Voluntourism and the Sustainable Development Goals

Volunteer tourism or voluntourism has become an extremely popular form of tourism as well as attracting significant and growing academic attention (Wearing & McGehee, 2013). In 2001 Wearing defined volunteer tourism (drawing on his own research in community based ecotourism and volunteer tourism in Costa Rica) as: “those tourists who, for various reasons, volunteer in an organized way to undertake holidays that might involve aiding or alleviating the material poverty of some groups in society, the restoration of certain environments, or research into aspects of society or environment” (Wearing, 2001:1). The significant growth in academic interest in the topic is reflected in a web of science search for volunteer tourism peer reviewed literature which counts 1 for 2001, 4 for 2008, 15 for 2013 and 41 for 2016 and the publication of a review paper in the leading journal Tourism Management (Wearing & McGehee, 2013) and several journal special issues.