Dr Phoebe Everingham

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Buen Vivir (BV) is a holistic vision for social and environmental wellbeing, which includes alternative economic activities to the neoliberal growth economy. This article looks at how tourism initiatives under a BV approach can lead to degrowth by drawing on a case study of how BV is put into practice through tourism in the Cotacachi County in Ecuador. We argue that by degrowing socially and environmentally damaging extractive sectors and growing alternative economic activities like community-based tourism, a BV approach could increase social and environmental wellbeing. We refer to LaTouche¿s notion of degrowth as a matrix of multiple alternatives that will reopen the space for human creativity. This complements the notion of BV as a plural approach, and in turn works to decolonise the parameters of how we might understand degrowth. In the case of Cotacachi, the vision for tourism is based on the needs of the community, rather than to satisfy a Eurocentric ideal of development supported by a policy of extractivism. BV is key to how this community conceptualises the potentialities of tourism because it considers the wellbeing of the people and the environment. In this case, degrowth is a consequence of BV, rather than the objective.

Volunteer tourism has been criticised for promoting neo-colonial discourses of development aid. To date, there is a dearth of research into organisations that do not overtly position themselves within a development aid context. This article draws on ethnographic research within a small-scale organisation in Ecuador, Fundacion Arte del Mundo, which promotes the creative arts, intercultural learning and mutuality as core to its volunteerism. This article highlights the benefits and potentialities of emphasising such intercultural learning exchanges and suggests that the predominance of development aid discourses, both in the practice and critiques of volunteer tourism can obscure a more serious engagement with such examples of learning and mutuality as constitutive of a less paternalistic volunteer tourism. The article argues that the experiences evident in the volunteerism of Fundacion Arte del Mundo at times actively subvert and decentre neo-colonial binaries and power differentials that often underpin exchanges between volunteers and the local community. By drawing attention to experiences of intercultural learning and mutuality, the article serves to shift the framing of discussion and practices of volunteer tourism away from those which consistently draw on neo-colonial binaries as the reference point of analysis and in doing so reify their interpretive power. © 2014, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.