Paper short abstract:

This paper reviews weaknesses in the study of NGOs involved in tourism in less economically developed countries and presents the rationale for embracing critical ethnography in order to further understanding of the complex dynamics of development.

Paper long abstract:

The study of NGOs involved in tourism in less economically developed countries has received insufficient academic attention and methodological and theoretical weaknesses are evident. This may in part reflect an inherent risk in our highly interconnected epistemic community that tourism scholars who also work as development practitioners do not publish donor-funded research findings on NGOs or their published accounts are instrumental i.e. descriptive and depoliticised. Shortcomings include a lack of attention to methodological assumptions, the predominance of normative accounts that emphasise technical issues, a neglect of reflexivity in relation to positionality and political ethics, as well as a lack of conceptualisation that adequately addresses the agency of actors and complexities of context. The extensive scholarship on NGOs in development studies has addressed these shortcomings and advocates the need to embrace critical ethnography. This is in order to better understand how NGOs are embedded in broader contexts and to shift the emphasis from evaluation of a fixed entity to organisational processes in flux. This approach draws attention to how an NGO can be shaped by diverse actors and serve different interests over time thus opening up the 'black box' of unseen political processes, institutional interests and social relations. This furthers understanding of the actual dynamics of development and in turn helps to explain the gap between idealised tourism development discourses and local empirical realities.