ways to attract and engage volunteer tourists who may wish to provide their voluntary labour in less direct ways. As a result programs are now emerging that move beyond the convention established in volunteer tourism where participants travel to a destination community to volunteer their labour while simultaneously being a ‘tourist’ in the broadest sense of the word. Instead, these new programs fuse adventure, volunteerism and philanthropy incrementally into an innovative tourism experience that challenges traditional debates about the decommodifying processes (Wearing, McDonald, and Ponting, 2005) embedded in volunteer tourism. One example of this new type of volunteer tourism is the development and provision of fundraising adventure tours. Fundraising adventure tourism has been adopted by a number of NGO’s who recruit participants willing to raise a pre-determined sum of money half of which is used to support the NGO’s core business and the remaining funds are used to fund an adventure tour.

Previous arguments have suggested that volunteer tourism does not fit into the commodified regime of mass and packaged tourism as its focus is not on the exchange value in the tourism system (Wearing et al. 2005). This paper explores whether the act of fundraising as an act of volunteering, conducted prior to participating in an adventure tour enabled participants to experience the decommodified frame of gift economy that has been heralded as the hallmark of volunteer tourism (Wearing, 2001) or whether this separation undermines this process. This paper presents a case study of one of these innovative programs developed and operated by Oxfam Community Aid Abroad Australia – Oxfam Challenge program.

This paper draws on the marketing materials of Oxfam and presents findings from an analysis of diaries and web-blogs of 25 individuals who participated in fundraising/cycling adventures with Oxfam Australia– Oxfam Challenge program. The adventure fundraising tour conducted by Oxfam Australia is marketed as an adventure experience with a difference. OXFAM Australia recruits participants willing to raise $5000 which in-part covers the cost of a two week cycling tour through remote villages in China, Vietnam or Cambodia where they visit environmental and humanitarian projects and where the funds they raised are being used. While participants are recruited through Oxfam Australia, the adventure tour component of the program is outsourced to a commercial travel service provider who provides a fully packaged program including airfares, meals, a bicycle, and a guide. This component of the experience is almost identical to any packaged adventurebased tour conducted by a wide range of operators globally.


List of Articles
No. Subject Viewssort Date
174 Think Tank XII Sustainable Tourism: Is it better to travel or not to ... file 5040 Nov 06, 2013

Tourism’s growing contribution to climate change has come to the forefront of the sustainable tourism literature as evidenced by the Journal of Sustainable Tourism’s (JOST) 2010 publication of a special issue titled “Tourism: Adapting to Cli...

Author: B. Bynum Boley 

Year: 2012 

173 Think Tank XIV Current Global Initiatives to Address the Sustainabili... file 5075 Jul 07, 2014

A number of ongoing and new initiatives aim at the tourism sector with the intention of improving sustainability within the sector and through tourism in other economic and social activities. Dirk's presentation reflects on UNWTO’s position ...

Author: Dirk Glaesser 

Year: 2014 

172 Think Tank XIII Building community capacity by developing regional bus... file 5118 Nov 06, 2013

Tourism is often proposed as a strategy for community development, especially in rural or remote regions where traditional industries, such as agriculture, are experiencing an economic downturn and there are limited alternative opportunities...

Author: Anna Blackman 

Year: 2013 

171 Think Tank XIV Exploring the potential of Community Based Ecotourism ... file 5179 Jun 27, 2014

Development in developing countries often results in mass land-use change and subsequent increase in greenhouse gas emission by deforestation or forest degradation. For instance, approximately a-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions was a...

Author: Stephen Wearing, Paul Chatterton, Amy Reggers & Hanna Sakata 

Year: 2014 

170 Think Tank XVI The impact of CSR activities of family businesses on c... file 5190 Jul 02, 2016

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Author: Zehrer Anita 

Year: 2016 

169 Think Tank XIV The Emergence of Cross-border Governance Structures: t... file 5256 Jun 26, 2014

It is well recognized that the local borders of a tourism destination are not easy to delineate as they are constantly changing through complex practices and discourses due to historical, political, and economic factors. In fact, recent stud...

Author: Dani Blasco, Jaume Guia & Lluís Prats 

Year: 2014 

168 Think Tank XIV Psychological Empowerment as Good Policy for Governanc... file 5263 Jun 26, 2014

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the potential impact psychological empowerment can have on sustainable tourism policy objectives, including improving resident attitudes toward tourism, enhancing destination competitiveness, and maint...

Author: B. Bynum Boley & Nancy Gard McGehee 

Year: 2014 

167 Think Tank XIV Exploring Policy, Politics and Governance through Stak... file 5283 Jun 27, 2014

This paper looks at the development of an ecotrekking industry on the Kokoda Track and demonstrates how the use of participatory methods in community based tourism can align two different “regimes of truth” (that of the community and of the ...

