Understanding community attitudes towards volunteer tourism

ABSTRACT

Volunteer tourism has been growing rapidly since the last decade. However, similar to other forms of tourism, volunteer tourism has been criticised for neglecting locals’ desires. As such, it is crucial to empower local communities and understand their needs, including their perceptions and attitudes towards volunteer tourism. Social representations have been used to examine community members’ ideas, their perceptions and the ways they think about tourism development. However, how local communities perceive alternative forms of tourism, including volunteer tourism have been under-researched. Using qualitative interviews with local residents in Mongolia, one of the post-Soviet countries and a fast-growing volunteer tourism destination in the world, this paper examines host communities’ general understanding and attitudes towards volunteerism and volunteer tourism development based on the perceived impacts, and considers how the social constructions of volunteerism underpin local residents’ perceptions of volunteer tourism. In addition, by investigating the historical and cultural influences in the host community, this article aims to pinpoint the relationship between social representations and cultural influences, offering an interesting insight to understand volunteer tourism development.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteer tourism
• voluntourism
• social representations
• communities’ attitudes
• Mongolia

Acknowledgment

I am very grateful to my respondents in Mongolia, and would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Hiu Yan Lee is an Assistant Professor at the Open University of Hong Kong. Her areas of interest and research are in the cultures and tourism but she specializes in volunteer tourism, which she formalised in her PhD (2020) on this subject.

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork for this research was supported by the HKU Postgraduate Scholarship (010306004), HKU SPACE Research Fund (200004912), and the Faculty of Social Sciences Funding Support on International Learning Experience.