From Here to Utopia?: Ethical Tourism, Civil Society and Global Citizenship

In the light of increased interest – academic and public alike - in the potential of travel to create a platform for transformative social engagement and ethical consumption, this paper offers a considered reflection on notions of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship and how these reveal themselves in the context of ‘ethical’ and ‘responsible’ forms of travel.   Specifically, it interrogates claims that certain ‘ethical and/or ‘responsible’ forms of travel carry with them the potential for progressive change aligned with cosmopolitan political ideals, and that such travel reflects the rise of a new ‘active citizen’ exercising a global civic responsibility and moral commitment towards the people, places and cultures they visit.  Consideration is also given to the manifold ways in which the discourses and practices of ethical tourism have aligned themselves with a variety of new social movements, geared towards bringing about more just, sustainable and participatory forms of tourism.  Finally, it considers whether the embrace of non-mainstream forms of tourism as a means of re-balancing the unequal relations of power between mobile and immobile peoples, based on the ideals of justice and reconciliation, genuinely heralds the potential for tourism to contribute to the nurturing of civic and participatory forms of citizenship.  In the process of doing so, it asks whether such forms of travel and civil society advocacy do indeed serve to extend and re-shape the meaning of citizenship, constituting new forms of solidarity and transnational bonds that are not reducible to ‘ethical consumption’ or enacted primarily through the mechanism of market exchange.