Author: Stephen Wearing, Paul Chatterton & Amy Reggers 

Year: 2014 

166 Think Tank XII Destination Governance and Tourist Mobilities: New Par... file 5299 Nov 06, 2013

Resort communities are complex systems where destination governance has become increasingly challenged by new mobilities of capital, finance, labor, communication, transportation, leisure and tourism. Popular destinations like the coastal co...

Author: Dianne Dredge & Tazim Jamal 

Year: 2012 

» Think Tank VII Innovations in Volunteer Tourism: A Case Study of Fund... file 5309 Oct 13, 2013

The popularity of volunteer tourism as a form of alternative tourism has grown significantly over the past decade (McGehee, and Norman, 2002). Volunteer tourists can now be found throughout the world participating in a wide array of social, ...

Author: Kevin Lyons 

Year: 2007 

164 Think Tank XIII Modeling the Index Components of Tourist Satisfaction ... file 5335 Nov 06, 2013

Destination performance evaluation has become an increasingly important task for effective destination management and sustainable destination development. However, it is a complex task due to the inclusion of diverse subsectors, business com...

Author: Toney K. Thomas 

Year: 2013 

163 Think Tank IX Exploring Tourists’ Environmental Learning, Values, an... file 5339 Oct 13, 2013

There is a need for a research agenda, which achieves a holistic understanding of the nature and influences of environmental learning on tourists’ environmental values and travel experiences in relation to climate change. Why, because touri...

Author: Ulrike Kachel & Gayle Jennings 

Year: 2009 

162 Think Tank V Crisis Communications and Tourism Recovery Strategies ... file 5357 Oct 13, 2013

This paper describes the application of lessons and processes gleaned from previous crises and disasters to the tourism recovery process for the Maldives following the tsunami of December 26 th , 2004. An assessment of existing literature as...

Author: Jack Carlsen 

Year: 2005 

OPA: 2005 Outstanding Paper Award Winner 

161 Think Tank XI Environmental Attitudes of Generation Y Students: Foun... file 5404 Oct 14, 2013

Sustainability has long been a theme in the tourism research and planning literature and is a growing concern in the wider area of business and corporate management. Consequent to these trends in practice and research there has been a growt...

Author: Pierre Benckendorff, Gianna Moscardo & Laurie Murphy 

Year: 2011 

160 Think Tank IV It's Mostly About Me: Reasons why Volunteers contribut... file 5413 Oct 13, 2013

This paper contributes to the debate by reporting on inital findings from a wider study of volunteers in museums and art museums that was designed to empirically explore volunteer motivation, expectations, values and commitment. The aim of t...

Author: Deborah Edwards 

Year: 2004 

159 Think Tank X Sustainability: What Matters to Students, Educators, a... file 5417 Oct 13, 2013

As climate change gains global attention from events like the summit in Copenhagen held during December of 2009, the need for sustainable tourism is more important than ever; with comprehensive education in sustainability concepts and practi...

Author: Cynthia S. Deale & Nelson Barber 

Year: 2010 

158 Think Tank VIII Resident Support for Sustainable Tourism Policies in T... file 5447 Oct 13, 2013

During the last two decades, there has been increased focus on topics related to various aspects of sustainable tourism. Believing that sustainable tourism can be a serious alternative that can remedy some of the negative impacts associated ...

Author: Ercan Sirakaya-Turk, Muzzo S. Uysal & Turgut Var 

Year: 2008 

157 Think Tank XIV Development of a Certification System for Sustainable ... file 5448 Jun 27, 2014

Tourism destinations are complex entities that can be defined as geographical areas of different sizes that are being visited by tourists. Most definitions then differentiate between the perspectives of those living in and managing a destina...

Author: Wolfgang Strasdas 

Year: 2014 

156 Think Tank XII Intersecting Mobilities: Tourists with Vision Impairme... file 5457 Nov 06, 2013

While there has been a developing interest in mobilities amongst tourism scholars, the notion of immobilities has often been ignored. Yet, there are many people who do not participate in tourism or, if they do, only experience partial mobili...

Author: Jennifer Small 

Year: 2012 

155 Think Tank VI Corporate Social Responsibility and Travel & Tourism B... file 5477 Oct 13, 2013

This paper discusses some economic, social, and environmental “hard issues” for the travel and tourism (T&T) industry with the aim of shedding some light on little discussed aspects of industry corporate social responsibility (CSR) with ...

Author: David Stipanuk 

Year: 2006 

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