The rise and fall of tourism for poverty reduction within SNV Netherlands Development Organisation

Summary

Although development organizations have been involved in tourism for poverty reduction for more than 30 years, their role remains contested. In my ethnographic study, I examined the rise and fall of tourism within SNV Netherlands Development Organisation in the period 1993–2013. Here, I show how and why tourism as a development tool was introduced within SNV, how it was conceptualized and implemented as development practice, how the organization’s internal ‘ways of working’ influenced this implementation and why SNV recently phased out tourism.