Donors on tour: Philanthrotourism in Africa

Stasja Koot,Robert Fletcher

doi:10.1016/j.annals.2021.103216

Stasja Koot, Robert Fletcher

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2021.103216

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Abstract

Increasingly NGOs organize trips for their ‘major donors’ to visit development projects with the aim to enhance funding streams and fortify donor relations. Building on growing discussions of ‘philanthrocapitalism’ as a novel form of international development financing, we analyze such ‘donor trips’ as a unique tourism niche termed ‘philanthrotourism’. Based on empirical research concerning two such trips to Sub-Saharan Africa, we argue that philanthrotourism allows donors to experience jouissance—a particular type of ambivalent enjoyment that includes fascination with dark and horrific elements—as a core motivation to engage in staged development spectacles via their touristic experiences and thereby affirm their commitment to philanthropy. Our analysis highlights the importance of investigating psychological underpinnings of ethical tourism more generally.

Highlights

This article explores the growing phenomenon in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) offer trips to visit development projects for ‘major donors’ to increase funding streams and fortify donor relations
Our analysis contributes to existing tourism literature, in relation to ‘ethical’ tourism, by exploring how such tourism integrates philanthrocapitalism, an ideology in which wealthy philanthropists further business techniques to philanthropic causes, via a psychoanalytic analysis of how the fascination for global inequality creates a very specific type of enjoyment for those participating in donor trips
Like philanthrocapitalism generally (Wilson, 2014b), allows donors to experience jouissance, a particular type of ambivalent enjoyment (Fink, 1995) that goes beyond ‘pure’ pleasure to encompass an element of discomfort or even pain in confronting distasteful aspects of the development landscape, such as orphaned children and poverty

Summary

Introduction

This article explores the growing phenomenon in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) offer trips to visit development projects for ‘major donors’ to increase funding streams and fortify donor relations. When donors travel, as in philanthrotourism, they are involved in philanthropy, but in philanthrocapitalism since it is the inequality generated by capitalism itself that provides for enjoyment in the first place From such a privileged position, donors experience jouissance through enjoyment of the pleasure/pain nexus: capitalism provides them with lives in which they enjoy and promote capitalism, while their position as dominant saviors provides for covert enjoyment of the pain that capitalism inflicts on a majority of other people (cf Kapoor, 2013). The representation of Africa in this way mobilizes jouissance, providing for both conventional enjoyment as well as the enjoyment and fascination of horror and revulsion, resulting in an attractive and simultaneously repelling fantasy (Wilson, 2014b), worth travelling to so that one can gaze at this representation (or spectacle) and enjoy it

Methodology

Conclusion