measurement but also relates to people’s experiences, freedoms in society, cultural constructs and social norms. To have a clearer understanding of poverty it is subsequently argued there is a need to engage with people who are marginalised from the mainstream and possess few resources. A failure to enter into participatory processes that attempt to provide rich under-standings of poverty may result in the imposition of solutions to alleviate poverty based upon a Western hegemonic construct that fails to respond to the poor’s needs.
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The geographical distribution of the poor is dominated by Least Developed Countries (LDC) which are located in sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia and Latin America. The pre dominant location is in sub-Saharan Africa and the majority of the poor are located in rural areas. Whilst population rates are declining in the developed countries of the world, they are increasing in the LDCs, where the population of the world’s poorest 48 countries is expected to double by 2050, raising key economic and social challenges for the future. In a situation where population growth outstrips economic growth, there is a subsequent danger of people and countries being caught in a poverty and development trap.2
This chapter:
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Critically evaluates the term ‘development’
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Explains development theories and paradigms
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Analyses the relationship between tourism and development•
Explores tourism’s relationship with poverty reductionTourism development
A relationship to poverty?
UNDERSTANDING ‘DEVELOPMENT’
The title of this chapter has been formulated as a question to encourage the reader to think about the relationship between tourism development and poverty.
Chapter 1 evaluated the concept of poverty, highlighting its multidimensional character and typologies. It was also discussed that the recognition of poverty as a matter for political and social concern has arisen relatively recently. For the majority of human history, poverty has been a condition of familiarity across most societies. However, economic growth and associated development means that absolute poverty is now a condition of a signifi cant minority rather than the majority of the world’s population, yet this is a recent transformation. As Collier (2008) observes, as recently as the 1960s the development challenge was one of a rich world of 1 billion people facing a poor world of 5 billion people.
However, during the course of the last four decades, the pace of development for 80 per cent of that 5 billion has been so rapid that the real challenge to develop-ment is the remaining 1 billion who live in countries that are often dysfunctional and failing.
Since the Second World War the term ‘economic development’ has become one that is widely used in reference to the nation state, yet, the term ‘development’ is one that has application in different contexts. For example, a common usage is to
talk of an individual’s development or perhaps lack of it, referring to changes in their behaviour, intellectual capabilities and skills, and physique. The theory of human evolution and development presented in Darwin’s seminal Origin of the Species in the nineteenth century was simultaneous with the great economic and social changes of the Industrial Revolution occurring in the same century in Europe and the USA. Philanthropists, liberals and social commentators such as Friedrich Engels, referred to in Chapter 1, shared concerns over the appalling living and working conditions of many working people during this period. The transition of agricultural societies to industrial economies and the effect on living standards for the majority resulted in interest in how societies develop. This led to observations that society may also pass through organic evolutional stages of development similar to the human body, the fi nal stage being that of a created utopia. Subsequently, the process of development may be interpreted as taking on the guise of a remedy attempting to address pressing social problems such as population increase and scarce resources; job losses and unemployment; urban squalor and poverty (Cowen and Sheraton, 1996).
It was in the immediate post-Second World War period in the 1940s that a strong association was established between global economic progress, national develop-ment and political ideologies. This epoch was defi ned by the ideological divide of capitalism and communism and an emergent political independence of the coun-tries of Asia and Africa from European powers. Within this changing global polit-ical order, a signifi cant event in establishing the terminology of international development was President Truman’s speech on 21 January 1949. He distinguished between the ‘developed’ and the ‘underdeveloped’ worlds, and the ‘First’ and the
‘Third’ worlds, terms defi ned by the quantitative measure of national income and political orientation. In other words, he divided the world between those who were modern and those who were not and established modernity as the standards to which other societies would be compared and judged (McMichael, 2004).
The First World encompassed the industrialised and capitalist countries of the world, those of North America, Western Europe and Australasia. The Third World countries were the economically developing countries of the world who were beginning to demand their sovereign independence, geographically situated in the continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In between the First World and the Third Worlds, was a Second World that consisted of the industrialised countries of the Soviet Union and other communist allies. The political dimension of Truman’s speech can be understood as interpreting the world’s poor as a possible threat to the established global political economy unless they could be integrated into the wider capitalist and market system. His speech also empha-sised the role of America in using its scientifi c and industrial knowledge to relieve the suffering of the poor, stating: ‘More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are
victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat to both them and to more prosperous areas.’ Alongside their economic power in the post- war era, the United States also possessed an ideological supremacy, given its superior standard of living with a per capita income three times that of Europe, an anti- colonial heritage and a commitment to liberal domestic and international relations. The signifi cance of this constructed world political geography was the imperative for the use of Western aid to rework the political and economic spaces of several Third World countries, administered through the Bretton Woods establishment, which is explained in Box 2.1 .
Beside the confl ict in political ideology between capitalism and communism, a major concern amongst the leaders of the ‘allied nations’, including the United States and Britain, was to establish a system of rules and regulations to govern the post- war global economy. A priority was to avoid the economic hardships of the 1930s ‘Great Depression’, a signifi cant causal factor of the rise of fascism and political division. To help to achieve this aim, a meeting of international leaders was convened at Bretton Woods, New England, in 1944, which resulted in the establishment of institutions to regulate the world economy, the most signifi cant of which, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), remain highly infl uential in determining the political economy of global policy.
BOX 2.1 THE BRETTON WOODS TRIO’S INFLUENCE ON INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
There are key global and international institutions and organisations, sometimes referred to as multilateral and supranational agencies that have a decisive infl uence in setting the paradigms and condi-tions for global and national economic development. These institu-tions are particularly infl uential in setting the terms of continued fi nancial support for LDCs in the form of aid and loans. Their estab-lishment can be traced to the immediate re- building of the European and international economy in the aftermath of the Second World War.
In 1944, delegates from 44 nations met at the New England resort of Bretton Woods, to devise a new framework for the global economy.
They were concerned to try to stabilise the international economy to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression that had proved economically and politically damaging. The title ‘Bretton Woods Trio’ refers to the three governing institutions which emerged from the conference to coordinate the global economy. These are: