Sustainable Community Development or Voluntourism: Sustainable Housing in Rural Maharashtra

Abstract

Volunteer tourism (‘voluntourism’) packages development and poverty as culturally exotic and ethical experiences for tourists from industrialized countries. Among the various sectors promoting voluntourism, university sector short term study abroad tours network voluntourism agencies, local actors (e.g., NGOs), universities, and government funding to offer students ‘life changing’ community sustainable development experiences. Alongside the purported benefits for all stakeholders, recent criticism points to the commodification of development and poverty through such tours and multiple pernicious effects of such travel, especially the failure to deliver community impact. Given the significant financial, political, and other interests involved, monitoring and evaluating such initiatives against transparent independent sustainability principles has proved complicated. Case studies employing ethical covert research, fieldwork, and secondary data analysis offer one approach. This case study of a purported sustainable housing project in rural Maharashtra, involving a bilateral university-government-local NGO voluntourism ecosystem lead by an Australian Green NGO (AGC) analyses the multiple gaps between participatory community sustainable development and voluntourism. This case study employs content analysis of project reports, visual data from a field visit, recent village documentary analysis, anonymized email communication, and secondary analysis of contextual data to evaluate the claims of participatory sustainable development and project outcomes of a bilateral NGO voluntourism housing project. The study findings signal lack of financial transparency, incompetent assessment of material needs, limited local participation and control, and failure to deliver on objectives. The conclusion recommends that socially responsible short-term international exchanges should be carefully monitored and exchanges should prefer knowledge exchange.

Creating International Student Experiences Through Academic–INGO Partnerships

“…1 Kennesaw State University, GA, USA 2 Comunidad Connect, San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua resources while offering communities little in return (Loya & Peters, 2019;Melles, 2018;Nyunt et al, 2022). For example, student groups can burden the time of local health care workers, or communities might become reliant on outside aid and subsequently fail to develop local resources or solutions.…”

Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Increasing Diversity and Community Participation to Achieve Environmental and Social Justice

“…For example, Cook (2008) stressed the importance of evaluating the extent to which CBPR involves action that affects community-level changes. However, despite good intentions, many past CBPR efforts have experienced colossal failures (Bentley, 1994;Dodson et al, 2012;Melles, 2018;Park, 2018), partially because of inadequate ethical review (Flicker et al, 2007).…”

“…For example, Park (2018) used an ethnographic approach to find that U.S. college students participating in short-term, self-funded trips to a small village in Cameroon to ''improve the quality of drinking water and community health'' displayed implicit beliefs about technology fixes, as well as cultural stereotypes about Western superiority, which were affirmed during the trip owing to a lack of understanding about the historical and structural context of water and health disparities in African countries. Similarly, Melles (2018) suggested that poverty becomes commodified in short-term international university trips where programs are packaged as ''culturally exotic and ethical experiences for students from industrialized countries,'' noting that projects carried out by these groups were characterized by a lack of financial transparency, inadequate needs assessments, and insufficient participation and control by local stakeholders.…”

Communicating Ethical Engagement Abroad: A Content Analysis of Service-Learning Study Abroad Third-Party Provider Websites

“…In the searches for this literature review, only two articles returned that examine the role of third-party providers in administering study abroad programs (Hains-Wesson, 2017;Hains-Wesson & Appleby, 2017 Despite the dearth of research into third-party providers, there has been significant caution and criticism about the dangers of international volunteerism. Critics have identified several areas of concern including the potential for international volunteerism to reinforce stereotypes about global inequalities, broader impacts on host communities that erode the health and well-being of people served in those communities, and the ethical obligations of organizations that participate in international service to examine organizational responsibility in perpetuating negative impacts in both students and host communities (Goodwin, 2015;Steele & Dredge, 2017;Hernandez-Maskivker, Lapoint, & Aquino, 2018;Melles, 2018;Bamber & Pike, 2013). This conversation about ethical global engagement has permeated popular culture as well.…”