Reflections on 10 years of ProPoor Tourism

ProPoor Tourism (PPT) arose 10 years ago when following the change of government after nearly
two decades of Thatcherism the Overseas Development Administration (ODA), which did not have
a seat at the Cabinet table, was renamed the Department for International Development (DFID) with
a radical Secretary of State, Claire Short in the Cabinet and with the elimination of poverty as its
core purpose (DFID, 1997). DFIDs focus was on the encouragement of economic growth which
benefits the poor (DFID, 1997, p. 2). Whilst the ambitious target of eliminating world poverty was
radical, the means by which it was to be achieved was more orthodox reflecting the neoclassical
consensus which has dominated economic and trade policy since the 1980s. The strategy was PPT.
DFID (1997, p. 6) argued that establishing the conditions that allow economic growth to accelerate
in the poorer developing countries is a critical prerequisite for sustainable poverty reduction.
The endorsement of poverty reduction as the key target of British government development policy
reflected growing international focus on poverty and the emerging consensus which would result in
the United Nations commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. Whilst the policy objective,
poverty elimination, represented a radical departure, the focus on neoliberal private sector led
economic growth was business as usual. PPT arose in the context of this reorientation of policy,
seeking to use the opportunity to secure benefits for the economically poor living with the impacts of
international and domestic tourism.
Harrison in his critique of PPT pointed out that its advocates are too comfortable with the status
quo and thus miss the big picture, tacitly accepting the neoliberal approach (2008, p. 858). The
PPT Partnership 1 was not ignorant of the academic debates about the economic, social and
environmental impacts of tourism. The PPT Partnership did not advocate the development of
tourism; it did argue that where tourism was occurring and growing, there were opportunities to use
tourism to reduce poverty. One of the main innovations of the PPT Partnerships approach was to
focus on net benefits to the poor.
Research conducted for the ODA, and published in 1997, on the impacts of tourism on conservation
and the livelihoods of local communities at national parks in India, Indonesia and Zimbabwe had
demonstrated that at the park, or system level, it was difficult to identify significant livelihood or
conservation benefits from tourism (Goodwin, Kent, Parker, & Walpole, 1997). The research was
commissioned by the ODA (Chalker, 1994) in pursuit of empirical evidence that ecotourism made a
contribution to conservation and the livelihoods of local communities. In that respect the results
were disappointing, demonstrating the chasm between the claims made for ecotourism
(Weaver, 1998, pp. 1920) and the results in and around national parks.
In 1998, DFID commissioned a paper on Tourism and Poverty Elimination (Goodwin, 1998). The
discussion paper began the process which resulted in DFID lobbying successfully at the
Commission on Sustainable Development at the UN in 1999(CSD7) to include in its
recommendations the eradication of poverty through tourism. The 1998 paper addressed how the
employment and other economic benefits of international tourism in developing countries could be

maximised, recognising that the costs and negative impacts of tourism needed to be managed and
minimised. The premise of the paper was that for developing countries tourism was significant and
growing, and it was assumed that it would continue; the question was how tourisms impact on
poverty reduction could be maximised. The paper accepted that tourism operations need to be
profitable in a competitive world market if they are to be sustainable and argued that local
intervention and management could increase the positive and reduce the negative impacts,
effectively maximising the net benefit. It also argued the case for enhancing local participation in
planning and management, involving local communities and giving them a degree of control as
hosts, and for ensuring that the poorer members of the community were able to secure access to
the market and ownership rights; but the paper sought to harness rather than challenge market
forces (Goodwin, 1998, p. 4, 7).
The presence of a market was at the heart of the approach, the generation of benefits was
recognised as being dependent upon the quality of the product and the tourism services and upon
the national and international market. A shift [was] proposed from a topdown to a bottomup
approach, firmly linked to international and domestic markets (Goodwin, 1998, p. 8). There was no
reference in the paper to ecotourism or to communitybased tourism (CBT); the paper sought to
connect the objective of eliminating poverty to the mainstream industry. The radical objective was to
harness the mainstream tourism industry to the cause of poverty elimination. DFID subsequently
commissioned a Sustainable Tourism and Poverty Elimination Study (Bennett, Roe, &
Ashley, 1999). The importance of the market approach is evidenced by the Deloitte & Touche
leadership on this study. It was in this report that the concept of PPT was coined and defined as:
tourism that generates net benefits for the poor (benefits greater than costs). Strategies for propoor
tourism focus specifically on unlocking opportunities for the poor within tourism, rather than
expanding the overall size of the sector (tilting not expanding the cake). (Bennett et al., 1999, p. ii)
The radicalism of the PPT approach was in seeking to use main stream tourism to achieve the
objective of poverty elimination. DFID produced Tourism and Poverty Elimination: Untapped
Potential for CSD7, this document emphasised the opportunities for informal sector engagement
with tourism by the poor and outlined strategies to stimulate microenterprise and promote business
linkages. PPT was from the outset a private sector, marketorientated strategy, added to which was
an emphasis on mitigating negative impacts and on a supportive policy and planning framework and
developing propoor processes and institutions.
At the Commission on Sustainable Development when tourism was considered
in 1999 governments were urged, amongst a host of other things, to maximize the potential of
tourism for eradicating poverty (CSD7, 1999, p. 2). In 2002, the World Tourism Organization (WTO)
launched its report on Tourism and Poverty Alleviation at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development and announced the development of a programme of work on Sustainable Tourism
Eliminating Poverty (STEP). The WTO concluded that the case studies go beyond traditional
assumptions about trickledown and multiplier effects: they demonstrate that it is possible to
measure analyse and influence local economic benefits in favour of poverty reduction. STEP
sought to refocus and incentivise Sustainable Tourism to make it a primary tool for Eliminating
Poverty in the worlds poorest countries (WTO, 2002, p. 15).

