Short-Term Volunteering and International Development: An Evaluation Framework for Volunteer Tourism

The purpose of this article is to promote debate about the linkages between volunteer tourism and international development, and to argue that volunteer tourism should be assessed as a development activity. Most volunteer tourism activities involve participants from developed countries traveling to volunteer in developing nations, with volunteers largely motivated by the desire to make a positive contribution to their hosts. Volunteer tourism has strong linkages to sustainable tourism, which originated in response to criticisms of mass tourism, including concerns over the negative impacts on hosting communities. In this article I propose a framework to evaluate the potential contributions of volunteer tourism projects to developmental goals. The proposed framework includes four criteria: that volunteers provide skills unavailable locally; that projects form part of a larger development program; that projects prioritize benefit to the host community; and that projects are community driven.