Abstract

Pro-poor tourism – tourism that is intended to result in increased net benefits for poor people – is currently receiving enormous attention from the World Tourism Organization, the UN system, governments, industry, and NGOs and is an integral component of many sustainable development strategies in the less developed countries. Through a series of cases and reviews from experts in the field this book provides one of the first assessments of the effectiveness of pro-poor tourism as a development strategy and tackles the issue of who benefits from tourism’s potential role in poverty reduction. This timely book therefore makes a major contribution to the ongoing debate about tourism’s role in economic development, postcolonial politics, and North-South relations at a time when international trade negotiations appear poised to further open up developing countries to international tourism.

Michael Hall is Professor of Marketing at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He also holds the position of Docent in the Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland and Visiting Professor, Faculty of Organisation and Management, Sheffield Hallam University, England. He has published widely in the tourism, environmental history and regional studies fields and has a long standing interest in issues of tourism planning and policy, social marketing and the capacity of tourism to contribute to sustainable development objectives at various scales of governance.

The book offers a descriptive, thematically consistent approach to understanding pro-poor tourism. The conceptualization of the area and drawing together of diverse ideas that surround the subject are the book's strengths.