PPT had from its inception a strong marketoriented approach to tourism rather than as a product
it was about unlocking opportunities for the poor by enabling them to benefit from economic
opportunities. In the 1999 DFID policy paper, it was explicitly asserted that PPT strategies had to be
integrated with general tourism development because PPT needed to connect with the mainstream
and because propoor tourism cannot succeed without successful development of the whole
tourism destination (DFID, 1999, p. 1).
The ProPoor Tourism Partnership grew out of DFIDfunded desk research in 20002001; this
research reaffirmed the importance of measuring and reporting impacts and ensuring commercial
viability. This requires close attention to product quality, marketing, investment in business skills,
and inclusion of the private sector (Ashley, Roe, & Goodwin, 2001, p. 42). The PPT Partnership in
2002 published a brief for the private sector on the tourism industry and poverty reduction but
efforts to engage with the private sector were few and far between (Ashley & Roe, 2003; Roe,
Goodwin, & Ashley, 2002). There were successful initiatives with demonstrable results in The
Gambia (Bah & Goodwin, 2003), followed by the current Gambia is Good initiative, South Africa
(Ashley, Poultney, & Hayson, 2005) and Tanzania (Goodwin, 2007). Each of these initiatives
demonstrated that close engagement with the private sector ensured that initiatives could have
significant impact on the livelihoods of the poor. However, there were few of them and the bulk of
the work undertaken in tourism and poverty reduction has focussed on more traditional CBT,
capacity building and ecotourism initiatives. In these initiatives, there has generally been very
limited emphasis on the market and results are not published. In the 1999 DFID policy paper, PPT
was explicitly differentiated from green tourism, naturebased and CBT. However, the PPT
Partnership was unsuccessful in asserting the importance of measuring net benefits for the poor
and in maintaining the emphasis on engagement with the private sector. These were the radical
elements of PPT but they were lost. Funders and development agency staff did not require
implementing field staff to monitor, measure and report outcomes and the established consultants
and field workers adroitly adopted the rhetoric of PPT and poverty reduction and continued with the
traditional approaches, paying insufficient attention to the market, not measuring the outcomes,
failing to measure the net benefits and not engaging with the private sector.
PPT was often spoken about in conversation and from platforms as though it were a product, 2 it
has also been confused with poorism (Baran, 2008) the exploitation of the poor as a tourist
attraction. More significant in undermining the concept of PPT as originally formulated was the use
of the rhetoric by a range of practitioners to secure funding for CBT and ecotourism initiatives, a
phenomenon exacerbated by the coincidence of 2002 being both the International Year of
Ecotourism and the launch of the WTOs Tourism and Poverty Alleviation report. By 2004, the
UNWTO was focussing on the seven mechanisms (employment, sale of goods and services to
tourism businesses and directly to tourists, development of tourism enterprises by the poor, taxes
and levies, philanthropy and infrastructure gain) rather than on markets or measuring and
demonstrating impacts on poverty (UNWTO, 2004). For those NGOs and development agencies
which had 20 or more years investment in ecotourism and CBT, it was business as usual. Whilst the
poor can be beneficiaries from ecotourism and CBT, there is very rarely any connection with the
mainstream industry, they remain small scale initiatives. The WTO worked hard to establish STEP
but it remains a relatively small programme run with trust funds both from the UNWTO STEP

Foundation and from individual governments. The STEP projects being implemented include the
training of guides and local hotel employees, facilitating the involvement of local people in tourism
development around natural and cultural heritage sites; providing business and financial services to
small, medium and CBT enterprises; and the joint marketing of CBT initiatives. A few of the projects
have sought to foster business linkages between poor producers and tourism enterprises, but
engagement with the mainstream industry has not been central to their approach
(see http://www.unwto.org/step/projects/en/projects.php, accessed 25 August 2008).
Harrison (2008, p. 851) argued that PPT should focus more on researching the actual and potential
role of mass tourism in alleviating poverty and bringing development. The PPT Partnership has
been making the same point, 10 years on it is time to establish with solid research findings whether
tourism can benefit the poor and that interventions have impacts sufficient to justify the investments.
The importance of the market and commercial viability was emphasised from the outset and
criticism of much of the work done in the name of PPT has been made by the PPT Partnership itself
in successive annual registers, and more trenchantly in unpublished evaluation studies undertaken
for development agencies (Goodwin, 2008; Goodwin & Rowe, 2006). Success requires
engagement with the mainstream industry and working with them to maximise their positive
economic impacts on local economic development and poverty reduction. In the next 10 years,
there needs to be more funding of interventions designed to achieve sustainable longterm poverty
reducing linkages with the mainstream industry; and decisions about funding interventions
whether mainstream or CBT need to be based on measured outcomes for the economically poor.
Practitioners need to be challenged to prove that they have reduced poverty through their
interventions, the PPT Partnership cannot require that there is monitoring and reporting of impacts,
the funders, development agencies and banks could. They should.