and poverty reduction 5
This chapter:
•
Reviews tourism and poverty reduction policy initiatives•
Evaluates pro-poor growth, pro-poor tourism and ST-EP•
Analyses how tourism can impact on the poorINTRODUCTION
For tourism to be used as an effective means for poverty reduction it is essential that it overcomes barriers of place, geography or political economy that may arrest the integration of the poor into the process of economic development. The key aim of this chapter is to subsequently review and evaluate the key policy initiatives that have been taken to date to integrate tourism into the poverty reduction and alleviation agenda. Refl ecting on how the tourism industry may or may not offer economic benefi ts to the poor, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and unfortunately now deceased, Wangari Maathai gives an interesting insight through her own observation of tourism and poverty in Yaoundé in Cameroon. As the Goodwill Ambassador for the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem, she was visiting the Commission for the Forests of Central Africa (COMIFAC), staying in a luxury hotel on one of the hills overlooking the city.
She describes looking across from the hotel to observe a group of farmers on a hill-side, farming on a very steep slope using methods that would result in soil erosion when the rains arrived. Refl ecting on this situation, she comments: ‘I wondered how much of the revenue of the hotel – which was owned by a foreign corporation – was making its way into the government coffers, and then, in turn, how much of that money the government was investing in its agricultural sector, including in an exten-sion service, that could educate the woman and assist her in farming more sustain-ably’ (Maathai, 2009: 15). This poignant observation of Maathai’s highlights key
issues and questions of how tourism can be best used as part of a strategy for poverty reduction and how it may play an active role in capacity building and creating liveli-hood opportunities, a similar situation to that of the disjuncture between tourism and poverty that exists in Cape Town as discussed in Box 5.1 .
BOX 5.1 TOURISM AND POVERTY IN CAPE TOWN
Cape Town in South Africa has been voted the world’s top tourist destination, possessing beautiful beaches, fashionable suburbs and great cuisine. However, the millions of tourists that arrive through the smart airport are quickly exposed to the shanty towns that fl ank the motorway to Table Mountain. The marginalised situation of the poor led Xola Skosana, a political activist, to go on hunger strike for a month to protest about their living conditions and the inequality of the society. In direct relevance to the relationship between tourism and poverty, he commented: ‘It is interesting to me that a woman would make up a bed in a fi ve star hotel then come home to sleep on the fl oor . . . or cook the best meal for someone else and come back to live off a slice of bread.’ The conditions of the poor are those that typify poverty, including fl imsy dwellings with no electricity, no running water and no sanitation. As one of the residents living in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s biggest township, commented: ‘There’s been no change since 1994 [the end of apartheid]. We’re still hungry, we are still living in a dirty place’, whilst another resident commented: ‘Cape Town is largely for the benefi t and entertainment of tourists.’
Source: after Smith, 2011
The need for the tourism industry in LDCs to provide benefi ts for the poor is similarly emphasised by Seabrook (2007: 21) in the following passage:
The world which the rich make their play-ground is crafted to the picturesque and scenic; even some of the poorest countries now promote themselves as tourist destinations. The Gambia, Tanzania, South Africa and Kenya are promoted for their clear waters, dramatic wildlife and stunning scenery. These are also places where millions are dying of AIDS, where violent crime is commonplace and pitiless social injustice prevails. But this does not impinge upon the enjoyments which the well-to-do purchase for themselves.
In the scenario of the model of tourism portrayed by Seabrook, tourism is likely to bring few benefi ts for the poor, instead segregating and marginalising them to
ensure that environments are not spoilt for tourists. Nevertheless, the desire of some of the poorest countries to promote themselves as tourist destinations is refl ective of a now established awareness that tourism has the potential to help achieve economic growth and development. Progressing beyond securing macro-economic benefi ts from tourism, any government that has the moral conviction and political desire to provide opportunities for its nation’s poor and reduce the incidence and indecency of poverty needs to rationalise how it can utilise tourism in a positive manner to progress human development and address the types of social problems exemplifi ed by Seabrook (ibid.).
Given the comparative advantage of the natural and cultural resources for tourism in many LDCs, and the emphasis for the World Bank and IMF on Poverty Reduc-tion Strategies (PRSs), governments need to identify how to utilise tourism devel-opment to maximise its positive impact for creating livelihood opportunities for the poor (Roe et al. , 2004; UNEP/UNWTO, 2005; Goodwin, 2006; Novelli and Hellwig, 2011). As was commented on in Chapter 2 , tourism’s potential to reduce poverty is supported by its economic importance in LDCs, being the primary source of foreign exchange earnings in 46 of the 49 poorest nations (UNWTO, 2009: 1). However, whilst the measurement of tourism’s macro-economic impacts permits a comparative analysis with other economic sectors, there is an absence of empirical data to demonstrate its contribution to poverty at the micro-level, the traditional praxis resting upon an assumption that local people will automatically benefi t through conventional systems of the trickle-down and multiplier processes (Roe et al. , 2004).
As was referred to in Chapter 2 , the linking of tourism to poverty reduction is a recent addition to the development debate, becoming a policy consideration since the start of the millennium. Whilst this is in part a consequence of a lack of under-standing of the potential role of tourism in poverty reduction, it is also attributable to a perception of the characteristics of conventional tourism development, including control by local elites and transnational corporations, negative environ-mental and social impacts, and high economic leakages (Torres and Momsen, 2004). However, the World Bank policy shift at the end of the 1990s away from SAPs to PRSs has refocused thinking on to tourism as a tool for poverty reduc-tion. The evolution of a policy framework for tourism’s use for poverty reduction can be attributed to three key sources. It has been advocated through the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) ‘Sustainable Tourism – Elimi-nating Poverty Program’ (ST-EP); the United Kingdom’s Department for Interna-tional Development’s (DFID) ‘Pro-Poor Tourism’ (PPT) policy; and the work of the Netherlands Agency for International Development (SNV). Within both PPT and ST-EP, emphasis is placed upon putting the poor at the centre of the develop-ment process (Scheyvens, 2002, 2003; Sofi eld, 2003; Easterling, 2005; Sharpley, 2009). As a key agency in placing tourism within the poverty reduction agenda,
DFID developed the construct of PPT towards the end of the 1990s, building on the concept of ‘pro-poor growth’, which symbolised the re-orientation of devel-opment towards Poverty Reduction Strategies. From the concept of pro-poor growth emerged ‘pro-poor tourism’, which was fi rst used by the management consultancy fi rm of Deloitte and Touche in a report for DFID on sustainable livelihoods in South Africa at the end of the 1990s. Both pro-poor growth and PPT are indicative of a changing paradigm in development thinking which is explained and evaluated in the next section of the chapter.