ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two focuses for critics of volunteer tourism postcolonialism and neoliberalism. It argues each framework has merits, but also considerable limitations, in understanding the significance of volunteer tourism today. It also argues a further concept needs to be considered, that of diminished subjectivity. The diminished subject, characterised by vulnerability in the face of development, is rooted in a widespread disillusionment with and disorientation towards politics and political agency characteristic of our times. It is this crisis in political agency that frames volunteer tourism more fundamentally than colonialism's legacy or the power of neoliberal ideology. The chapter focuses on linking conservation and community wellbeing goals through small-scale projects rather than economic development through infrastructural development and international trade. Far from imposing western ideas onto the communities in which they work, most contributors to Generation NGO, a volume of heartfelt reflections of young Canadian volunteers, want to return home with lessons for their lives and their societies.
