Development Tourism in Cuba: Experiential Learning and Solidarity in the Development Tourism Encounter

ABSTRACT

Increasingly non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide provide immersion programs that employ experiential learning strategies to promote greater global awareness and responsibility for development in the global South. Study tours are one such platform for NGOs in their public education efforts. Drawing on ethnographic research in Cuba, the purpose of this paper is to explore the discourses and narratives tourists draw on to give meaning to their experiences of Oxfam and Global Exchange study tours, as an example of emerging development tourism. We see how the study tours produce tropes of solidarity that are discursively reproduced through the desires, intentions and feelings of NGO study tourists. This experiential learning process through tourism is an important development strategy for NGOs working to promote awareness and support for their own activities and campaigns but also for promoting awareness of development issues more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Development tourism
• experiential learning
• study tours
• NGO
• solidarity
• Cuba

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.