ABSTRACT
The last two decades have witnessed a growing literature on ‘moral’ or alternative tourism that links the behaviour and purchasing habits of consumers to development outcomes in developing countries (see Krippendorf, 1987; Patullo, 1996; Scheyvens, 2002; Weaver, 2008; Buckley, 2008; Fennell, 2008; Pattullo and Minelli, 2009; Wearing and Neil, 2009, among others). This emergence is in contrast to classical views of political economy which consider leisure as a discreet area lying outside of politics (Rojek, 2001). This transition in tourism has a strong affinity with moral consumer markets in that through our consumer habits we can make companies more moral, favour products that are deemed more sustainable or are fairer for the producers combined with concern for other issues such as the environment (Lury, 1996; Paterson, 2006). Volunteer tourism is now widely recognized as an important and growing segment of the alternative tourism sector. In the last decade a significant body of literature has emerged on volunteer tourism in tourism studies, human geography and related disciplines.
