Figure 5.1 Income growth rates for the poor in selected countries Source: taken from the DFID briefi ng sheet, February 2004
are not given a priority in development strategies. The example of Ghana, where the growth of income of the poor was higher than in Brazil and Bangladesh despite a lower overall growth rate, suggests that the political and policy environment of growth can determine the relative increase in income for the poor.
benefi ts for poor people. It enhances the linkages between tourism businesses and poor people, so that tourism’s contribution to poverty reduction is increased and poor people are able to participate more effectively in product development.’
The orientation of this defi nition is towards an absolute defi nition of pro-poor tourism, as no explicit reference is attributed to the relative distribution of wealth.
Whilst Mitchell and Ashley (2010) make reference to the absolute defi nition of pro-poor growth as being politically undemanding, they also observe that a restric-tive defi nition of economic growth as being pro-poor only when it is presumed to reduce inequality would exclude most of the tourism industry from involvement in PPG. A relative approach to PPT also necessitates the availability of empirical data to demonstrate the impact of tourism on poverty reduction and the distribution of income in society. However, there is a current lack of empirical evidence of the benefi cial impact of tourism on poverty reduction. This lack of data is also a problem in lobbying governments for support for the use of tourism in PRSs in LDCs, especially in countries where public resources are relatively small and face a variety of competing demands. As Mitchell and Ashley (2010: 10) comment: ‘of concern to policy makers and practitioners in the fi eld is not so much how to label their tourism, but how – and how much – to invest in developing tourism; the likely impact on poverty; and how to enhance the poverty reduction effect’.
Despite the political and defi nitional problems that characterise PPT, there is a consensus view that it is not a specifi c product or niche of the tourism market but an ‘approach’ to securing an increase of the net benefi ts for the poor from tourism, through ensuring that it contributes to poverty reduction. Whilst there may be a variety of different types and ways that tourism can make an active contribution to poverty reduction – for example through philanthropic tourism, volunteer and community-based tourism (CBT) – to make a signifi cant contribution the focus must be on the mainstream tourism industry to enhance linkages between it and poor people. Any type and size of company can be involved in pro-poor tourism – for example a small lodge, an urban hotel, a tour operator or an infrastructure developer – provided it aims to supply benefi ts for the poor. The inclusion of the last player, an infrastructure developer, is indicative that the benefi ts for the poor from the tourism industry do not only arise directly, but in this example they arise indirectly from improved services including roads, sanitation and utilities. The targeting of opportunities for the poor may also be actively pursued in the supply chain of tourism, a concept that is developed in the fi nal chapter.
Although PPT sounds like a new kind of alternative tourism, understanding that it is an approach and not a product, and that it can be applied to mass tourism as well as post-Fordist models of tourism, helps to distinguish it from other types of alter-native tourism, e.g. sustainable tourism (ST), ecotourism (ET) and community-based tourism (CBT). A further key difference is that whilst PPT may share
characteristics of these alternative forms of tourism – for example, they may all seek to challenge the existing structures of political economy of tourism, including an agenda to support wealth distribution and intra-generational equity, democratic participation, women’s rights, and natural resource conservation – PPT is the only approach to have poverty as its key focus. The geographical focus of PPT is also more closely defi ned than for other types of alternative tourism, focusing exclu-sively on developing countries (Ashley et al. , 2001).
The centralisation of the poor as the key focus of PPT ensures that they should receive economic benefi ts directly as an outcome of a successfully implemented strategy targeted to their needs. The prioritising of the needs of the poor contrasts to the other forms of alternative tourism whose strategies may prioritise nature conser-vation and target economic benefi ts to the local population or community, rather than specifi cally the poor. The emphasis of PPT is one that re-orientates the use of tourism to lift people out of poverty, a possible outcome being that through the provision of sustainable livelihood opportunities from tourism there is a lessened propensity for environmental degradation as a consequence of poverty. In contrast to ST or ET, environmental and natural resource conservation is secured as a posi-tive benefi t of the prioritisation of tourism for poverty reduction, rather than a reduc-tion in poverty being a positive secondary outcome of the prioritisareduc-tion of nature conservation. Thus although in some cases strategies for PPT, ET and ST may result in similar outcomes, their priorities and routes for achieving them may be different.
Similar to the evolution of PRSs, it is evident that PPT does not necessarily repre-sent a radical challenge to the status quo of the existing political economy. It can operate as a concept within existing political structures, including neo-liberalism, provided that the benefi ts of tourism include and target poor people. Referring to the two types of pro-poor growth outlined in the last section and recognised by the World Bank (2012), an absolute defi nition of PPT would not need to involve any re-distribution of wealth provided that income levels of the poor rose through direct or indirect engagement with the tourism industry. Within this absolute para-digm, as Mitchell and Ashley (2010) observe, almost all types of economic growth have the potential to be pro-poor, even if the main benefi ciaries are the non-poor and growth is associated with rising inequality. An evident restriction of this approach is its sole focus on income as a measure of poverty, ignoring other issues of poverty including empowerment, democracy and rights of citizenship.
In contrast, if PPT is operating within the ‘relative’ pro-poor paradigm, tourism could only be recognised as being pro-poor if it is contributing to a distributional shift in income growth that favours the poor vis-à-vis the rest of the population.
This would result in a decrease in income inequality and proportionally increased resources for the poor, a process that should also lead to their subsequent empow-erment. However, as was commented on in the general context of PPG, there is a
potential danger that in pursuing a relative agenda for PPT that opportunities for economic growth from tourism are not taken if poor households incomes are benefi tting proportionally more than the average. Thus the somewhat ambiguous nature of PPT along with its moral imperative means it is open to political hijacking (Macbeth, 2005) and criticisms have also been made of its lack of polit-ical defi nition. Perhaps as Chok et al. (2007: 40) observe, unless existing struc-tural inequalities are addressed in the wider political economy, PPT is unlikely to
‘reap signifi cant and long-term benefi ts for the already marginalised’.